Year: 2017-2018

Developer: Daedalic

Genre&Topics: narrative game, medieval drama, religion, politics, morality

Website: Pillars

In 2017, when I heard that Daedalic was working on a gaming transposition of the well reknown historical novel by Ken Follett, I was skeptical. Daedalic is a prolific German developer and publisher of low-budget titles; the most of them are classic point&click hand draw graphic adventures, appreciable for their stories but with poor animation. Developing narrative games is a different kettle of fish! Narrative games as The Walking Dead S1 or Life Is Strange are pioneering titles; it’s not so easy to melt interactivity and storytelling, it’s the new frontier of gaming. The Pillars Of The Earth is a very long novel coming with a lot of characters, locations, historical references and events, different storylines intersecting along a whole life time. Not so easy to transpose. Yes, I had good reason for being skeptical and overlooking the title!

One year after a friend of mine suggested me to play Pillars. Mmmm… Still skeptical, I started to read a lot of reviews. They were generally quite favorable. Mmmm… Still skeptical, I purchased Pillars on special sales. Still skeptical, my first game session started at 22:30; I got completely immersed in the narrative flow and lost the sense of time and reality! When I came out of apnea and returned to reality, it was 01:30! I didn’t realize, but I played for three hours with no interruptions! For me it had been just one hour! Not relativistic contraction of time! No more skeptical! 🙂

I continued to experience the same sensation of immersion in the following game sessions, until the completion of book 2. The title has been released in three episodes or books from August 2017 to March 2018; each book is composed of seven chapters. It took me around 15 hours to complete the whole game, but book 1 & 2 took the most of time. So, I enjoyed narrative immersion for around 11-12 hours. But what happened in third book to break my “resonance” with storytelling? It’s just a matter of mine? Let’s analyze the title and try to understand how it’s able to provide immersion despite the low-budget production and what went wrong in the last book.

Essentially Pillars is a “hybrid” 2D title, a mix of traditional point&click graphic adventures, modern interactive drama like Life Is Strange and a bit of a visual novel. Scenes have a certain spatial depth in an apparent third dimension thanks to the use of parallax layers. There is a major focus on searching items and solving puzzles, following the traditional point&click gameplay of Daedalic titles; by the way, multiple choice dialogues have the lion part. Maybe animations are “poor” and quasi-static, typical of Daedalic’s productions, but drawings and voice acting are really great. Thanks to good drawings and voice acting, developers succeed to create convincing and unforgettable characters to empathize with; they still have a special place in my memories several days after completing the game. How could I forget the proud Aliena, the good-hearted Philip and the other several characters so well depicted and with a deep personality of their own? While playing, I felt like I was part of a family, I became attached to different characters, even to minor ones like Milius! Even “bad” characters as Remigius and Waleran are well depicted and convincing. Quality of screenplay, dialogues and texts is excellent and not only because of the good literary source; developers made a great work of transposition. Not by chance, Ken Follett himself supervised and approved the transposition; he gave even his voice to the Cantor (the narrator voice over). An incredible squad of more than 40 actors registered nearly 40 hours of voice over. Talking of numbers, the game includes over 200 beautiful hand-painted backgrounds over which animated sprites interact.

Someone could complain that the more violent, hot and dramatic scenes of the novel have been removed or softened; that’s a pity, I would have liked a more adult oriented game with more dramatic peaks. However, the drama is all there, able to keep you on the edge of your seat. More precisely, the smooth flow of narration is able to hypnotize, keep the player glued to the screen and make him reflect about deep contents (morality, faith, religion, politics, etc.), just like the literary source. I must confess that a few scenes even moved me. Developers succeed in realizing a virtual narrative experience thanks to well managed alchemy and alternation of different interactive and not interactive techniques and languages. Cut scenes, scripted scenes, puzzles, mini games, illustrated texts, tons of multiple choice dialogues, board game mechanics and point&click mechanics are well integrated; the pace of narration is well managed, developers have learned well the art of interactive narration from games like Life Is Strange or The Walking Dead S1 and succeed in melting it with traditional 2D point&click graphic adventure. As said, you have to take some choices in dialogues, but they have minor consequences, just a few alternative and secondary plot variations; however main story is just one, no multiple endings. Your dexterity in mini games can even bring you to game over or to save the life of some characters. Story is essentially the same as in the novel, just minor variations.

Well, what has gone wrong with third book? Why did I lost the sensation of deep immersion? I want to be clear: third book has still good narrative value and quality, but it defects of interactivity. It’s not a matter of lack of dramatic events. It’s just the way developers managed interactive narration, a different way in comparison to first two books.

The original novel has been too “compressed” in the last episode! I think the game would need at least five episodes, not just three. You can notice clear differences between the first two episodes and the last one. As said, first two episodes show a good narrative pace and a good mix of cut scenes, scripted scenes, dialogues, multiple choices, puzzles, game board mechanichs and point&click mechanics. Storytelling is well mixed with interactivity. That’s very important for Video Games, that’s the way you can create immersion.

On the contrary too many events are happening in the last episode, but at the same time third book is shorter than first two books. Story is too much “compressed”, developers were forced to use a lot of passive cut scenes, documents and dialogues at the expense of gameplay and interactivity. There is a not-written rule: you have never to transform Video Games in interactive movies or books. Last episode is out of balance. Literary quality of screenplay is still good, but it’s too quick and compressed, you cannot understand if it’s a movie or a game, interactivity is lacking, the most of time you are not touching your controller, just a few clicks! On the contrary, players should always have the sensation to move story and events forward, thanks to their interaction.

That’s a production mistake for sure; I think developers were forced to compress story in just three episodes, so they used too many cut scenes, texts and documents and neglected interactivity; maybe a matter of budget.

By the way I cannot do other than recommend you to play Pillars if you like the contemporary trend of narrative gaming. Daedalic is pursuing the right way and evolving its narrative production, as evidenced by its last work State Of Mind. We expect higher budget and better animations from next titles!

Rating: 78/100 (info about ratings here)