Cinematics and cutscenes are commonly employed as vehicles for storytelling in games, often used to convey the spectacle behind special emotions and epic moments that simple gameplay is not able to. Some games, however, do not use cutscenes at all, relying exclusively on environmental storytelling instead.
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Carvings on walls, audio logs in abandoned facilities, long forgotten tomes in caves, and other hand-placed objects in the world tell the stories the developers want to convey in an immersive, non-intrusive way. Players feel like they are unearthing a story with their own efforts, one discovery at a time.
Subnautica
Stories Buried in the Deep Sea
Subnautica is an underwater survival base-building game that relies almost entirely on environmental storytelling to gradually reveal the hidden depths of the ocean, without relying on cutscenes at all. As a result, players are free to explore the depths of the oceans to slowly uncover the truth about the new world they find themselves in, the dangers it contains, and the opportunities that lie deep beneath the waves.
After the opening sequence, there are no cutscenes for exposition. The entire story is told through lost recordings and journal entries found in abandoned life pods, crashed ships, and secret underground facilities spread out across the seabed.
Outward
Lore Earned Through Exploration
Outward is an indie open-world game with rich lore, an expansive setting, and not a single cutscene to its name. The main story is mostly experienced through dialogue with NPCs in the major hubs like Cierzo, Berg, Levant, Monsoon, and New Sirocco.
Lore about enemies, factions, magic, and politics is there for players to discover if they look hard enough, but it isn’t force-fed to them through linear narrative sequences. The lack of traditional quest markers encourages exploration, however, and is what makes discovering new things so rewarding in Outward.
Project Zomboid
A World Ending Quietly in the Background
Project Zomboid is an open-world isometric game where players are tasked with surviving a zombie apocalypse using any means necessary. There are no quests or missions in the game that deal directly with the story; the players’ main concern is ensuring their own survival, and finding out tidbits about how the rest of the world is doing is entirely optional. As a result, most do not pay attention to the hints the game drops about what is going on outside the Exclusion Zone.
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For players who like to decipher a story themselves, these open-world games keep their narratives ambiguous, offering only cryptic clues as a guide.
Players who are curious, however, can discover what is happening to the rest of the world as the zombie apocalypse spreads. With scattered info in the form of radio logs, television programs, and old magazines, it is possible to piece together some of the story. The environmental storytelling is masterfully done, and without a single cutscene to boot.
Valheim
Norse Myths Etched into Stone
Valheim drops players into a harsh, unforgiving procedurally generated land inspired by Norse mythology, where almost all the storytelling is conveyed through the world itself. After a small introductory sequence where players are told that they are warriors from Midgard who have been given a life in Valheim to defeat Odin’s foes, the Forsaken, no more information is provided, leaving players to piece together the rest by themselves.
Valheim’s deeper lore is told through rune stones, large magical rocks scattered across Valheim by Odin to guide his warriors towards the Forsaken. The engravings on the rune stones tell the story of previous warriors sent by Odin to kill the Forsaken, clues about treasures, descriptions of vague dreams, folk tales, declarations of heroes, and a lot more.
Kenshi
A World That Changes With Every Choice
Kenshi is an open-world RPG with deep lore that is not explained through cutscenes or traditional narrative elements, but rather through exploration and environmental storytelling. Players uncover the truth of the world around them by talking to NPCs, exploring abandoned cities, liberating slave camps, and discovering forgotten locations.
What makes Kenshi’s story stand out is that it isn’t all about the past; it evolves during a playthrough as well. As players side with factions to help them claim a region for their own, the place changes, new forces move in, new conflicts arise, and new stories unfold in real time.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim
The Land of the Nords Holds Many Secrets
Skyrim tells its story through NPC dialogue, books, and the physical layout of the world itself rather than grandiose cinematic cutscenes. From ancient Nordic ruins to dwemer caves to dragon burial mounds, the world of Skyrim is not just an empty expanse of snow and tundra, but a living, breathing land that bears the footprints of those who came before, and displays it proudly for anyone who wants to go looking.
Hundreds of books, letters, journals, and notes are scattered throughout the libraries of Skyrim, telling the past and present reality of Tamriel in bits and pieces that players can piece together to understand the full picture. Players interested in learning more about the deep lore of The Elder Scrolls franchise can spend hundreds of hours exploring the world of Skyrim and still come up with new things to find.
While there are scripted sequences in Skyrim, like the cart ride at the very start of the game and the dialogue with Jarl Balgruuf when the dragon attacks the western watchtower, they are not, strictly speaking, cutscenes.
Elite Dangerous
A Living Milky Way Shaped By Players
Elite Dangerous offers players a 1:1 procedurally generated recreation of the Milky Way galaxy, complete with deep background lore about humanity’s expansion into the cosmos, the conflicts between various political entities like the Federation and the Alliance, and major alien threats like the Thargoids. Elite Dangerous is a sandbox game that does not have any quests or missions, leaving players free to choose their path and what they want to do instead of giving them a linear plot to follow that dictates what they do. Those who want to discover its lore will have to go looking.
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In addition to the larger events happening in the Milky Way, the world of Elite Dangerous evolves in real-time. Each action a player takes impacts something or someone in a meaningful way. Attacking a faction’s facility in a star system reduces the amount of influence that faction has in that system, and if that influence gets low enough, it is very possible that the faction will be kicked out of the system entirely. Similarly, every mission completed for a faction increases that faction’s influence, meaning players can (and do) help factions become the ruling force in a star system with their actions.
Outer Wilds
A Solar System Built on Questions
Outer Wilds is a rare example of a game where the entire narrative is told through its environment. There are no cutscenes explaining what is happening, nor any handholding or quest markers to tell players where to go and what to look for. Outer Wilds throws players into a solar system trapped in a 22-minute time loop, where players have to use the limited time they have before the world ends to explore the system and discover its secrets one step at a time to uncover the full mystery and reach the finish line.
Every time the time loop ends, players end up right back at the start, the world resets itself, and the only thing that is changed is what the players discovered in their previous loops. Piecing together clues from multiple loops slowly reveals the full picture. Since the clues can be acquired in any order, each playthrough is unique for every player, depending on which order they found the clues.
Elden Ring
A Masterclass in Environmental Storytelling
Elden Ring’s lore was conceived with the help of the legendary author George R. R. Martin, and the majority of it is told through the fragmented storytelling method. Bits and pieces of lore are found throughout the massive open-world seemingly without rhyme or reason. Crucial pieces of information that are massively important to get the full picture of Elden Ring’s mythos are hidden in item descriptions, cryptic NPC dialogue, and environmental details that are so easy to miss that it has taken the collective efforts of the entire community to discover some secrets.
It is up to the players to piece this information together one fragment at a time, and slowly but surely gain understanding about what is truly going on in the Lands Between, the truth behind the struggle to become the Elden Lord, the connection between the NPCs scattered across the world, and the motives of the various factions and religious orders that call the place home. Trying to understand the lore of Elden Ring can be an exercise in frustration, but the reward when it all comes together, and players finally understand the connection between seemingly random events and bits of dialogue heard in different corners of the world, is truly exquisite.
Most major bosses in Elden Ring have a minor cutscene associated with them. However, since 99% of the storytelling is done through environmental storytelling, we’ve decided that the game deserves a spot on this list.
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