Art of Storytelling – The Remedy way

What the talk is about

Saku Lehtinen gives a retrospective on how Remedy approaches storytelling in games. His first point is that a game is its own medium: instead of porting a plot from film or books, find the core of the theme and think how it works interactively. Second, limits in budget and time become an advantage because they put the player's imagination to work. In Max Payne this showed in a visual approach to the story that used photos of real people instead of weak 3D animation. For Alan Wake the model was a TV series in the spirit of Twin Peaks, with the supernatural resting on an ordinary base. Quantum Break combined gameplay with live-action footage and character technology. Finally, in Control, brutalist architecture becomes almost a character and contrasts with the weird. Useful for writers, game designers and art directors.