NARRATIVE
Inside Caroline Marchal’s ambitions for interactive narrative at Interior/Night
The name of Caroline Marchal’s studio is a real scene-setter. In 2016, when Marchal first decided to go solo after nearly two decades at Quantic Dream and Sony, she called on ex-colleague Steve Kniebihly for help picking a name, and he suggested ‘Interior/Night’. “I immediately thought it was perfect,” she says. “It evoked the warm atmosphere of a lit-up cabin at night, in the forest. A place where you can gather with your friends to tell stories.” Of course, it evokes something else too: the screenwriting convention for quickly establishing a scene. At a time when videogames’ influence on TV and film have never been greater, Marchal and Interior/Night are seeking to bring the two closer together, but from the opposite direction.
As Dusk Falls, its debut, charged you with steering an ensemble cast rather than one player character. “That was a result of looking at TV series,” Marchal says. “I think games in general are closer to TV than film, because of the scope of the stories. It’s usual for a TV show to have multiple points of view.” And the game wasn’t only structured like a season of TV, it was plotted like one, using the writers’ room model, with Marchal in the role of showrunner, all collaborating to “break the big narrative problems, such as ‘What is this character about’?”
In mimicking the processes of TV, Marchal aims to make narrative games more approachable to people who’d never think of themselves as players. “The games audience, it’s huge, but it’s still not entirely mainstream,” she says. “The biggest IPs – the great big games that are in the top-ten charts year after year – they’re actually catering for quite a small audience, when you think about it.” With Phil Spencer publicly fretting that console games might be scraping the ceiling of their addressable audience, no wonder Xbox signed up to publish As Dusk Falls, after Interior/Night’s initial deal with Sega fell through in 2019.
In mimicking the processes of TV, Marchal aims to make narrative games more approachable
For Marchal, though, this mission stretches back to her Quantic Dream days. She remembers hearing from Heavy Rain players that it had inspired their partner to pick up a controller for the first time. “But then every [character] dies, because they can’t do the quick-time events, and don’t know all the buttons.” It’s far from the only barrier put up by the game industry, Marchal argues, from the cost of owning a console to the UX of services such as Steam.
