Getting the Ending Right

July 5, 2019

Endings in stories are always tricky to get right. An ending has to successfully bring together all the story threads and pay them off in a satisfactory way. It should have some element of unexpectedness to it and yet feel inevitable. And it shouldn’t belabor the point with excessive exposition. I’m keenly aware of this now that I’m coming down to the closing scenes of Sleuthhounds: Cruise. With this game being so much larger than the previous Sleuthhounds games, there is more to wrap up with its larger cast and consequently more plot lines to deal with.

One lesson in writing that I learned some years ago is that in any story there comes a tipping point. It’s the moment in the story where everything that follows it must drive the story to the conclusion. Prior to this tipping point the story is free to introduce new story threads or delve into the characterizations of characters. However, once the tipping point is reached there’s no more room for these sort of sidelines.

The added challenge with writing a whodunit type mystery, in the vein of an Agatha Christie story, is that by its very nature the story needs to reveal the criminal as late in the narrative as possible. This is usually done with a great deal of exposition from some genius detective who is privy to information that the audience is not. The detective then explains how all the obscure facts of the case add up to the final solution.

In prose or film this methodology works great. The detective fills in the blanks and the audience is left hanging on their every word trying to make the final guess moments before the criminal is actually revealed. However, in an interactive game things are (or should be) different. I remember playing the game Sherlock Holmes and the Secret of the Silver Earring, which very much follows this pattern. While I enjoyed the game overall, I did find the ending rather disappointing. Having played the game as Holmes, it was annoying to get to the end and have him reveal all these details that he knew but that had not been made apparent to me the player. It felt like a cheat and the resulting ten minute cutscene where Holmes expounded on everything almost felt like the game was rubbing it in my face that I wasn’t as observant as Holmes (even when there was no way to be so).

With these past lessons in mind, I’ve found myself with the somewhat daunting task of concluding Cruise. I’ll admit it, my original idea for the final confrontation was to do the classic the-detectives-reveal-everything type of scene. It’s easy enough to write one sentence into the design that says that’s how the climax goes, but when I came to actually implement that scene I first had to refine that and figure out all the details of what would happen in that scene.

As I started breaking down the scenario, I very quickly realized that it was getting into a lot of heavy exposition. Not only that, but some of the exposition was stuff the player would already know from having played the rest of the game and some of the stuff was information the player would have no real way of knowing. In essence Homes and Ampson were solving the mystery for the player.

Taking a step back, I realized that the problem wasn’t with the information so much as how it was being presented. By doing a scene where all the suspects are gathered together and then the criminal is revealed, I was putting across the information for that reveal in the past tense. That is, Ampson and Homes already knew all the answers and were telling the NPCs (and the player) what the solution was. There was never a sequence that placed the player squarely into the final deductions and made discovering those answers an interactive experience.

Once I figured out what the problem was, it was pretty easy to correct. I still have the scene where all the suspects are gathered together, because I really wanted such a scene in the game, but now instead of the detectives simply presenting everything in linear fashion, the game goes into a flashback where the player gets to conduct the final interactive investigation and do the final deductions themselves to sort out the story. This allows this conclusive moment to be conducted in the present tense where the player is actively figuring things out rather than passively being told them.

Using flashbacks also allowed me to deal with another issue. Before the big gathering of suspects, the villain of the piece places Homes and Ampson into a deathtrap from which they must escape. In my original design notes the player was going to escape the trap and then, because I was telling the story in a linear fashion, they would have to go round up everyone.

I was never satisfied with that because it felt like a make work chore after going through the tense scene of escaping the trap. However, with the flashback idea, it allowed me to cut away from the deathtrap with Ampson and Homes still inside and proceed to the climax leaving the player wondering where the Sleuthhounds are and what happened to them. From there an initial flashback allows the player to play through the escape before then going into the final investigative flashback.

The added benefit of using these flashbacks is all that busy work of rounding up the suspects can be completely bypassed. The story can remain focused on what’s important: dealing with the villain. That tipping point, where every scene in the story must drive towards the final resolution, comes when Homes and Ampson get stuck in the trap. With the flashback structure, after that point every scene takes the story a step closer to the ending, with no diversions or meaningless tasks.

The ending is shaping up really nicely now. There are a few elements in the story that I initially thought were going to be important, but ultimately weren’t, and a few that seemed insignificant at the time I put them in but became much more critical as the game evolved. Once I’ve finished my first pass through the game I’ll have to go back and remove those elements that are insignificant and bolster the more important ones. All of that will be relatively easy compared to getting the ending into place right now. Exciting times!