How Story Games Hand Over Control

Story games hand control to the player in very different ways. Some branch on every decision, some reach outside the window into the game’s own files, and some let the scenery do the talking. Four games on this site show the main techniques, and recognising which one is in play helps get the most out of each story in our story games and horror games collections.

Branching chapters in Slay the Princess

Slay the Princess is built as a chain of chapters. Chapter one is always the same setup — the cabin, the basement, the blade, the Princess — but how the player handles it decides which version of her appears next. Take the blade and refuse to drop it, try to slay her and fail, and the next chapter leads to the Tower, a far more dominant Princess; keep talking to her instead, and her own actions change what she becomes. Each later chapter reshapes the cabin and adds a new voice, such as the Voice of the Contrarian or the Voice of the Broken, alongside the Narrator and the Voice of the Hero. Jonathan Sims performs the Narrator and every one of those voices, so each is set apart by attitude and the way it argues with the others.

How to use it: replay and deliberately choose the opposite of the last run. The game stresses that there are no wrong choices — only different Princesses — and many routes branch from the second chapter rather than the first.

Common mistake: expecting to override the story by refusing everything. In some runs the Narrator steps in and forces events anyway, and the interesting branches come from how the player reacts to that.

Poems and files in Doki Doki Literature Club

Doki Doki Literature Club uses two layers of control. The visible one is the poem minigame: the player picks words, and each word appeals more to Sayori, Natsuki or Yuri, steering whose scenes unlock. The hidden layer is the game folder itself — each club member has a character file, and the story eventually expects the player to interact with those files directly.

How to use it: play the first run without touching the folder. The file-based moments land hardest when they arrive on the story’s schedule, and tampering early triggers special reactions that are better saved for a second run.

Scenery as narration in Murder

Murder takes the opposite approach to branching. Peter Moorhead describes it as a minimal point-and-click that tells its cyberpunk story through the environment: the futuristic Tokyo around Lieutenant Motomeru Minori carries most of the meaning, and the design rewards attentive, thoughtful play over puzzle-solving.

How to use it: slow down and examine everything. The story about morality and sentience is hidden in details rather than dialogue choices, and the whole piece takes about an hour, so there is time to linger. Pixel art by Lucas Carvalho and Glauber Kotaki and a score by KubrixXx do much of the storytelling work that dialogue choices would carry elsewhere.

Obedience as a mechanic in Baby In Yellow

Baby In Yellow frames control as a question of who is really in charge. The babysitting tasks — feeding, diaper changes, bedtime stories — are the rules, and a whisper urges the babysitter to obey. The White Rabbit update added the option of abandoning those duties and running away, with the baby growing very upset in response. Breaking the rules becomes its own path.

Common mistakes across story games

• Rushing through text. In all four games, the details players skip are the ones the twists rely on.
• Looking up routes before a first run. Slay the Princess and Doki Doki Literature Club are designed around surprise.
• Expecting puzzles from Murder. It is closer to an interactive short story than a classic adventure.
• Treating rules as fixed. Baby In Yellow and Slay the Princess both reward testing what happens when the player refuses.