Empirical is a first-person action game where the player explores an old art-deco hotel with the help of a mysterious mask. In addition to granting a variety of powers, the mask speaks to the player and warns of its deranged inventor, who has trapped the hotel’s old guests and experimented on them for years. The player must uncover the truth of what happened and escape the hotel. Empirical was conceived as a “miniature immersive sim”, where the player’s abilities allow them to overcome challenges through their own creative means, rather than scripted solutions.
Role: Narrative/Sound Designer
Tools: Unreal Engine 4
Platform: Windows
Dates Worked: September – December 2017
This game was built by a team of four people over three months. I was primarily responsible for crafting the narrative, though I also worked on sounds. I wrote all of the narrative content, and implemented it using Unreal blueprints.
Gameplay
The player finds a mysterious mask that grants them a variety of different powers. They have a projectile they can redirect in midair, a shock wave that pulls objects in before detonating, and a variety of mobility based powers such as dashing and wall-jumping.
Narrative
My intent with Empirical’s narrative was to have it serve as a backdrop that the player could investigate as much or as little as they wanted to while pursuing their ultimate goal of escaping. While exploring the Empire Hotel and fighting off mysterious, masked phantasms with their new abilities, the player can slowly piece together the events that happened here. The different narrative details were each communicated through the different delivery systems that I designed.
Environmental Storytelling
Through posters and other artifacts scattered throughout the hotel, the player learns that there was a grand gala here to showcase a technological marvel, a mask that grants the wearer extraordinary abilities. Certain rooms and areas of the hotel appear to be actively destroyed, implying some sort of calamitous event having taken place.
The Mask Itself
After finding the mask, the player quickly learns that it has some kind of consciousness, as it starts communicating with the player through messages written in game space. These messages initially only give gameplay objectives, but they gradually reveal that the mask is in conflict with its inventor, and may be partially responsible for whatever calamity befell the hotel.
Inventor Observations
At certain points, the player may hear a woman’s voice coming from a nearby room. When the player investigates, they discover the source, a floating, glowing mask. If they get too close, or into its line of sight, the mask stops talking and falls to the ground. Savvy players will learn this quickly, and by remaining out of sight and listening in, they may learn that the enemies are hotel guests overcome by their masks and subjected to years of the inventor’s cruel experiments, which the player is now drawn into.
Postmortem
Empirical’s narrative was at the very least, successful in creating an air of mystery. Players enjoyed trying to figure out what was going in the hotel, and many were intrigued by the inventor’s talking masks. Telling a story in fragments and withholding most information made players treat information like a reward, rather than context and justification. This also meant that players sometimes had trouble contextualizing their goals, and were occasionally somewhat confused. Players often came away with different impressions of what the story was. This was a reasonable and realistic outcome in a situation like this, but it didn’t always give players the intended experience.
I realized it’s important to make sure that absolutely essential story information (the conflict between the mask and the inventor, the nature of the masked phantasms) is delivered directly to the player so they can’t miss it. Empirical was was most effective for people who dived into the challenge of investigating the lore, but less so for those who just wanted the context to play the game. The main lesson I learned from Empirical is the importance of boiling a story down to its essentials, and making sure the player gets at least that much.