It seems I ended up with a supernatural/divine theme for my blog name. That was one half in part because I was listening to a track from the Digital Devil Saga soundtrack and thought it had a nice ring to it, but also due to a comment once made about Until Dawn, namely that no mere mortal could have solved one of the problems the designer inevitably faced.

Spoilers for Until Dawn, for your information.

Until Dawn is a game where you make choices and push buttons in quicktime events set to the backdrop of a B list horror movie. Frankly speaking, the gameplay is about equivalent to being forced to do a jumping jack before every page turn in a book, but without the physical exertion. It doesn’t sound like I’m selling it, but if you don’t do that jumping jack fast enough, your favorite character will die. You don’t want to kill Tyrion do you?

Imagine then, being the designer working with the writer on this horror movie game. The writer comes back and has this big scene where this one character has to choose one of his friends to die in a Saw-like contraption. But here’s the kicker, one of the friends is actually the antagonist and is faking his death to pull a prank (and surprise the audience.) Fun right?

No, you say. You can’t do that. The player has been making choices the entire game on the most menial of things. If we give them a choice here, they might choose to save the antagonist, and then what? Create a whole new branch in the story where the antagonist’s prank failed? Too costly. Don’t allow the player to make that choice? Player feels cheated and becomes very suspicious of the character’s death. Throw a game over screen? Same as before, and now you’re introducing a new element to your game for this one scenario. You complain to your producer but too bad: game needs a saw, game needs a faked death.

So what’s a designer to do? The designer prays the to god of game design and an angel delivers her answer: make it so both choices can be interpreted to either answer.

Allow me to show you.

The scene starts with a quick view of the saw contraption. It should be fairly obvious what’s going to happen. The saw will move forward, go on either the left or right track, and cut one of the two characters in half. Go to the left, Ashley dies. Go to the right, Josh dies.

Over a loud speaker, the Psycho tells the player (playing as Chris) what she has probably inferred. You get to pick. The exact wording is “which subject will live, and which will die.” The exact wording used is a part of the trick, so pay attention to it.

The second piece of information we get about this contraption is this shot. In it, we see the lever that will be used to make the choice. Note the wording again. This time, we are told our choice will be to save someone. We choose who lives. Also note the position of the pictures. Ashely on the left, and Josh on the right. Given only this image, we can infer that by throwing the lever to the left, we save Ashely. If we throw the lever to the right, we save Josh.

After that, the player is forced to make a decision. Save Josh, or save Ashley. Take notice that the wording is still who to save, but this time Josh is on the left, and Ashley is on the right. There is no way around this decision, no third choice. Save Josh, or save Ashley. Left, or right.

After making a decision, the player is finally presented with a full view of the saw contraption, and this is where things get confusing. Logically, throwing the lever to the left will send the saw down the left path, killing Ashley. But the player was just told that choosing Ashley’s portrait, on the left, will save Ashley. But the player was also just told that picking the left option was saving Josh. So which is it? Will the lever choose who to save? Or who to kill?

The answer is that the saw will always kill Josh. Choosing the left option is choosing to save Ashley. Choosing the right option is choosing to kill Josh. And the process was so muddled that even if the player wanted to save Josh, the different result would be blamed on the player’s own misunderstanding of the machine, rather than the game’s intent to deceive.

And don’t take my word for it, it really is a confusing choice, as demonstrated by these youtubers.

This sort of choice design is fascinating since it’s normally the type of design that game designers try to avoid. Normally confusing your players is bad. Here it’s necessary.