The amount of times I’ve tried writing a story - no matter how short - and bailed a few pages in is innumerable. Even writing my first post on Substack has been an ordeal to just get out. Is there anything more annoying than a blank page? The answer for me is writing something that never quite comes together like you imagined. Or realizing you’ve conjured up ideas of where you want something to go but can’t quite get there without it feeling forced.
During October I started playing Beacon Pines on a whim as it released on Xbox Game Pass and seemed cozy and slightly spooky. It very quickly started uncovering something a little bit sinister that scratched the requirement to play a vaguely horror game for the scariest holiday of the year. The titular town of Beacon Pines is preparing for a festival with the help of Perennial Harvest - an ominous company that has positioned its headquarters near the edge of town and has big plans for the town’s future. It’s clean, sterile façade looms over the pleasant small-town aesthetic surrounding it without feeling completely out-of-place but also still not meshing cleanly with the rest of the town’s design. As I said: it’s ominous.
It’s a backdrop and eventually the centerpiece of the story that unfolds in Beacon Pines. Luka VanHorn’s father recently passed away. His mother disappeared and no one can confirm whether she’s dead or alive. His grandmother that he has a sparse relationship with has moved into his home to take care of him. Luka fills his days with adventures alongside his best friend, Rolo. The two bond over their expeditions, turning a treehouse into a home base of sorts and an escape from life outside of their heads.
As their imaginations fuel sneaking suspicions that something weird is going on just outside of town, Beacon Pines slowly peels back layer upon layer of intrigue that turns a couple of kids’ hyperactive imaginations into a fight for the town’s survival. The main story itself is not necessarily incredible, but it depends on which story you consider the main one. Utilizing a framing device of a story being narrated by an unknown voice and governed by the player’s decisions in critical moments that always branch, Beacon Pines has an abundance of endings. It also has a very linear design that doesn’t penalize players for wanting to go back and see how the story unfolds from a different decision - in fact, it’s encouraged. The literal ending of the game is the one that ends on credits, but it’s also the one that brings the most catharsis to that unknown narrator.
The frustration of not reaching a satisfying conclusion can be felt by the narrator at every moment the story ends. Which it does frequently. You are beholden to the writing process as a player, which is what makes the game fairly linear. A narrative-heavy experience that only asks the player to walk from point A to point B and occasionally make a decision based on the limited options they have at that moment (visualized as Charms that can be obtained through conversation and interactions along the way), Beacon Pines is not concerned with the player in a way that it’s decision-making might make it feel. It wants to tell a story. A good one. But it just doesn’t have all the pieces when the player and narrator meet. There’s a collaborative process that unfolds.
Those Charms that you collect are merely words or actions, such as “crooked” or “pull”. And they don’t all apply to a specific decision being made so when you reach a critical point in which a decision needs to be made, you may actually only have one Charm that applies to that situation. But you’ll collect other Charms, even on paths that reach dead ends. So you’ll go back to the previous point. Or maybe you’ll go back a few chapters because you see you have a Charm that unfolds a new branch of the story. Everything will be different based on that decision. The main arc is still roughly the same as you can’t change the foundation of what is happening at Beacon Pines, but you can change the outcome of what happens.
Imagine you’ve written the first draft of a screenplay. It clocks in at about 90 minutes, and you’re feeling like that’s a bit too abrupt. So you go back through and you realize that maybe you rushed through the second act of your story. A character maybe made a decision that served the plot but didn’t serve the character. Now you’ve written something that feels more natural as a result of your choice, but the screenplay’s now stretched to 110 pages and you want it to be tighter. You go back again. You abbreviate a subplot, turn it into background noise. Who cares about that character when we’re focused on this one?
Beacon Pines is constantly rewriting itself. Where there was an illusion of choice, it eventually reveals itself to instead be a writing exercise. What will happen if Luka punches Rolo’s sister to get away instead of trying to talk around it? In a game like Heavy Rain or other Quantic Dream titles, branching narratives are par for the course but they’ve always irked me because they gamify storytelling. They turn it into a win/lose scenario where a Game Over forces the player to go back. But they’re not going back with anything new, just knowing what not to do. Or they kill off a character because the player didn’t react quick enough to a prompt. So now the narrative suffers because of a mechanic that has nothing to do with the story.
In Beacon Pines, when you go down a path that ends horribly or in an unsatisfying way, you still learn about characters, their motivations, and even plot points surrounding the narrative. So when you reach that dead end and go back to explore another path, you are using that knowledge to inform the story you’re telling. But you’re not retelling those points again all the time. Sometimes it’s in the background more, or it’s not relevant to the thread you’re on so it doesn’t even come up. You know it because you’re a part of the writing process.
By far the most surprising element of Beacon Pines is that it packs an emotional wallop with so many of its endings, but it almost always feels wrong. The narrator says as much and urges you to go back and try a different path. It was too cleanly wrapped up or too depressing, or it never quite felt like the characters got the due they deserved. It’s all a part of writing and as a reader you sometimes wonder what made the author choose to go one way over another. Beacon Pines lets you into that process. The idea that just because you can write a story to conclusion doesn’t mean it’s done. It’s always changing.
This is why the discussion of a game’s story or any piece of writing being “perfect” is usually nonsense to the one who wrote it. But it’s satisfying and that’s when you let it out into the world. To position this idea back into the world of video games, my biggest critique has always been that storytelling in video games is told through two lenses: immersive and interesting. Those can be the same thing. But they rarely ever are. A good example of them being the same is Hades from Supergiant Games - a studio that has made some of the best stories in video games that tie themselves neatly into fun mechanics that are informed by the story being told or vice versa. They’re intertwined and cannot be separated.
However, what is the relationship between the immersion that is offered by Detroit: Become Human and the story it’s telling? It’s a parasitic relationship where choices made by a player are to see something interesting happen. It could be the continuation of the story, but at no point does you being able to slowly apply pressure to a button give the story any more weight. It’s why the most common video game trope is the power fantasy. Give the player the feeling of being powerful and the story can be whatever so long as it lets the player continue to become more and more powerful or have some sense of progression. Detroit: Become Human only lets the story progress if the player engages, but doesn’t put anything that makes sense gameplay-wise into the player’s hands.
The Assassin’s Creed series is a great example of a series always seeming like it’s fighting against itself. The story is almost irrelevant to the gameplay, and the gameplay continues to expand even if the scope of the story doesn’t. The bigger the open world gets, the more justification you need to bring the character along while still offering more and more experiences because everyone in the world doesn’t just do the same thing over and over. It would break immersion if in every section of a world were the same fetch quests to collect some sheets of music. How did they get there? Is everyone in the world playing music and also really bad at keeping documents together?
I opened this with saying that my first post in Substack was an ordeal to get out. This is it. The first post. I wrote through it and will go back through this now and see what I’d like to trim and cut. But at a certain point I’m going to say “this is good enough”. Not because I think it’s serviceable, but because I don’t feel like there is any more that needs to be included for this article to land. It’s a review of Beacon Pines, kind of. I barely talked about the story itself. Mostly just how it is presented. It’s also a glimpse into the headspace of someone who is trying to write something for themselves. For others too, otherwise I’d never hit publish on this, but it’s mostly for me. Beacon Pines as it’s told by the narrator seems mostly for the narrator. What you take from it afterwards is where your relationship with it forms and that’s the beautiful thing about art.