What if the player could learn and understand things alongside them? And what if acquiring that knowledge were entirely optional, dependent on dialogue mechanics, reading, piecing together environmental clues…?<\/p>\n
Suddenly, the same story revealed unexpected nuances. The player’s curiosity could become the driving force behind the narrative. Simply progressing through the game would no longer be enough to understand what was happening. The player would have to take an interest in the characters, pay attention to what they said, observe the world and draw their own conclusions.<\/p>\n
An example:<\/strong> a hermit \u2014 Aran \u2014 lives in a cabin in the woods. Nearby, two travellers \u2014 young Adso and the elderly Dorin \u2014 are ambushed by the Queen’s soldiers. Dorin is mortally wounded and tries to say something important, but dies before he can get the words out. Aran takes Adso in, and the boy explains that he and Dorin were on their way to find him when they were attacked.<\/p>\n All Adso knows is that he must deliver an object to Aran, an object that turns out to be a powerful relic. Why he must do so is a mystery to everyone, including the player. The only person who knew the reason, Dorin, is dead. Clearly, something in Aran’s past connects him to these events, but he’s a man of few words and, for the time being, he’s keeping it to himself.<\/p>\n From that point onwards, the player can simply carry on without giving much thought to what has happened. They can complete the adventure, but they’ll never find out who Dorin was, why he and Adso were heading to Aran’s cabin, or what connection existed between them.<\/p>\n By contrast, players who explore the relationship between Aran and Adso, delve into their conversations, read the boy’s notes and pay attention to their surroundings will gradually piece together a much richer, more complex story.<\/p>\n In short, some events took place before Aran and Adso began their journey, while others will unfold along the way. There are characters, conflicts, revelations and a conclusion. But a crucial part of that story isn’t going to come looking for you. You have to go looking for it.<\/strong><\/p>\n And this is especially true of the game’s ending or, more precisely, its endings.<\/p>\n Blades of Fire<\/em> begins in a rather unusual way.<\/p>\n Aran of Lira appears in an unfamiliar place, facing a figure he doesn’t recognise. He doesn’t know exactly where he is or understand what’s happening. Neither does the player. And at that very moment, the adventure begins.<\/p>\n It’s easy to interpret this scene as exactly what it appears to be: a mere introduction. One of those sequences we use to establish a game’s tone, introduce a mystery and make the player wonder what it all means.<\/p>\n But it’s more than just an introduction.<\/p>\n What the player is witnessing at the beginning of Blades of Fire<\/em> actually belongs to the end of the story, although there’s no way for them to know that yet.<\/p>\n The first time they see the scene, all they have are questions. Much later, having travelled through the world, met its characters and understood what has happened, they finally have the knowledge needed to interpret what they saw in those opening minutes.<\/p>\n I find this approach to storytelling particularly interesting because it demands something from the player: memory<\/strong>.<\/p>\n We don’t want to stop the game forty hours later and say, “Remember that scene at the beginning? Well, here’s what it meant.” We trust the player to remember it. And if they do, something that initially seemed merely strange suddenly takes on an entirely different meaning.<\/p>\n There’s something I particularly like about this device: the scene itself hasn’t changed. What has changed is the player, what they know and, consequently, how they interpret it.<\/p>\n This idea extends throughout much of the world of Blades of Fire<\/em>. The story doesn’t exist solely along the path the player follows. It’s also all around them, both spatially and temporally. In places they can explore, characters they can speak to, scrolls they can read and events whose connections may not become apparent until many hours later.<\/p>\n We, the authors, know what happened in that world. But we don’t necessarily want to explain everything. There’s an important difference between explaining a mystery and providing the pieces needed to solve it. In Blades of Fire<\/em>, we tried to do the latter.<\/p>\n This means accepting a certain risk. If you place important information somewhere optional, some players won’t find it. If you allow a conversation to be missed, some players will never hear it. And if you expect someone to connect two events separated by many hours of gameplay, there will be those who never make that connection.<\/p>\n From a traditional storytelling perspective, this might seem like a problem, but we saw it more as an opportunity. Because discovery has a special value when you don’t know in advance what you’re looking for, or even whether there’s anything to find.<\/p>\n And that philosophy led us to make one of the riskiest narrative decisions in Blades of Fire<\/em>.<\/p>\n When Aran kills Erin, the story’s villain, something interesting happens.<\/p>\n From the perspective of conventional video game structure, the moment has all the hallmarks of an ending. You’ve travelled through the world, overcome its obstacles and finally reached the person ultimately responsible for everything that has happened. You confront him and, at last, defeat him.<\/p>\n Erin dies. The story appears to be over.<\/p>\n If, as a player, you’re happy with that, wonderful. You’ve accomplished your mission. End of story.<\/p>\n But perhaps you notice that, even as the credits roll, you still have control of the characters. It’s a small anomaly, a purely mechanical clue that might make you suspect there’s something left to do.<\/p>\n We didn’t want a new mission to pop up immediately after Erin’s death, announcing:<\/p>\n NEW OBJECTIVE: RESURRECT YOUR BELOVED<\/strong><\/p>\n Because then there would be nothing to discover. We would simply have added another mission.<\/p>\n Instead, after Erin’s death, we do something considerably more dangerous: we leave the player alone.<\/p>\n They can continue investigating, talking to characters, exploring places they’ve left behind, or simply decide that the game is over. There’s no longer an objective pushing them forwards, no mission structure telling them what to do next.<\/p>\n And that’s precisely where we wanted to get to.<\/p>\n For many hours, Aran has had clear reasons to keep moving forwards. His objective has guided the player through the adventure. But after Erin’s death, that motivation disappears.<\/p>\n Now it’s up to the player to ask themselves: Is that it? Is there something more? What were some of those things I found actually for? What did that thing I saw mean? Can I do something the game isn’t telling me to do?<\/em><\/p>\n At no point does Blades of Fire<\/em> tell the player that Nerea can be resurrected.<\/p>\n Never.<\/p>\n It doesn’t appear as a mission. There’s no character waiting beside an icon to explain what needs to be done. There’s no checklist telling the player which objects they need to collect.<\/p>\n And yet, throughout the adventure, the world has taught them certain things. They’ve met characters, witnessed events and uncovered information that, at the time, may have seemed completely unrelated.<\/p>\n And it’s possible that, by remembering all those things and connecting the pieces, they might arrive at a conclusion entirely on their own:<\/p>\n Hang on… what if I could bring her back?<\/em><\/p>\n To me, this represents an enormous narrative difference.<\/p>\n Video games normally know what you have to do, and your job is to figure out how to do it. Here, we wanted the player to get ahead of the game itself and formulate an objective we had never explicitly given them.<\/p>\n Because there’s a fundamental difference between asking How can I resurrect Nerea?<\/em> and asking Can I resurrect her?<\/em><\/p>\n The first question assumes that a mission exists and that you simply need to work out how to complete it. The second means discovering a possibility nobody ever told you about.<\/p>\n And that question has to come from the player.<\/strong><\/p>\n If they reach that point, they stop pursuing an objective we’ve imposed on them and start pursuing one they feel is their own.<\/p>\n This makes the conclusion of Blades of Fire<\/em> rather unusual. There’s an ending the game gives you, and another one the player can discover.<\/p>\n Not because they selected a different dialogue option twenty hours earlier, or filled a morality meter, or because the game announced that a true ending existed and provided a list of requirements to unlock it.<\/p>\n The possibility has been there all along, woven into the rules of the world and the events of the story. What changes is the player’s ability to recognise it.<\/p>\n And that was essential to us. We didn’t want that conclusion to feel like unfinished content, like another task to tick off before reaching one hundred per cent completion.<\/p>\n We wanted it to feel like a secret. A revelation.<\/p>\n Something that, once discovered, would make the player mentally retrace their adventure and realise that some of the things they’d encountered were far more important than they’d initially believed.<\/p>\n Naturally, designing a game this way has consequences.<\/p>\n Some players will finish Blades of Fire<\/em> after killing Erin and never continue. Others will suspect there’s something more but won’t know how to find it. And some will only discover that the true ending exists because someone else tells them about it.<\/p>\n I think that’s fair.<\/p>\n We could have made sure that practically everyone saw the complete ending. All it would have taken was a map marker. But then that ending would have meant something else entirely.<\/p>\n There’s something we do increasingly often in video games that I’m not always convinced by: we’re so afraid of players missing content that we end up filling the experience with markers, lists, percentages, objectives, notifications, unfinished quests… Everything is neatly catalogued, waiting to be consumed.<\/p>\n I understand why we do it. Creating content is expensive, and we want players to enjoy everything we’ve invested so much work in. But I think that, sometimes, this concern leads us to sacrifice something valuable: the possibility of being genuinely surprised.<\/p>\n I’m not suggesting that every game should tell its story this way. I don’t even think it’s necessarily the best approach. It’s a creative choice with advantages, drawbacks and, above all, risks.<\/p>\n In Blades of Fire<\/em>, we decided to take those risks because we wanted to explore a different relationship between the player and the narrative. One in which understanding the story wouldn’t depend exclusively on progressing through the game, but also on the curiosity, attention and initiative of the person on the other side of the screen.<\/p>\n We build the world, scatter the pieces, establish its rules and then step aside.<\/p>\n Because some stories work better when they don’t go chasing after the player, but when the player has to go looking for them.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Spoiler warning:<\/strong> this article reveals key details of Blades of Fire. If you haven’t played the game yet, we recommend coming back once you’ve completed your adventure.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2129,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-video-game-design"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mercurysteam.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/blades-of-fire-narrativa-02.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mercurysteam.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/blades-of-fire-narrativa-03.jpg\")
<\/p>\nStarting at the end<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mercurysteam.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/blades-of-fire-narrativa-04.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe story isn’t right in front of the player<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mercurysteam.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/blades-of-fire-narrativa-05.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe ending that looks like the end<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mercurysteam.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/blades-of-fire-narrativa-06.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWhat now?<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mercurysteam.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/blades-of-fire-narrativa-07.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe true ending must be discovered<\/h2>\n
The price of not telling everything<\/h2>\n