esper Narratively, what is happening to a video game character when they lose a life? (13:10)
I was hoping Call of Juarez: Gunslinger would come up in the answers to this question. It’s got a pretty neat framing device where the whole game is being told as a bar story by an (unreliable) old gunslinger recounting his glory days, and you’re playing as him in these stories. Whenever you die, either the people in the bar or the narrator says the story’s not being told right, and then you’re reloaded back to the last checkpoint. This also affects the gameplay sometimes, when details of the level that you’re playing will change whenever the narrator’s memory fails, so you’ll see the geometry get kinda wiped out and reframed on the fly.
It’s an unexpectedly ambitious approach to storytelling that elevates it above the otherwise meh series.
