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Narrative used to be a dirty word in video games. For a long time the perception of the medium was that story, characters, theme and plot mattered about as much as the script to a porno. Naturally, a slew of small studios have fought this notion time and time again in such successful breakout hits as Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Dear Esther, Thirty Flights of Loving, and most recently The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (made by the director of Bulletstorm no less!). But that's old news! Of course independent developers are pushing the limits of what the medium is capable of as they're not beholden to publishers, and these more experimental curios have had a lot of success relative to their minuscule studio sizes. What's really interesting is that big budget blockbusters are adapting to this new way of thinking and in many cases they're doing it shockingly well.
Right now the biggest and boldest example I've seen of this (and the inspiration for writing this, if I'm being honest) is the bewilderingly slow opening of Alien: Isolation. It takes two hours before the titular creature even shows up. That's a long time! So what happens in those first two hours?
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