Flash games: Complex stories

Welcome to Pixellated Culture. This week we'll be taking a look at often forgotten games that are just as important to us as console games: games on the internet. This is a different tack, but since I've been playing flash games as much as I play "normal" video games and there are many great ones. In the future we can look at other games like these and browser games as they are doing wonderful things for the industry and for what we can experience.

The games we're going to look at today are all available to play on Kongregate (which is free). 

Today's games strike me as being very rich in story and what they mean. One game with such an interesting story is Prior by krangGAMES. Prior takes the trope of you having amnesia, but from there it takes an interesting turn. You explore the game, which is a platformer, but never run into any enemies. You piece together a story by reading notes. From this you learn there was a war, you were a soldier, this is a science facility, there is a doctor in charge, and your family is somewhere in the facility. Which options you pursue are up to you. There are a total of three endings for the game, where you decide what to pursue-escape, the doctor, or your family. Each ending reveals more about the story and about who the character was. You ultimately decide who your character is now, giving the player ultimate control of their fate.

A different kind of story is in Flight by Armor Games. Flight is a game where you see how far you can throw a paper airplane. The story is separated from the gameplay, but it is an interesting story none the less. The story starts with a little girl writing a letter to Santa and folding it into a paper airplane. The paper airplane then flies to Paris where a young man finds it and writes a love letter which he folds into a paper airplane. The airplanes fly around the world and ultimately, you get a happy ending. Such a simple story, yet this motivation keeps you going. You want to see where these message will end up next and if if it will end up being a happy ending. Each person reacts to the messages differently and most of the story lines do not get an ending, but just to see how far paper airplanes can go and what impact such a simple thing can have.

Another story takes a character who already has a backstory and is telling the player about it. You control the character the whole time yet you have to wait for the character to tell you exactly what the story is as you go through levels of platforming with a time mechanic. This game is The Company of Myself by 2D Array. The man starts out by saying he prefers to be solitary and then over the course of the game you learn about what happened to the last person he cared about to explain his solitary behavior. The end reveals why he is talking to the player, with a stinger to reveal more about the character. I would discuss this in more detail, but I do not wish to spoil this game as it is so short and well worth a play. 

Here we see three different tacks at story telling. Each game has a story in its own regards and each is nothing like the other. Two of these games have serious stories, like you would expect to find in "normal" video games, just in a condensed format. Flash games provide a great opening for many game makers and stories to come out. These developers may well make the "normal" games of tomorrow.