Among the many books I’ve read and games I’ve played, I find myself wanting to continue returning to three fictional worlds time and time again: A House of Many Doors, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Peter and the Starcatchers. I find these three choices ironic considering their stark tonal differences. Despite that, what keeps me coming back is their immersive world-building and storytelling.
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The first of these three examples, A House of Many Doors by Pixel Trickery, is a narrative-heavy horror adventure game. The setting is the titular “House”, a parasite dimension that takes people, towns, and sometimes gods from other realms to occupy large, city-sized “Rooms”. There’s no sky, no sun, only darkness, walls, and locked doors that lead further into the “House”. The primary game loop features exploration and choose-your-own-adventure-style story elements as your character traverses the Rooms. The game goes to painstaking lengths to flesh out every corner of its twisted world. Beyond the prose that describes every Room, the eerie background visuals, and background music add a distinct level of unease and place to each setting.
What I find especially interesting about A House of Many Doors’ world-building is the cohesion it can maintain across its many Rooms, which range from horrific walls made of meat and faces to beautiful dreamscapes, literally made out of dreams. The prose, art, sound design, music composition, and plot maintain a sense of unease while still leaving space for each Room to have a distinct identity. This works splendidly with the game’s central loop of exploration and keeps everything feeling connected but not repetitive.
The game is inspired by Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, which is made obvious as you play, though the originality of A House of Many Doors shines in its Rooms’ intricate societies and cities, all real and authentic in the context of the game. It is clear that each Room has a longstanding history that reaches beyond the player’s time there. This also helps to ground the game’s cosmic horror. With a solid foundation and world the player can understand, the horror becomes that much more real and effective. There is a strong sense of fear, wonder, and sublime dread when exploring the House that keeps me wanting to return and discover it all over again.
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To pivot in a completely different direction, let’s dive into my experience with Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Despite the game only coming out in 2017, the recent sequel has given me a strange nostalgia for Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule. Now, I am kinda embarrassed to say that during my first playthrough, I mostly skipped through dialogue and neglected to read journals, diaries, and really most text that would give backstory. I blame this entirely on the game’s world– I wanted to go out and live it rather than read about it! In my eyes this is a fantastic example of effective narrative design as the story itself was baked into the world, working hand-in-hand with the text so that all players could enjoy it.
There is one moment that plays on repeat when I think about this game. It was early on, I was a simple bare-chested Link doing my best with a rusty sword and 3 apples I found on the ground. I was walking along a lake when I looked up into the night sky and saw a massive dragon. The game hadn’t told me about any dragon, and I certainly wasn’t expecting one. I was awestruck and just watched the dragon dip behind a mountain, completely ignoring my presence and continuing to go about its business.
At the time, all I could think was “Big dragon! Big dragon! Can I see the dragon again?” but after reflecting on it, that moment solidified that the world was far, far bigger than myself. As I continued into the game, the expansive villages, small camp settlements tucked away in the woods, and roaming legendary beasts continued to instill this feeling that, even though I was playing a legendary hero, I was only a small piece in a kingdom that had so much going on. The world was vibrant and alive. Every corner had some mystery waiting to be uncovered, whether that was a large dragon flying gracefully through the night or a little campfire and tent on a snowy mountain.
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To round out this reflection, I’m going to cater to my inner child and discuss my favorite book from middle school, Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry’s Peter and the Starcatchers. The book acts as a prequel to the events of the novel Peter and Wendy, filled with swashbuckling, fairies, and adventure. Reading it as a child, it was not the characters who drew me in, rather the ideas of the world that the authors made resonated with me.
To briefly summarize, there is a secret society of “Starcatchers” who are essentially secret agents working for the Queen of England. It’s their job to find and guard “starstuff”— magical dust created from fallen stars. The authors use starstuff to explain all of the supernatural happenings in Neverland in the original story. Peter is able to fly and stay a boy forever, fish turn into mermaids, birds become fairies, a ship can soar through the air, and a pocket watch becomes so loud it can be heard in the gut of a crocodile. In later novels, the authors introduce characters who are half shadows, elaborate kingdoms with power-hungry leaders greedy for starstuff, and living skeletons. It is one of the many worlds set up in such a way that all the supernatural occurrences happen outside of the public eye, only seen by Starcatchers and anyone else tangled up in their dealings.
Stories like those always stuck with me as a kid because I always wanted to be one of those swashbuckling Starcatchers fighting pirates, living shadows, and other enchanted enemies to protect something that fell from the heavens. The worldbuilding is grounded within itself, yet captures a recklessly wild imagination that still resonates with me as an adult. Something interesting about this particular story is that it is based on existing content, but rather than rehashing it, it reimagines it through a new lens, crafting new explanations for everything, and honestly, by the end of the line of books, it becomes more or less a sort of fanfiction that rewrites the original story. This time instead of ambiguous magic being the reason behind everything, it’s pirate secret agents who harness the powers of the stars.