When a high-ranking security officer saves you from prison, you end up a pawn in her schemes. Now you must eliminate anyone standing in the way of her secret plans and try to get your life back while working two jobs. No tenant, employee, or superior is safe from your spying.
Role: Narrative Designer, Writer
Status: Shipped
Studio: Paintbucket Games
Publisher: Alawar Premium
Release Date: 3 Mar, 2022
On Steam, On GOG, Game Website
Won BEST SERIOUS GAME Award
at the German Game Awards (DCP) 2023
Won BEST STORY Award
at the German Developer Awards (DEP) 2022
Won BEST GAME BEYOND ENTERTAINMENT Award
at the German Developer Awards (DEP) 2022
Quest Design and Narrative Logic Breakdown via Articy by Game Director
Movies Games And Tech – 80/100
Softpedia – 75/100 [Story 8/10]
Shipped Quests:
- Something Is Off
- The Dissidents
- The Letter
- Forgotten Criminal
- Youthful Exuberance
- A Friendly Round
- Secret Correspondence
- Help Kim
- Kim’s Hideout
- The Great Escape
- Peephole for the People
- Life is Life
- Broken Heart
- End Them!
- The Prodigal Daughter
- Duty: Postal Service
- Responsibilities
- School Troubles
- Damocles: Alex Emergency Surgery
- Imprisoned in the Past
- Radioactive Colleague
- Tit for That
- Tutorial
- Dusty Entanglements (Half of the quest)
- Postal Service Daily (15 Dialogues)
Shipped Features:
- Advanced Dialogue Mode
- Access Systems (Narrative Gating)
- Promotion Systems
- Narrative Event Trigger System (Explosions, Posters, Quests, etc)
- Government Shop
- Surveillance System Progression
- Music, Theme, Nuance, Emotion System
- Area Waypoint Slots
Responsibilities
In Short: Quest Design, Narrative Design & Writing (in German on this project, localization to English was handled by an external team) with a focus on player agency, emergent heavy-hitting consequences, multiple ways to solve quests, and fun.
The Family Finale and Resistance storylines were my main responsibility, and in total, I worked on, wrote, designed, & technically implemented 28 quests and a number of systems.
Detailed breakdown of responsibilities:
- designing, implementing, writing main story quests
- designing, implementing, writing side quests
- provide peer review for writing by other teammates
- designing, maintaining narrative systems in cooperation with other departments
- in-engine implementation and troubleshooting of narrative and game design systems
- responsible for numerous features including
- the advanced dialogue system,
- narrative progression through promotions,
- government shop,
- surveillance system progression,
- controlled access system,
- musical theme, emotion and nuance layers,
- technical template design,
- and many more
- writing dialogues faithful to the characters‘ characterization and unique tone
- designing, implementing character dialogues and their logic
- node-based visual scripting of quest and dialogue logic
- creating schedules and NPC behavior logic
- creating, maintaining documentation related to narrative systems
- creating, maintaining documentation related to the overall narrative and world (lore)
- optimization of quest and narrative content
debugging, playtesting of narrative content - empowering, supporting other departments to ensure narrative coherence
- editorializing cinematics, writing for narration texts
- revising and developmental proofreading of localization texts (WIP)
Beholder 3’s narrative deals with numerous sensitive themes many of which the players can influence, like living in a totalitarian state, surveillance, voyeurism, unwanted pregnancy, HIV infections while only being able to save one person, homosexuality in a totalitarian state, the suicide of your daughter if she isn’t saved from the conversion camp, the guilt if you put her there, your son ending up in a wheelchair if his medical bills aren’t paid, and many more. Since all of these have major ramifications on the world, story, and other characters, it was a monumental effort and technical narrative challenge to make that happen believably.
We intended Beholder 3 to put the player in front of tough visible (direct) and invisible (indirect, putting the player in impossible situations) choices, of which it is impossible to fulfil all. The player always has to decide for themselves which decisions they can live with and which they can’t. We tried handling these topics respectfully and sincerely, yet also with humour.
Almost every quest has multiple ways to solve it, with as many secret ways on top of that.
“Is Beholder 3 worth it? Very simply. Yes. It’s a rarity when a non-AAA title game feels so polished, detailed, and original that it contends with the best of the best.
Beholder 3 takes the best bits of the first two games in this series and blends them together to make a fun, dark, morally challenging point-and-click adventure. While slow in pace is still thoroughly enjoyable. If you like dystopian fiction, if you like puzzle-based point-and-click adventures, if you like strong narrative then Beholder 3 might just be the game for you. It’s one I will be playing again and again.
+ Engaging story and variety of missions
+ Interesting array of diverse characters”
James Refelian, Movies Games And Tech
