Introduction
Mother of Frankenstein came out of a rough moment for Hatch Escapes. COVID had forced us to shutter both Lab Rat, our award-winning Los Angeles escape room, and the build for our second room, The Ladder, a massively complex undertaking for which we had only just managed to pull together a full team. We had no revenue coming in but were still paying rent and utilities on our physical space. Into this void stepped our friend and co-producer Arvind Ethan David, who suggested we try and come up with a concept for a tabletop game, which we could quickly (ha!) design and manufacture while we waited for the universe to re-open.
Terry and I knew we wanted to create a narrative-centered puzzle game—a subgenre of tabletop games still in its infancy. Our X factor, as we saw it, was that we wanted to tell a real story—one with characters, plot turns, emotional development, and a satisfying climax.
This is still a rarity in tabletop games, and for a pretty straightforward reason: it might be impossible. Unlike movies, television shows, and video games, there are no hi-def visuals to accompany tabletop games, making it difficult to create the immersion necessary to sell characters deserving of empathy. And puzzles add a whole new layer of potential trouble, both in terms of diverting player attention (“I just spent an hour solving this musical Sudoku and now I don’t even remember what’s happening in the story.”) and diluting emotional investment (“How can you ask me to give a shit about somebody’s dead child at the same time I’m struggling to construct all these tricky origami roofs?”).
We quickly came up with some design rules that we hoped would give us the best chance at threading this insanely tiny needle.
First, we would build our story around actual historical figures. This would immediately ground the narrative in the real world, which was crucial to maintaining credibility as the story moved from the factual to the speculative, while also giving us a head start in terms of emotional investment (it’s a lot easier to create empathy for people who actually existed than a bunch of made-up avatars and ciphers). Also, if players had some sense of the characters from the jump, we would be able to cut down on the requisite introductory info dump that can suck all the joy out of a game just as it’s beginning.
Second, we would come up with a narrative container for the game that would make all of the puzzles diegetic (i.e., part of the story itself). The way most puzzle games create diegesis is through some kind of “testing” conceit—"This ancient temple is full of riddles in order to ensure that whoever eventually claims the powerful magical artifact hidden within is worthy of the inconceivable power it bestows!” We also went with a testing conceit, but one that replaced the hackneyed and logically implausible puzzles of the “ancient temple” with a set of challenges rooted in character and emotion.
Obviously, because players have no connection to Mary Shelley, it wouldn’t make sense for her to be testing them. Instead, we decided to establish that the game was designed as a test for Mary Shelley’s son, Percy Florence (we chose to call him simply “Florence” to help differentiate from his father, Percy Bysshe Shelley). In our game, Mary has a secret she wishes to impart to her son, but in order for him to understand it, he needs to know her life story. The puzzles thus serve as a testing mechanism to ensure Florence is following along with the plot.
(As an added bonus, it also creates an explanation for why we can skip to the end of the game and read Mary’s secret any time we want. In the “ancient temple” model, the puzzles are an obstacle standing in the way of some prize. But Mary didn’t create her game as an obstacle to keep Florence from learning the truth; she’s requesting he play through it in order to understand that secret truth. Any good son would obey her last request…as would any good player.)
Our third and final major design directive was both the most difficult to achieve and the most difficult to describe, but we’ll refer to it here as ludonarrative consonance—the phenomenon in which the gameplay always reflects the narrative moment. See, even the most diegetic puzzles built to “test” someone can technically come in any flavor—if all I’m trying to figure out is whether or not you’re clever, I can test you with a math puzzle, or a logic puzzle, or a spatial reasoning puzzle, or a word puzzle…anything! Yet we feel something is off when gameplay doesn’t line up with story. In videogames, this feeling of wrongness is known as ludonarrative dissonance.
So those were our three directives for Mother of Frankenstein: real-world grounding (i.e., cleaving to the facts of Mary’s life wherever possible), diegetic puzzles (i.e., ensuring each puzzle fit with Mary’s central narrative drive to share her secret with her son), and ludonarrative consonance (i.e., puzzles whose mechanics correlated as closely as possible with the themes and beats of the narrative).
To set folks up for the best possible experience, we decided to include a “Start Sheet” in each volume, laying out best practices for playing Mother of Frankenstein. We advised players not to use the “divide and conquer” method standard with puzzle games, because it would make the story much more difficult to follow. We gave a recommended timeline for each volume, dividing it into three or four distinct play sessions to try and minimize burnout. We described the game as a “novella with puzzles,” in order to set expectations about reading. Last but not least, we extolled the many virtues of our hint system.
Of course all the recommendations in the world won’t work unless the gameplay itself encourages players to accept those recommendations. And as these essays are being written before the game has been released, we still don’t know if we succeeded…only you do!
We are aquiver with antici…
…
…pation.