How explicit does a video game’s lore need to be, anyway?

Comparing video games to good literature used to be the ultimate gotcha for the longest time. Simply bringing up games as a serious option for storytelling could get you laughed out of the room in some circles, but this is slowly changing, and non-explicit narratives are responsible for this.

Now, simply obscuring a game’s story is not enough to make it interesting, engaging, or even genuinely worth engaging with. There must still be a spark of something special tucked away behind the monster closets and the resource grinds. Slowly but certainly, more and more developers are figuring out that they don’t have to explain themselves to the player in the simplest terms possible.

Some games, like Bungie’s classic Marathon for example, have embraced this type of oblique narrative progression from the very start. It’s just that, outside of niche communities, the general gaming public didn’t care to discuss them until decades after the fact. That’s all changing slowly, and this is immensely thrilling for reasons we’re about to go into.

Here, I’ve grabbed a few mainstream examples of games with huge amounts of non-explicit or obscure narrative elements to see how they fit into the wider context of video game storytelling.

Destiny is all about civilizational trauma

On the face of it, the Destiny franchise has simply been about fending off armies of aliens in a post-apocalyptic far-future. Behind the scenes, though, it’s a fair bit different. Much as was the case with Marathon, it’s important for a Bungie shooter to offer two layers of narrative development: the first is surface-level and obvious, where Guardians beat down the imminent threat and give humanity a second lease on life… over and over again.

The second layer, however, is anything but obvious. It needs to be peeled back by going through veritable mountains of lore—much of it available over at Ishtar Collective—and piecing together character motives, universal ontology, and oodles upon oodles of other features over a long period of time. This is only for the really invested players, and while I’ll be the first to admit that Bungie doesn’t always deliver, there’s something special cooking in the background of Destiny for sure.

Interacting with Destiny‘s deep lore is extremely ergodic, if I’m being honest. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea at all. Bungie makes you work for the game’s big revelations, and quite often, they simply don’t land in the moment-to-moment campaign. The simpler stuff takes precedence, and that’s probably for the best.

From my point of view, Destiny is actually about people’s inability to cope with gods and the impossibility of proper communication between them. The Witness itself—the game’s biggest Big Bad so far—came about as a response to the Traveler’s presence. A silent deity hovering above its people simply stopped being enough for the Precursor civilization, and so they became the Witness. This set off a series of events leading to the slaughter and destruction of untold trillions, with the latest batch of the Witness’ victims–the Eliksni, the Cabal, and the humans—barely surviving by the time the Light and Dark saga wrapped up.

Elden Ring is all about changing the rules of reality

It’s easy to get lost in Elden Ring’s moment-to-moment lore, characters, their relationships, and how they may or may not have interacted with one another. Doubly so, due to the developers’ insistence on not giving us the whole picture and narrative. Instead, FromSoft’s games are almost ridiculously oblique from an outsider’s perspective. They only really come into their own when you’re poring through item descriptions and whatnot, and that’s a pretty big ask for the average player.

Disregarding any hunt for “true lore” for a little bit, Elden Ring seems like an infinitely loaded monster closet. You travel through one region after another and dismantle its defenders, take down huge monsters, and make yourself a nuisance for about 90 percent of the continent. Admittedly, it’s fun to think about the game from this point of view, but that misses the point.

In truth, the bits that I myself can make sense of suggest that the Lands Between host a war for the nature of reality itself. The key is the Elden Ring itself, of course: a strange object that somehow dictates how the continent, the world, or the universe functions. The Elden Ring is so powerful, in fact, that removing a particular part of it nullifies death itself, so that’s fun.

Now, toying with the ontology of existence is… problematic, to say the least, and the Lands Between are reeling from various factions and deities’ attempts to capitalize on taking control over the Elden Ring.

No Man’s Sky is all about coping with the fact that nothing matters

Did you know that No Man’s Sky actually has a story? It’s an oblique matter, I’ll give you that, but it’s genuinely the stuff of deep, existential horror, and it’s about as far from being obvious as possible.

The gist of it is that it is, boringly enough, a simulation. The bit that amortizes this “problem” is that No Man’s Sky does away with the usual Matrix-pattern take on this trope. This game, instead, tries hard to drive home the point that it straight-up does not matter whether its own story exists in a simulation or not. Further, its NPCs sometimes break the fourth wall and ask you, the player, whether you can be certain that you, too, do not exist in a higher-order simulation and whether you’d be able to tell if one is running in the first place.

Aside from this, No Man’s Sky also plays host to what may or may not be the primordial god of its universe. There’s also a single being that killed trillions of thinking creatures in its first life and waxes philosophic with the player when push comes to shove. It’s oddly poetic, the whole shindig.

Games are more and more eager to give their players mental homework, and that’s a good thing

One thing all three examples I highlighted here have in common is that their true narratives require a non-insignificant amount of mental legwork from the player. The fact that it’s all entirely optional and doesn’t come in the way of gameplay or of more surface-level storytelling is awesome, too. Those of us who want to engage with this stuff can do so. Those who choose not to, however, can just shoot guns and slash away at monsters, and they’re still not missing out on the most important part of the medium.

This drives home the argument that video games are maturing into a genuinely engaging narrative medium. Figuring out the stuff I outlined above took a lot of work from the community, collecting data entries, lore tidbits, and other remarkably obscure writings. And people often still have to make their own conclusions about the things that are presented to them. For example, Elden Ring‘s actual story and the truth behind the Greater Will are still hotly contested, even after the DLC’s been out for months and the game’s been datamined to heck and back.

I genuinely believe Elden Ring would be a way worse game if not for FromSoft’s sometimes obnoxious insistence on mystery, and this whole aspect of it is—once again—optional.

It’s an impressive feat, and I’m extremely thankful for the developers who choose to tell stories such as these. And I’m not the only one.