A couple weeks back I wrote about some pretty bad puzzles in The Painscreek Killings, and if you thought I was done ranting about that game, you would be wrong.
I can’t really delve any further into this discussion without noting that what follows will massively spoil the game. Admittedly, if you read the previous essay and already felt turned off by it, then you probably don’t care as you likely won’t play it. But there is something about the actual experience that is tough to capture without actively being there. Because that experience will be part of what this essay is trying to explain and capture.
So I want to talk about the ending to Painscreek.
But before I do that, let’s set the scene. The Painscreek Killings is about exploring an abandoned town as an investigative reporter. You’ve been sent to this town because several years back a few prominent townsfolk were murdered, with no clear solution as to who the killer was or why they did it. Everyone else has moved away and things have been closed up, and the town is now about to be sold off to make way for something else. So this is the last chance anyone has to investigate the killings. You’ve been sent here to dig up something.
When you start, you are given a very literal set of tasks, albeit a small one. One, figure out who killed a woman named Vivian Roberts, who was the most well-known of the murder victims. Two, figure out what the murder weapon was. Three, take a picture to accompany your story.
The third task is pretty mundane, but the first and second task set some expectations. This is going to be a mystery for you to solve. That idea is bolstered by the fact that the before you begin the game it warns you that you will need to pay attention to clues and make deductive leaps to succeed.
I bring this up because as you explore this lonely little town and read the various diaries of the former townsfolk to learn about their lives, the narrative slowly unfolds. You find that the story stretches back much further than just those past few years. It involves extramarital affairs and other murders and orphaned children and the like. The actual story starts to fit together like a puzzle, and with each clue you get closer to figuring out the truth. This part of the gameplay is actually interesting and shows a good deal of promise. However, to bring this whole concept together you need to make sure that the ending works just right.
And so what might we expect, if we’ve spent five or six or ten hours playing this game and gathering these clues? Surely we’d anticipate this all to culminate in a final challenge – a mystery. A mystery which we can mess up if we’ve not paid sufficient attention, or not gathered all the clues.
That is definitely how Painscreek should end. That is not how Painscreek does end, though.
The point of this essay will be to explore the idea of “genre switching.” This is the idea of a game transitioning from one type of clearly-defined genre into another. A first-person shooter transforming into a turn-based RPG. A platformer transforming into a puzzle-adventure game. A high-intensity character action game taking a moment to have you play a match-3 minigame. All of these things, big and small, are genre switches.
Genre switches are not inherently bad or good. But there are definitely ways in which they can be done well or poorly. And I want to explore specifically how a game communicates what it is at a fundamental level. When a game chooses its mechanics and narrative and environmental design, what “genre” does the game place itself in? And what should a player expect from the game as a consequence?
The idea of subverting player expectations as a tool of game design already exists, but I want to use this as an opportunity to explain what “subversion” should probably mean. Because even if you subvert expectations, you can still do so by making a poor choice for the game, or making a bad game entirely. In that sense, you as a designer have still failed, because the subversion is not interesting or compelling.
Genre Switches and Player Expectations
So let’s go back to Painscreek. How does it end? The last minor stretches of the game have you locating a key to the town’s church, as well as finding a photo of a hidden button in one of the church’s rooms. When you open the secret room leading up to the attic, you find a desk with a typewriter, a bloody axe, and in one of the drawers is a tape recording of the town’s pastor explaining how he killed the three people who constituted the initial mysterious murders, including Vivian Roberts.
Once the tape stops playing, a health bar appears at the bottom of your screen, and in the distance you can hear a loud “clunk” sound, which is the pastor chaining up and locking the front door.
This is now an escape sequence.
You run through the church’s basement into the town’s sewer system, pop back up through the town hospital, and then head to the hospital roof, all while the pastor chases you with an axe. You are guided by a ghost – a lady from the story that was killed well before you arrived in town – who ultimately saves you from death. The sequence is admittedly short and forgiving – you can take about five or six hits, the axe murderer is definitely slower than you when you run at full speed, and there’s not too many opportunities to get lost. It may well take a couple tries – which is admittedly annoying – but getting to the end of it isn’t really tough.
Once you successfully end the sequence, you are greeted with the culmination of your investigative task. You are asked to choose who killed Vivian Roberts, what weapon was used, and then choose of the photos you’ve taken.
This ends up being a significant letdown.
Let’s begin with mysteries. A good mystery doesn’t just require a premise. It needs to be constructed for the audience to engage with the mystery. That means there has to be a genuine problem that requires the collection of clues and the use of reasoning to put those clues together. You need an event, a set of possible culprits, and evidence that makes at least a few of those culprits viable suspects. A good mystery story such as a book or movie should allow the audience to potentially figure out the solution before it is revealed. In a game, it must be a solution that the audience can figure out. And by contrast, it must also be a problem that the audience is capable of getting wrong.
So Painscreek presents itself as a mystery game, but then falls flat at the very end. Because by the time you actually reach the end, the solution is obvious. In fact, it is painfully obvious. One of the keys to the construction of a mystery is that while there can be only one right answer, that right answer shouldn’t be obvious. It should require careful consideration of the evidence, and perhaps even some clever application of knowledge. The ability to notice details and figure out what doesn’t quite add up.
And so when Painscreek just provides a murder weapon laying out in the open and a taped confession, it completely undercuts the mystery. The player’s final interaction with the game – solving the mystery – becomes an exercise in tedium. Because the only way to get the answer wrong is to hit the wrong button or to do so deliberately.
But it’s not just the undercutting of the mystery. Arguably the more egregious error is the complete shift to a survival horror game for just a brief period at the very end.
Now before getting too deep into this, it would not be fair to say there is absolutely no communication that this could occur. A couple years prior to your arrival in the town, a private investigator is hired to look into the same case. You see his car parked in the middle of the town at the beginning of the game with some of his notes and his ID, and you find some of his other notes in different places around town. As you start getting closer to the end, you will be able to open the glove box in his car, which you notice has a bloody handprint on it. And his final notebook reveals that he figured out who the real killer is, but now that same killer is after him, too. This all hints that the killer could still be hanging around, trying to throw people off the trail if they should come looking.
However, while these clues technically exist, it doesn’t do anything to overcome what the rest of the game is – a calm if unnerving journey through an abandoned town to track down clues. You are spending hours upon hours running through the town, gathering evidence, solving puzzles, finding keys to open locked doors, and so on.
And this is what I meant earlier about how a game communicates what it is. The more time you spend interacting with a set of mechanics, the more you get used to those mechanics. And the more you expect the game to keep throwing those mechanics at you. You obviously want the game to expand upon those mechanics – to make things more complex, more varied, more challenging – but always with an eye to maintaining the same kind of game that you’ve been playing the whole time.
Which is why the shift to a chase sequence is so aggravating. The game hasn’t really taught you to expect this, so it takes you by surprise. And then in that surprise you have to figure out what to do next. Which is part of why you might need a retry or two to get through the sequence – a fact which makes the sequence feel even more annoying than it already is.
And yet, there are plenty of games that combine these chase sequences with puzzle solving or document reading that people generally enjoy. Just about any first-person horror game fits into this mold in some way. So what makes Painscreek different?
The problem is that when you purchase one of those other games, something like Outlast or a Poppy game, you go in with an expectation. An expectation that is fed by the game. You are playing a horror game, and the horror is broken up by calmer sequences involving puzzles or exploration. You know that there is going to be a moment when the game switches back to its horror mode. You are expecting it. In fact, that’s what you’re playing for in the first place.
But as I said, Painscreek has sold itself from the very start as a mystery game. A mystery game with an eerie atmosphere, but a mystery game nonetheless. The puzzles and exploration are the game – that’s what you’re there for. You aren’t there for a chase sequence. If you happen to enjoy chase sequences, then you might be okay with it…but the chances are fairly good that if you’re booting up a mystery game, you’re there to solve a mystery, not be chased.
And this is why the language of genre and how a game communicates what it’s about is so important. Forging an identity and maintaining that identity helps players know what they’re in for.
A game can switch between genres, but in doing so it needs to be clear that it’s going to happen and let a player know. Minigames, for example, are a common element of open-world games, and players are usually introduced to those early on. A game that attempts to meld genres together usually has players engage in both forms of play simultaneously, or switch back-and-forth pretty constantly. Even a game that explicitly tries to mess with the concept of genre or be all kinds of genres simultaneously will transition quickly enough that players will expect those switches.
Of course, even then not all genre switches are made equal. The more you force a player to engage with something that they don’t enjoy, the worse that mechanic becomes. One of the reasons minigames work so well is that they’re optional – if you don’t like them, you don’t have to play them. It also matters how well each individual segment is designed. It doesn’t matter if you seamlessly switch between different gameplay elements if those elements all suck. And of course it matters how well those different genres fit in general. It’s probably a bad idea to ask players to engage with one set of skills such as reaction time and button memorization, and then change things up by asking them to perform deductive logic puzzles.
And if you’re going to have a player go through nearly a dozen hours of one type of game just to hit them with not only something different, but wildly different, then you’ve basically alienated a good chunk of your audience in some way. Because either you’ve pulled in a crowd with what is effectively a bait-and-switch, or you might have to be up front about what the switch and risk driving people away before they even play.
Concluding Remarks
Creating a good open-ended puzzle game is difficult. Creating a good mystery is difficult. In a way, it’s understandable why Painscreek’s ending flopped like this.
If I had to guess, the ending might have been caused by one of two factors. The first could have been that this chase sequence was always planned, and the key was simply building up to it. The player is asked to wonder if they’re really alone, and the closer they get to the truth they more they realize that they were being watched the whole time. It is the culmination of a horror game, and not a mystery game.
The second possibility is that this is the result of failing to juggle the mystery properly. By the time everything was put together, the identity of the real killer was too obvious, making the whole thing underwhelming. So how do you fix that? Add in some action. Not strictly speaking as a distraction, but because the alternative is to basically admit that you have nothing.
I don’t think either answer is ultimately good. If this sequence was all planned from the start, it demonstrates that the developers didn’t really understand their own game. If this sequence was to cover up for a problem with the ending, it shows that they had really dropped the ball on creating the mystery. I would argue the latter is the better problem – they at least knew what they were doing, but wrote themselves into a corner and couldn’t spend the time and money starting over.
Whatever the case, the conclusion is what we have. A mystery game without a mystery, won by running down the correct corridors and proving that you have eyes and ears.
Abstracting Games 