I talked through my thoughts on both intros as I replayed them in the videos here, and I’ll summarise and add some conclusions through the magic of text. Obviously both parts of this post spoil the intros to these games.

Prey

• No intro cut-scene, you’re in control right away.
• Starting in your apartment gives you a safe place to play around, and a few hints at who you are in this world.
• If you’re intrigued, there are e-mails to read for more background, but the game is not held up for this exposition if you don’t want it.
• The mysteries are big, and central to you:
• Who am I in this world?
• What is my brother’s work and what’s my part in it?
• What are these tests for, and why is everyone so surprised when I do the obvious solution?
• For each, you get enough info to speculate but not enough to clear it up, and they’re all intriguing to me.
• The tests are framed as a thing you must do before you can go to space and Talos 1, treating that as an exciting reward. Going to space is exciting, I relate to this motivation. And it makes it cooler to be there, especially as it comes sooner than you’re led to believe.
• Waking up as if the day is repeating raises further intriguing questions about your place in this world – especially when you realise it isn’t.
• Breaking the glass is a great visual reveal: your first dramatic action is also the game’s most dramatic revelation so far.
• Behind the scenes, all the notes, e-mails and environmental storytelling are interesting because they’re about you or people directly related to you, and feed into your many pressing questions about what’s going on.
• I didn’t get to it in the video, but later when you emerge into the lobby, that’s a big, beautiful, visual reveal of a big piece of information – or a satisfying confirmation of what you’ve already twigged through your own investigations.

Sorry the mic gets drowned out in parts.

Mankind Divided

• Non-interactive intro cut scene.
• Starts with a news report about a terrorist incident, layered over footage of unknown men attacking other unknown men. Same incident? Seemingly not. Same men? Maybe. What’s this incident? Don’t know yet. Trying to tell two stories at once, and both are just ‘terrorists do bad things’ so far.
• Long, talky briefing, all tell and no show. We’re going after an arms dealer. He’s selling to some faction. One team is gonna do one thing, I’m gonna… block? An entrance? To keep the Jinn out? Aren’t the Jinn already there? Isn’t that who the deal is with?
• Also interact with some gizmo in some way that’ll save? Our undercover agent? Why, how, which one was he again?
• Long, unusually difficult stretch of gameplay with no further explanation. What I do in the level seems unrelated to what the briefing said: I’m not stopping the Jinn getting in, I’m moving through a level beating them up.
• Peter Serafinowicz and I keep calling each other up to be assholes to each other. I don’t like either of us.
• Get to the deal. Bad guys are there but other bad guys kill them. I must unplug a helicopter!
• I don’t know who the gold mask guys are but it doesn’t seem interesting or important. Some bad guys killed some other bad guys over some weapons. The new ones are mysterious, but to be honest I knew next to nothing about the folks they just killed either. They’re both just violent people who want weapons, that’s all the plot that’s been communicated after about 30 minutes of talking and fighting.
• Long credits sequence of disjointed news reports and symbolic imagery.
• Long conspirator chat that doesn’t clarify anything.
• Game suddenly goes back into intro mode, with a long non-interactive talky sequence arriving in Prague. The game’s biggest twist so far – I’m a double agent! – is never really mentioned, only indirectly implied by the nature of this conversation about Interpol logistics.
• Another inciting incident! An explosion! It doesn’t reveal or relate to anything else so far.
• In the third of three intros, you wake up in your apartment. Some of the augs you didn’t choose are disabled now but some aren’t and you can’t see which ones because that screen is broken – until you go and do a mission that’s hard and annoying without knowing what your augs are.

Lessons:

Start from a place that needs no explaining

MD needs you to understand all the factions and political context of an arms deal, and a double-agent within one of them, to make sense of what you’re being asked to do and why you should care. You can’t really show that, so they just have to talk to you about it for 7 full minutes before you can start playing. The result is I didn’t really follow it and I don’t really care.

When you wake up in your apartment in Prey, all that really needs saying is that you’re going to work for your brother on a space station. The other stuff you don’t know is fun to figure out.

Unanswered questions are not automatically mysteries

Unanswered question: who are the gold mask guys who kill the other terrorists?
Mystery: why am I waking up as if my day is repeating?

The difference is that this mystery is:

• Consequential: it matters a lot what the answer is.
• Personal: the answer will affect my character specifically.
• Hard to answer: there’s no obvious answer that isn’t interesting in itself.

With the gold mask guys, it’s not clear why it’s important who they are, they have no relation to my character yet, and a very likely answer is very boring: they’re just another group of terrorists who want weapons. If they at least didn’t take the weapons, that’d be something to pique some interest – a vendetta? A hit? But still, faction-kills-faction is always gonna struggle to rank on those three points.

Pick a reveal you can show

MD’s intro does have a cool piece of information to reveal, but it comes more than half an hour in, delivered through dialogue, and only implied. You’re a double-agent! Whoa! That makes both you and Interpol more interesting. But I learned that from a loading screen tip, after a long conversation that conveys it so indirectly I didn’t grasp it at all.

Could MD have done their reveal visually? Maybe. If your first mission had been to retrieve some vital drive, you could have a scene like:

MILLER (VO): When you get to Prague bring it straight to my office, Jensen, we can’t take any risks.
JENSEN: Understood.
We see him put the drive in a brown paper bag and leave the train. As soon as he steps onto the platform, he drops it in the trash. He passes a woman sitting at a cafe, touches her table as he squeezes past, and without looking at her:
JENSEN: Package is in, you’ve got 20 minutes.
We stay on Jensen as he blends into the crowd, but can see her get up as she leaves the frame.

There’d still be some Tell before and after the Show, but the reveal itself is a big, dirty betrayal we see with our own eyes.

Prey’s big reveal is that your reality is an artifice and you’re the subject of a test. That’s an easy one to show visually, and they do it with style: you unwittingly shatter the false world’s thin facade with a wrench blow.

I’ve been mostly playing Human Revolution so far, but I’ll also use some examples for DX1 since there’s so much overlap.

The basic ingredients

We’re talking about ‘ways to achieve your objective’. The objective itself is not optional, or different depending on your play style. Heat Signature does have an element of that, but it’s not what’s interesting about Deus Ex – most of the time, especially in 1 and 3, you have no say in what your objective is. The interesting part is in how you get to it. That generally breaks down into:

Routes: the various paths you can take. Some are easily visible, some might be hidden.

Obstacles: any elements that need to be overcome or avoided on a route – enemies, high walls, locked doors, toxic gas.

Methods: anything that lets you get past an obstacle, including basic skills like sneaking, conventional means like guns, environmental things like a switch, and specialised tools like a hacking upgrade.

Routes require different Methods

This is not interesting:

Multiple routes, but who cares? They’re all the same.

This is more interesting but still pretty trivial:

Multiple routes, but one is clearly more trouble than the others, so the choice isn’t interesting.

This is getting Deus Exy:

Multiple routes, obstacles on all, and each requires a different Method. Do you have a Method for clearing debris? Do you have a Method for dealing with enemies? Do you have a Method for dealing with locked doors? Which brings us to:

The player chooses which Methods to invest in

This is one area DXHR massively improved over DX1. In Deus Ex 1 a single cheap hacking upgrade got you into every computer in the game, and the aug options were binary choices: A or B, where B is often useless. DXHR makes everything Augs, and both unlocking and upgrading them take the same, painfully rare currency. That gives you enormous power to specialise, and also puts enormous weight on those early decisions. The first few Methods you unlock with this system will be all you have, for a time.

I used to think the virtue of lots of routes was that the player always has a big decision to make as they approach each objective. But replaying the Deus Ex games and really examining the situations I find myself in, that’s not it. Most of the time the choice is already made for me by a previous decision about either the playstyle I want to use or the upgrades I’ve picked. If I’ve got the strength upgrade and I’m playing stealthy, when I see a vent blocked by a drinks machine, I’m moving the drinks machine and getting in the vent. I don’t even need to see the other options.

And that’s OK! The actual deciding process is not the sole pleasure of playing a game. A lot of the fun comes in living out your decision, and seeing it rewarded by Routes that it lets you exploit. You got the strength upgrade? Good choice! Now you get to move this heavy thing and access this special route, which is gonna get you close to your objective with minimal resistance. That makes your playthrough feel personal, it makes your choices feel relevant, and it makes you feel clever.

Methods have different Costs

If every obstacle was solved for free by some particular Method, and impassable otherwise, that would probably be OK for a while. But pretty soon your choices would either feel irrelevant (if every Method unlocked a Route) or unfair (if your chosen Methods left you with no Route).

Methods need to have different costs, otherwise unlocking new ones wouldn’t be appealing. Basic sneaking is a Method, but it gets harder and more time consuming to use alone as the game progresses. The kinds of costs Methods can have are things like:

• Resources: blowing up this weak wall uses up a grenade, whereas punching through it with an Aug only takes one rechargable power cell.
• Risk/Skill: you can use this pistol to take out these three guards, but it’s going to be tricky and you’ll die if it fails. If you have a gas grenade, it’s easy and safe.
• Time: if you want to get up to that vent, you’re going to need to scrounge around to find another box you can stack on this one. If you had the jump Aug, it’d be quick.
• Playstyle conflict: yeah, you can probably solve this by just throwing a frag grenade in there. But that’s not who you want to be this time, it’s not how you want to play. You want to do it silently and nonlethally with a tazer and a fridge.

Combat requires a combination of Methods

Combat is special. While it’s technically an avoidable obstacle like the others, almost every playstyle and route involves it at some point, and as players we expect it to be ten times richer and more interesting than any other type. We’re a lot less forgiving of a game that only has one type of weapon than a game that only has one type of lockpick.

This is true for me as much as anyone – every one of my favourite Deus Ex anecdotes involves violence either by or against me. In fact, the first moment that sold me on Deus Ex was getting stuck on a bit with two guards – I couldn’t take them both out before one killed me. Then I realised I could round the corner, spray a fire extinguisher at them both, and shoot them while they choke. It felt like I was fighting against unfair odds, improvising a desperate and clever way to overcome them.

In DXHR it’s less about improvisation, but my favourite thing to do is very similar. Lots of situations involve three guards – I like to stand near two of them, shoot the third in the head with the silenced pistol, then immediately hit the takedown key to use my upgraded close combat move on both the others. It feels like a spectacular explosion of violence, too sudden for anyone to stop and yet almost perfectly silent.

So combat needs:

• The odds stacked against you
• Multiple Methods
• Each Method insufficient alone
• Methods with different strengths

The fire extinguisher can’t hurt anyone, but it can immobilise two people very suddenly without much skill. The pistol can kill in one shot, but only if it’s to the head, and it’s hard to hit a moving head.

If combat tools each have different strengths – range, damage, stun, area, delay – you’re encouraged to come up with some way to combine them to solve the situation at hand, which feels inventive, improvisational and clever.

That’s what I have so far. As with any analysis, it’s not the only way to break it down, and it doesn’t cover everything. I have one more element I want to write up, but I think FTL may be a better example of it, so it feels like a separate post. And if replaying DX1 throws up anything big that this doesn’t cover, that’ll be its own post too.

A lot of the time, MGS V is just a very good stealth game. You have lots of tools to distract, evade or take down your enemies, and they’re all very satisfying to use – just like Deus Ex 3. Its levels are encampments dotted seamlessly around a huge open world – just like Far Cries 2-4. Its layered systems turn failures into new challenges rather than end points – just like Invisible Inc. But none of those things are new, and MGS V sometimes feels like something that is.

Those times, for me, are not during some particularly great mission, or when some unexpected chain of events creates a cool story. They’re after: when the guards lie sleeping or dead, the cargo containers are ballooning skyward, I’m scampering out with the target (too weak to be similarly ballooned) slung over my shoulders.

Because what happens next is both incredibly mundane and incredibly unusual. I heave them into the back seat of a 4×4, get in the driver’s seat, and drive off. I bring up the map and tell my chopper pilot where to pick us up. Then I drive them there. Then I park, haul them out, carry them to the chopper, and put them in. Then the chopper flies off. Then I go back to my car, look at my map, and figure out where I’m going next.

None of these things are thrilling or even challenging, they’re just the things you would need to do if this was your mission and these were you tools. And that makes you feel more like an actual field operative than any other game I can think of. Instead of cutting to the next exciting mission or cinematic, it leaves you to deal with the basic mechanical business of getting things done and moving on. It’s more than feeling like the star of an action movie – it’s feeling like this is your job.

As I’ve started to figure out that this is what’s special about the game, I’ve also figured out how to maximise the feeling. Because it doesn’t always do this: main missions often do cut away, or force you to return to base. So now I drop myself at sunset, in whichever country has the most side-ops scattered across its map, climb in my car, and work through the night.

That means getting from each mission area to the next, sometimes through 3 kilometers of twisting, guard-infested roads. I mostly drive, cutting my headlights and offroading dangerously to skirt watchtowers, and enjoying the empty, dark stretches between. Other times I ride, hanging off the saddle to hide behind my horse as we trot past patrols in the shadows. And for the longest journeys, I sneak into an outpost’s delivery point, climb inside a stamped addressed cardboard box, and post myself to the next town.

That part is probably not a lot like a real commando’s job.

But it’s these between moments, staying in the world between objectives, that makes it work. It has all the appeal of methodically taking down the outposts in Far Cry 3 and 4, but the added sense of purpose from the side-ops makes a huge difference to the fantasy you’re living: you’re an agent with a job to do rather than a madman with a murderous hobby.

In fact you’ve got lots of jobs to do, and the more of them you do in one continuous marathon of espionage, the deeper you can sink into this other life. Last night I tranqed a whole airport to find a crucial blueprint, interrogated a lookout to locate a prisoner, incapacitated four heavy infantry with my bare hands, and stole a tank from under the noses of its sniper guardians. By the time I drove out to a remote shack to capture an interpreter, the sun was coming up. I tranqed him and one of his bodyguards at range, then snuck up on the last one and slammed him into the shack. For no practical reason, I loaded the target and the better of the two bodyguards into my jeep and drove to the nearest pickup point… then this happened:

Turns out the game sometimes auto-extracts people when you leave the mission area. Which is one of many signs that this sense of doing all the between bits yourself wasn’t a particularly high priority for the developers. But when you play that way, and when they let you, it’s really something special.

Almost every game that lets you take people out lethally or non-lethally presents it as a choice between pragmatism and ethics: killing is easier, but tranqing is nicer. That’s true in MGS V too, but it adds something else to that choice that solves a problem I’ve had with these games for ages.

The ability to play a game nonlethally lets you adopt that policy as your character’s moral code, and that makes your game persona a little more sympathetic. By the same token, it also demonises the act of killing: it’s no longer possible to claim it’s necessary, because you often have the developer’s word that it isn’t. To kill is now either the act of a sadistic monster, or an unsatisfying compromise made because you either couldn’t or couldn’t be bothered to pull off the non-lethal option.

So the ways of playing these games – including my own – boil down to:

1. Do everything nonlethally forever, no matter how difficult or boring it becomes.
2. Kill everyone, playing the role of a psychotic monster who usually clashes with both the story and your own ability to embody your character.
3. Stop caring about the distinction and do a messy mix of both, as your mood or the situation dictates.

It’s probably clear from the way I’ve phrased these that I don’t find any of them entirely satisfactory. Very few games make the purely nonlethal option inherently fun – the faint satisfaction of knowing you’ve done the ‘right’ thing is balanced against how boring and time consuming the methods were, how many cool tools you weren’t allowed to use, and how utterly fake the whole charade is – you’re usually only doing it this way because you have divine knowledge that the world has been architected to make it possible.

Mechanically, I like the third option. I like having a lot of tools. Option 1 makes lethal tools forbidden, and option 2 makes nonlethal tools pointless. But by itself, option 3 doesn’t give you any particular reason to use both sets, so it can feel kind of empty.

That’s the thing MGS V fixes. With an early upgrade to your binoculars, you can scan every soldier to see how good they are at a variety of different tasks. If they’re any good, it’s worth taking them out non-lethally, because you can then tie a balloon to them, send them up into the sky, have your colleagues collect them with a passing plane, fly them to the Seychelles, drop them off at an offshore base, persuade them to change sides to your private mercenary corp, then put them in full-time, devotedly loyal employment in the division of your base that their talents best suit.

I’ll be honest, this was not my next guess for how games would ultimately fix this problem.

But it does work.

You have to disengage with the moral aspect completely, of course – you’re now operating in a pretty grotesque fantasy land where no-one has a will that can’t be bent to serve your own. You can shoot a person 7 times in the knees and then make them work in your box-delivery department forever, and they will salute you on sight and thank you if you punch them. You could read it as parody or an ugly dominance fantasy, but I suspect it’s just where a series of cool systems ideas led them, and they didn’t much mind that it was narratively mad. Luckily, neither do I.

It works because there’s now a strong practical reason to use nonlethal tactics for some guards, and lethal for others. This guard has an A in Engineering and this one has a B in Intel, so I’ll tranq those two and kill the rest. You don’t have to kill the rest, but as in most games it’s easier: you have more powerful, more varied, and more satisfying tools to do it, and it eliminates them from the complicated patrol equation: people don’t get up from death.

Pure lethal and pure nonlethal are still options, but by fleshing out option 3 with interesting systems, it makes it clear how much less interesting they really are. Fine for an experimental or role-playing playthrough, but monotonous compared to the juice you can get out of that choice if you let it vary situationally.

In other games, the “kill or tranq?” question asks you to pick one of two possible playthroughs at the start, and it takes a dozen hours to finish enunciating your answer. MGS V lets it become an ongoing debate.

Being an outsider to the Metal Gear series, I was only cautiously optimistic about V. All I heard about the last one was that it had 90-minute cut-scenes. I watched enough of one of them on YouTube to determine that it was… not my cup of tea. Of V, I’d seen some fun stuff in videos, but I was half-assuming the story would barge in and ruin it.

Well, the story does barge in. But only for the intro and a few brief intrusions, spread out over the vast, ridiculous amount of time I’ve played the game for so far – at least thirty hours, I think. That’s a ridiculously tiny fraction, and the rest is extraordinarily good.

So many things about it are surprising or different or interesting and I want to write about all of them. So I think I’ll do that, one post at a time, starting with this:

MGS V is extremely forgiving

Outside of those few scripted intrusions, I’ve only actually died a handful of times in those thirty hours. The game has an enormous failure spectrum – I mentioned these in respect to Invisible Inc, but here’s the gist:

MGS V has most of the stealth genre’s most generous failsafes, plus an incredibly generous one of its own inserted at the crucial moment – Reflex Mode. The result is something like this:

• If a guard sees you, you get an ‘awareness’ indicator showing you where they are. If you reduce your visibility, that goes away completely and the guard won’t even investigate.
• If you stay in sight and/or make yourself more visible, the guard will very, very slowly come over to investigate. Even then, this alerts no-one else and doesn’t count against you in any score or performance metrics, and you don’t even have to move: going prone and using a ‘hide’ button makes you damn nearly invisible – I’ve had a guard stood 2 feet from me shining a torch directly on my body without spotting me in that mode.
• If they DO definitively see you and recognise you as an intruder, Reflex Mode puts the world in slowmo and you get a huuuuuuuuge amount of time to do something about it. Your view is snapped to the person who saw you, the yelp of recognition they make seems to be inaudible to other guards, and if you shoot them in the head with a quiet weapon (you start with two) in this ample time, no alert is triggered.
• If you fail to take them out in this time, or someone else sees them die, the surviving guard will yell. Others in earshot will be alerted, but no-one beyond that at this stage. Your default weapon is rapid fire, accurate and silenced, and if you can take out everyone who heard before they have a chance to radio, the alert is contained.
• Even if you do give them time to radio, it will do nothing if you’ve already taken out their communications equipment.
• Even if they manage to radio for reinforcements, it’s easy to run away and they won’t give chase.
• Even if you don’t run away, it’s quite possible to kill everyone without taking a hit.
• Even if you take a hit, your health regenerates for free.
• Even if you get hit a LOT – even if you get hit by a mortar – you only go into a ‘wounded’ state that restricts your movement but still gives you a chance to take everyone out.
• If you fuck that up, yeah, you’re dead.

Listing it like that makes it sound absurd, but I really think this is one of the main reasons I and so many people end up having such a great time. Moving to these messier states creates stories of panic and improvisation, instead of frustrating game-overs. It’s the same reason it works in Invisible Inc:

Spoiler-free

The Game: Her Story

You play someone who’s been given access to a database of video clips, all of the same woman being interviewed by the police about the disappearance of her husband. You can only find the clips by searching for words or phrases you think might be in their transcripts, and you only get to see the first five results of that search. The clips are extremely short – most are about 20 seconds – but there are hundreds. The more you watch and discover, the better an idea you get of what to search for, and slowly you piece together the truth of what happened.

What Works: Nonlinear Storytelling

You’re free to search for anything you like, and the game cannot hide or lock off any clips that mention that term. The only restriction is that five-clip limit, and that’s sorted in chronological order, so it also can’t cheat by keeping a particular clip out of the top five artificially. That means it’s entirely possible to find the deepest secrets of the story with your first search.

But that’s not what happened for me, or anyone else I’ve talked to. In fact, it seems to almost always play out like a brilliantly paced thriller: mysterious hints leading to confusing contradictions, leading to revelations, then to further curiosities, then to even bigger revelations.

It was about an hour before I felt I had a handle on what happened, and an hour later it was all turned on its head. By then I was so fascinated that I spent another hour scouring for more, fleshing out the details, and investigating side-leads. I expect it would be two more to find everything.

Why:

Having to type in search terms means the way you explore and discover the plot is driven by your own intelligence. You can search for general terms if you’re stumped, but more often something she says will spark an idea in your head, you type it in, and see what you get.

When an idea like that fills the results box with 5 undiscovered clips, you get to feel what it’s like to make a breakthrough in a murder case – to solve something with a flash of inspiration. And because nothing in Her Story is straightforward, there’s a delight to delving into that fresh treasure trove of new information – new questions as much as new answers.

Letting the player potentially find any part of your story in any order is a counter-intuitive idea for an entirely story-driven game.

Without that five clip limit, I don’t think it would work – a generic search would become a playlist of all the videos.

Without the search results being in chronological order, I don’t think it would work – you could keep trying different generic words until the juicy stuff came up by chance.

And with a simpler plot, I don’t think it would work – the ‘truth’ of Her Story’s plot is so elaborate and complex that even watching the game’s most revealing clip would only give you one piece of the puzzle.

That last point is what really made it special, for me. I took 700+ words of notes while playing, meticulously organised by date of interview, and repeatedly had to revise or correct assumptions I’d made about the meaning of earlier clips.

My first big revelation was a substantial clip that seemed to describe the whole crux of the thing, and sent me on a frenzied series of searches to investigate its most remarkable info. An hour later, after discovering much more, I went back and watched that clip again to check something. As I did, everything about it flipped round. Almost every word changed meaning, mysterious references clicked into new facts, and previously vague motives suddenly became frighteningly clear. It was the same clip that had told me what happened, but only with a headful of new information did it also tell me why.

What To Learn:

Search is a great interface for natural language input

It’s interesting to compare Her Story to a text adventure: you do type in text, freely, in the hope of getting a pre-written response back. And like a text-adventure, a lot of what you type does not have a response. But here that system is never frustrating, because the logic of what will and won’t get a response is made clear to you, there’s a natural reason for it, and that lets it become the game.

The implicit promise of a text adventure is “Type whatever you want to do, I’ll tell you if it works!” But if you’re not conversant in the standard commands, what you type will more often fail because the game doesn’t understand it or doesn’t have a response ready.

The promise of Her Story is “Type what you think she might have said, I’ll show you if she said it.” When nothing comes back, it’s because you failed at that job.

The interface, the thing that limits what you can and can’t do, is natural: it matches the limitations your character in this world also faces. And so the challenge of overcoming it feels like a game, rather than a frustration.

If you split a sufficiently complex plot into sufficiently small pieces, it works out of order

Plenty of stories work out of order, but they had to be pre-written that way. Her Story doesn’t know the order you’ll discover it in, yet it seems to almost always work as a well-paced thriller. Because as in my example, even a crucial piece of information, in isolation, doesn’t tell you everything you want to know.

It’s worth noting, though, that Her Story’s delivery system does influence the order, by sorting results chronologically. If what you search for has more than 5 results, the 5 you get will be the earliest of those, which tend to be less revealing than later clips.

If you can tell something out of order, let the player drive the order

If every clip in Her Story was an audio log littered randomly around BioShock, it would lose part of its appeal. What made the game exciting was driving that discovery process with my own insights. They didn’t always work, and often I found something I wasn’t looking for, but I was still driving the process and sometimes hitting the jackpot, and that’s what made it so engrossing.

I don’t know what the ‘littered around BioShock’ equivalent of that is yet, but that’s what I’m thinking about now.

What is it?

A turn-based stealth game with randomly generated levels and no savegames. You have two secret agents with different special abilities, and you choose from offices of varying difficulties and rewards to break into and steal money, equipment and abilities. You break in by carefully peering round corners and doors, ambushing unwitting guards with your tazers, and hacking security devices from a special vision mode.

If you want a better idea of how it plays, I recorded myself going through one mission, and talked through my thinking and how the game works.

What works and why?

Turn-Based Stealth

As in XCOM, there are lots of interesting considerations to precisely where you should move each team member each turn. But instead of optimising accuracy percentages, you’re trying to avoid being seen at all – and usually succeeding. This makes it feel much cleaner and more satisfying than turn-based gunfights, but no less tense or eventful. Being directly seen is a rare, crisis-level event, but lots can happen between ‘perfect stealth’ and ‘caught at gunpoint’.

The edge of a guard’s vision will cause you to be ‘noticed’, causing the guard to come closer on his next turn. Being seen by a camera will raise the alarm level and bring guards running, but not fail or damage you. Your tazer only knocks guards out temporarily, and needs time to recharge, leaving you vulnerable. These tensions and trade-offs are what you’re worrying about on a moment-to-moment basis.

It says something that the last horrifying, gasp-out-loud moment I had in Invisible Inc was when one of my agents shot and killed someone. I’d set them in overwatch to hopefully take out a drone, but a human guard walked in front of them. I was distraught at a) wasting my only shot on a guard who could have been tazed, and b) raising the alarm level by tripping his heatbeat sensor. Not at the loss of life, obvs.

Hard Intel

I think every stealth game I like gives you an unrealistic intel advantage. Deus Ex makes your enemies short sighted. Human Revolution lets you switch to third person to see round corners. Far Cry 4 lets you tag people to see them through walls. I decided to go all the way in Gunpoint and let you see everything at all times.

Invisible Inc’s is subtle but extremely powerful. You can only see areas your agents and hacked cameras can see, but: you can see if those areas are being watched. The vision of enemies, even enemies you don’t know about, shows up as if it were bright red light. That doesn’t always tell you exactly where these unknown enemies are, but it gives you perfect, reliable, hard-and-fast intel about the most crucial thing you could want to know: if I move there, will I be seen? Having that intel, and being able to rely on it, makes Invisible Inc a game of strategy rather than one of guesswork and risk management.

Failure Spectrum

When you can fail at something but still carry on playing, I call the range of states between perfect success and total failure a ‘failure spectrum’: there’s a spectrum of possible outcomes, and screw-ups can move you towards the failure end and recoveries can (sometimes) move you back up towards success. In Invisible Inc, there are a few different failure spectrums that you could break down something like this:

Equipment:

• Leave with all of the money and equipment in the level without losing any
• Leave with more money and equipment than you spent
• Leave with some of your money and equipment left
• Lose it all somehow?!

Evasion:

• Get what you want without being noticed
• Get noticed, but not directly seen
• Get seen, but slip away before anyone is hurt
• Someone gets knocked out but not injured
• Someone gets injured but the other agent revives them
• Someone gets injured and you can’t revive them, but you drag them to the exit (thanks, Skeed in the comments!)
• Someone gets injured and you have to leave them behind, losing them forever
• The whole team gets injured and therefore everyone dies, game over

Style:

• Get what you want without killing anyone
• Get what you want without hurting anyone
• Get what you want without using the ‘Rewind’ function

How much you care about each of those things is subjective in some cases, but together they form a huge range of possible outcomes. Every encounter and decision you make as you play is moving you up or down on that spectrum, so you care about them all.

A big failure spectrum is good because a lot of the most emotional moments in a game happen on the cusp of failure. If you were this close to being seen, your escape is exhilarating. But if failure is a ‘game over’ screen, spending a lot of time on the cusp of failure means a lot of ‘game over’ screens. Each one interrupts your immersion and ends your investment in this current run. It pulls you out of the game, and you find yourself in a menu, then at a checkpoint or a savegame. Mentally acclimatising to how much of your story has been lost forces you to disengage from it, and you have to build up all that immersion again from scratch.

If failure isn’t game over, it’s still nail-biting when to come close to it. And when you do slip over the threshold, it’s just another development in the story you’re creating and living through. The challenge switches to one about recovering from your screw-up, which can be tense and exciting in itself. Each level of a failure spectrum ultimately means the game can make you spend more of your time at that exhilarating cusp of failure without introducing frustrating interruptions.

Systems Interplay

This one’s harder to define precisely because the best moments it creates are always unique to the situation. But basically I mean: all these cool systems link into each other, so that problems in one can be solved with another.

My favourite example is when I was trying to ambush a guard with triple power armour. One layer of armour means you need a weapon with one level of piercing to harm them. Triple means you need three. I have none. But power armour is a device, and devices can be hacked.

I spent three turns using my Parasite program to break down each layer of his power armour, and one more getting Deckard in position to take him out. At last he’s in range, so I have him run out of cover, stand directly behind the guard, and- nothing. The tazer icon is disabled. I check the guard’s info: 1 layer of armour. It must have regenerated.

This is bad. I used all of Deckard’s movement points to get him right up to the unsuspecting guard, so now he’s stranded there. The guard is facing a wall, he will absolutely turn around on his turn. And Deckard’s cloaking device is nowhere near being ready again. I have the hacking power to put another parasite on his armour, but it wouldn’t eat through even one layer until the start of our next turn, by which point it would be too late. I don’t have any other hacking tools, not even the basic Lockpick that breaks 1 firewall.

But hang on – didn’t I see that for sale? We’re on this mission to buy new hacking upgrades, and my other agent Internationale reached the terminal last turn – she found nothing good we could afford. The Lockpick isn’t good, really, but right now it would be a life saver. And if we sold one of my less useful hacking programs, I think we could afford it.

Internationale is miles from the terminal, but if she sprints full pelt, she could just make it to the console this turn – alerting everyone on the way. She sprints, everyone hears the footsteps, but she makes it. Selling our Hunter tool gets us enough for the Lockpick, and she buys it. I switch to hacking mode, use the Lockpick on the guard’s power armour, and it shuts down. At last, Deckard’s tazer icon lights up, and I click it.

Grab, zap, whomp – he’s down.

That was the guard AI, feeding into the item system, feeding into the penetration system, feeding into the hacking system, feeding into the shopping system, feeding into the noise and movement system.

On another level, I might have been able to have Internationale buy her own cloaking unit and sneak up to the guard with a Mark II Buster Chip to over-ride his armour by hand.

Or if she’d been Xu, he could use an EMP fist-needle to reboot it.

Or Internationale could have Buster Chipped a drone with a penetrating gun mount to just blow through it.

Or if the Safe Alarm Daemon had been active, she could have intentionally opened a safe to trip one and cause the guard to investigate that next instead of turning around.

I’ve even heard of someone intentionally knocking out their own agent for two turns just because guards don’t notice prone bodies: if I’d had a flash grenade, I could have KO’d Deckard myself to save him.

More Info

It’s in Early Access at the moment. Obviously I like it already, but I would pretty much always advise waiting until the developer calls a game done – I’m only playing now because I need to judge it for the IGF.

Not least because of fucking cocking shit like this shitting shit:

Third-person open world action and stealth game, with Assassin’s Creed free-running and Arkham Asylum combat. You’re in Mordor, it’s full of orc-like Uruks, and for reasons that were probably explained in all the cut-scenes I skipped, you have to use them to get to the Black Dark Lord Hand – who I gather is a ruffian.

What Works?

A menu of minibosses called Sauron’s Army. They’re Uruk captains with randomly generated looks, names, strengths and weaknesses. You select one from the lineup, interrogate lesser Uruks to find out which of your many modes of attack they’re weak to, then track them down in the open world and decide how to go about taking them out.

Why?

Well, that’s cool for starters. It’s cool having to find a source who’ll have information on your target, extracting that from them in a telepathic way that looks frightening but does not appear to be harmful, memorising these secret weaknesses, hunting your mark through the open world, and looking for a way to combine what you know with their situation. Weak to explosions, but nothing flammable around. Weak to stealth, but can I get past his lackeys? Maybe if I distract them over there…

In most cases, this secret info lets you take them out swiftly. And having intel inform your strategy and pay off so decisively in a non-scripted scenario makes this more satisfying than any of my kills in Assassin’s Creed.

But Sauron’s Army gets much more interesting when, in the second half of the game, you upgrade your telepathy to a sort of mind-control. The result seems to be that they see you as their Warchief: they don’t attack you, but nor do they attack their fellow Uruks unless you order them to. And they even mutter about looking for ‘the ranger’ – you.

With low-ranking Uruks this is just a cooler version of every game’s ‘Charm’ spell: it’s permanent, and they work like sleeper agents, waiting for your go-word when you’ve covertly turned enough of a stronghold’s guards to take it over.

But when you flip a captain in Sauron’s Army, you’re essentially becoming part of it. Now you have commanders. They’ll raise their own armies, they’ll fight with other captains, and they’ll try to become Warchiefs. You can step in at any time and send them after a particular target, and whether you micromanage them or not, you can show up to each of the important events in their lives to make sure they go well.

My man Blorg the Poet has been captured by a bigger captain and is about to be executed. The bigger captain is vulnerable to ranged. A spectral arrow whizzes from the bushes and thuds into his cranium.

His men run, Blorg runs, all the other prisoners run. Blorg is promoted into the power vacuum.

In the first half of the game you study their weaknesses, in the second, you suddenly care about their strengths. Not because they matter that much, but because these are your guys. I find myself selecting them for their quirks, cultivating an Uruk sub-faction of freaks and weirdos. Blorg speaks in rhyme. Glabkuk has a claw for a hand. Ukbuk just has a really fancy red-feather headdress I like. This is my team.

All this links into the dynamic, unpredictable business of the captain encounters themselves, which can sometimes run into each other as your fights lurch around Mordor. The first time I faced Ukbuk, I lost control of the situation. I’d stealth-flipped most of his henchmen to make the fight swing my way, but then one of my own captains blundered into the fracas and joined in.

Ukbuk was already weak enough for me to turn him, but I was caught up fighting his remaining loyal subjects as my captain closed in to finish him off. I’d never much liked the guy, so I did the only thing I could to save Ukbuk and his fancy headdress: Dispatch. This detonates the heads of all my mind-controlled soldiers, captain included, rather dramatically ending the fight.

Their bodies dropped, I finished off Ukbuk’s henchmen, and… he killed me. Or rather, he downed me. You get one last chance to come back from the brink of death by completing a quicktime event. But I’d just upgraded that ability to also kill my assailant if I succeed. Saving myself would kill Ukbuk. In easily one of the dumbest things I’ve done for a hat in a videogame, I let myself die.

Ukbuk got promoted for that. But that just made him a more valuable asset when I eventually turned him to my side.

So that’s what’s cool about it. The game has just added a screenshot composition tool that’s so good I almost wish I still worked in magazines. It really shows off how characterful and distinctive the Uruks are – they’re all generated by the same system, footsoldiers and captains alike. Not least because any of the former can be promoted to the latter for killing you.

Here are some other shots I took tonight:

Each level has a shrine that grants a choice of upgrades, letting you incrementally design a perfect build of complimentary abilities until depth 16, at which point they run out completely and you just see how far you can get with what you’ve built.

As the difficulty ramps up from there, the way your chosen abilities play off each other to let you overcome the endlessly increasing challenge becomes elegant, then balletic, then sublime. These calculated chains of sweeps, leaps and thrusts let you dance through a minefield with precision and grace, felling everything around you. It’s hard to fully explain how neat, clever and satisfying it feels – so I made a GIF.

If you’re interested in what’s actually going on here, I’ll go through it frame by frame.

First move. The purple wizards and green archers can shoot along any straight row of hexes (six directions), so I can’t go up (wizard on the right) or down (archer on the left). I head up-right, to get as close as I can without taking damage.

JC, a bomb! The red guys throw these, and they blow up next turn, hitting everything adjacent. This could be a tough spot: every adjacent square gets me hit by something next turn, and I certainly can’t stay where I am. But that’s what your upgrades are for – in this case, Shielding Bash.

Bash lets you knock anything away from you, including bombs, and in this case that lets me neatly blow up these two footmen. But it’s the Shielding Bash upgrade that really saves me here: every time I Bash, I’m invulnerable until my next turn. That protects me from the wizard above.

I’m missing a screenshot after this (I fudged it a bit in the GIF) but I manage to kill the closest wizard without taking damage, leading to this:

JC, a bomb! My shield bash is still on cooldown so I can’t bat it back at the red guys, but they’re low priority anyway – often they actually help. I’m much more interested in getting rid of these wizards.

I can’t Lunge at them directly, because the archer on the left would shoot me in the back, so I Leap right next to them. Leap costs a chunk of your slow-recharging energy, but I’ve also upgraded it to stun everyone near where I land, so it’s worth it to get close and stun the closest wizard.

The wizard I didn’t stun moved down, and another bomb rolls in. If I stay where I am, I’ll get hit by a wizard, an archer and a bomb – crazy damage. But I’m here to kill these wizards, and I can do it rather neatly.

As you move from one tile to another, you Slash any enemy who’s adjacent to both. In this case I Leap over their heads, letting me kill them both in one move, and stunning the red guy nearby.

Moving upward here would Slash the red guy and Lunge the archer, but I notice the archer in the middle would hit me. I don’t, however, notice the archer in the upper left.

Stupid mistake. I kill the red guy and stun the closest archer, but get hit by the one I forgot about across the river. Past level 16, though, it’s OK to take 1 point of damage on a level: the golden fleece you find there heals you by that much each time you descend.

JC, a bomb! Not hard to decide what to do here.

I Bash the bomb at the archer and two red guys, killing all three and protecting me from the top archer because of that shielding perk.

This is not as easy as it looks: you can’t attack an adjacent enemy by moving directly into their square, so no conventional moves are safe here. But as it happens, that last bomb bash was my third killing move in a row, and I have a killstreak perk. There are several to choose from, and I’ve picked the one that recharges your energy, returns your spear, and resets your cooldowns. That means Shielding Bash is ready to go, even though I only just used it.

The blackness is basically a wall, so Bashing someone into it crushes them instantly. It also shields me of course, so the archer across the river can’t hurt me again.

Easy move – leaping towards the archer lets me land into a Lunge, killing him with my spear.

This one’s trickier: if I Slash this guy by going up, the soldier on the right can stab me. If I Slash him by going down-left, killing him exposes me to the archer. I kind of want to kill him but stay where I am.

I guess I could throw my spear? It’s counter-intuitive at close range, and it’ll leave my spear in the archer’s line of fire, but! I’ve just done two consecutive killing moves, so as long as I kill something this’ll be my third, and my cooldowns, energy and spear will be returned.

I throw my spear into his face at point blank range, and it teleports right back into my hand. I love this game.

From here, it’s easy: Slash up…

Slash down…

Leap to chase the archer…

And throw my spear across the river.

It’s a risky move in combat, because without your spear you can’t do the super useful Lunge attack, and it’s awkward to get it back. But for the final enemy on a level, it feels like such a cool finish. Despite being turn-based and cutesy, what’s happening Hoplite’s fights has a spectacular and relentless brutality to it.

Once more from the top:

Hoplite is $2 on iOS and Android (free to try).