We love stories that grant us control. There's something innately exciting about the prospect, but it's hard to pin down what makes a branching narrative so much fun. Fortunately, we have Human Within, which is one of the worst told stories I've ever experienced! Yes, it's weird to be happy about this, yet those mistakes are the perfect way to understand why and how these kinds of games work.
So, let's break it down, shall we? Naturally, this means there are major spoilers across this entire article.
Branches Need To Make Sense
Now, a story like this has to branch in a way that makes sense. It's about finding a flow of decision-making where the choice and consequence click. You can make informed choices, and crucially, if there's any sort of twist, you can still understand how that choice led to that outcome in hindsight. It adds weight. “Oh gosh, is the character I care about going to make it out of this alright?” or “Will they hate me forever if I do this?”
For Human Within, everything is framed through our heroine, Linh, a digital ghost trying to reconstruct her memories. This is intercut with her sister Nyla trying to find a way to break them out of the clutches of a morally dubious CEO who has them locked up. Linh alternates between helping in the present and reconstructing memories. It's a good premise on paper. The problem is how most choices hold no clear bearing on the situation.
You probably wouldn't wonder, “If I use a blender right now, will the sound bother a cat in the alley behind my house?” However, that's the sort of logic some choices operate under for Human Within.
For instance: If Linh takes to Blake's charm, she might learn that our “nefarious” CEO is actually just desperate to try and save his mother from dementia. So far so good, right? However, learning this truth only results in Blake being honest at the end, with Linh still screwing him over.
You're In Control, Not The Character
What's more, this highlights one of the biggest struggles with telling stories using defined protagonists. We love a protagonist with texture and backstory, but if the characters themselves aren't responding the same way we are, that can cause a lot of undue friction.
It also doesn't matter that her sister, Nyla, who the story anchors as the most “moral” person, is swayed by Blake's pleas for mercy. Linh still chooses to delete herself and corrupt the project out of… spite? Fear? It's not clear and doesn't make sense, which makes every subsequent playthrough feel more like tossing darts at a wall. Given how other seemingly significant decisions are all picked for you, like who you enlist to liberate yourself and Nyla, it's even harder to immerse yourself as Linh. You aren't playing Linh, you're just an underpaid editor to her life's story's subplots.
There is something to be said about character agency in stories - easily enough to warrant its own article. Put simply, the agency should still align with the player themselves. If I'm generous and kind, my character should be too. If I'm a jerk, then so is my character.
Yet Human Within structures itself opaquely around what it's already decided Linh is like as a person. It's unclear how your choices impact the world and how you can actually alter Linh's perspective. You are fundamentally unmoored, rather than empowered and curious. Because it's hard to get people to make choices. We want to be liked, and statistically speaking, it's difficult to get us operating outside our norm, even in a virtual reality. So if we are being reminded of how we and our player character aren't aligned, then we're likely to be even more paranoid.
Telltale's famous first season of The Walking Dead might be a messy, assembled on the fly series of stories, but it gets under your skin. You become Lee Everett, even if just for a few hours, and make snap decisions that can surprise you. Lulling the player in like that, getting them on the same wavelength as the protagonist, is crucial. It's why we become so attached to heroes that can at times be little more than ciphers by comparison to everyone around them.
Intelligence And Observational Skills Should Be Rewarded
Which is what brings us to the greatest flaw in Human Within's storytelling - you're supposed to be playing the smartest person in this story, yet you never feel like it. Nyla is constantly telling you what to do. You have next to no say over how things play out in the “present” sections, only the past. Every interstitial puzzle is laden with being told “No” in dozens of different ways, sometimes unavoidably so before the real solution reveals itself.
It's funny too because this has the double-edged sword of lacking something you wouldn't think is important, but absolutely is: bad decisions. To be fair, clearly the story considers almost every choice that sees Linh agreeing with Blake as a bad choice, but I mean beyond that. It's not possible to get caught before the appointed time.
You will always navigate the same scenarios with little to no variance until it's so close to the end that it doesn't really matter. You can even see in the game's story “tree” in the extras menu that several scenes have no alternate variants. They're set puzzles with fixed solutions. In fairness, this is necessary to an extent, though not even having a minor fail state or something to reinforce the risk of it all robs the story of tension.
This actually circles back to my biggest issue with By Grit Alone. While it doesn't have branching narrative, a horror game also relies on tension. By Grit Alone's mistake was breaking the tension by killing the player too frequently - you can't be scared by repetition like that. You need a balance of some failure, but not too much. Just enough to snap you back, like a rubber band. We as an audience need to know that our choices could blow up in our faces, but also have enough information and certainty to commit anyway. Ideally, the story actually has fairly few avenues of failure, but you still feel the risk because it's there.
Mass Effect 2 is most famous for how it ends with its infamous “Suicide Mission” ending where you can, theoretically, get your entire squad and you killed. It's exceptionally hard to do that. You almost have to be trying to get that bad ending… but it's there. And the possibility gnaws at you. It makes you overthink decisions on your first playthrough. That's what Human Within could've had. The entire story is a hostage situation. The tension is there. It's great on paper. And yet, between decisions that happen in the past and next to no agency in the present, plus little reward for trying to be clever, you never feel it. Which is weird because there's even secondary info feeds we can pick up and look at, yet they're basically b-roll that can be tossed about. Imagine if looking at these altered the current scene somehow.
So our context only grows and informs in scenes with varying amount of importance. It's in the scenes where the plot moves forward that the context has the least amount of meaning or development. They're like a bitter divorced couple having to share a car ride together. And in the case of my first playthrough, there was even less context for some specific narrative flourishes, like how the end credits song is Nyla's favorite and that's why it plays. If anything, that's a narrative beat that could've added an emotional through-line worth keeping on track.
This is why I say it's the worst told story I've heard in quite some time. It's not that the linear series of events can't work, but in the format of a choose your own adventure? It's not my adventure, I don't have a clear choice, and I don't feel like I can contribute. Plus, the fact choices are made by which direction you're looking at key moments, instead of a button press? Not ideal, especially without dedicated eye-tracking support. At times, this meant Human Within decided I made a choice based on what aspect of a room I was staring at before I could turn my head the right way.
The Medium Matters
Despite all these issues, there is one crucial scapegoat for Human Within's stumbling blocks that explains at least some design decisions made: this is an FMV game. That's Full Motion Video, a genre born from CD tech in the 90s that imploded and recently had a big comeback, thanks to how much easier it is to tell a TV quality story on a tight budget. This style of gameplay introduces a whole mess of new challenges, though. Unfortunately, Human Within demonstrates several hiccups you can make with this as well.
The bold choice of fully 360° live action scenes is incredibly impressive… for about five minutes. I understand it's to symbolize how out of body Linh is feeling, but the effect drops off quickly. Then you start to realize that any time you move, the scene struggles to stay centered because it's a full 360° view from a single fixed point. This was undoubtedly very expensive to shoot, and the array of different sets used in the various flashbacks is arguably a greater expenditure of resources than just having branching versions of scenes set in one location. There's a reason your average Wales Interactive game has maybe three major locations total.
This is all the more awkward when Human Within features other sections with those multiple flat feeds you can pick up and look at individually in cyberspace. So despite leaning into the immersive nature of VR, it's actually more jarring when you aren't in cyberspace, as you aren't able to move or interact with anything. There are some fully CGI sections for puzzles as well, which are functionally pointing and clicking. Again, the priorities are a little unorthodox.
Had Human Within relied on flat FMV feeds and an otherwise more traditional computer-generated presentation, they could've used the freedom of VR to throw more information at the player at once. Really make us feel like we're in cyberspace as a digital consciousness. That sounds wild, right?
This could've been really cool, and for what it's worth, I don't begrudge the team behind Human Within. It's apparent this was someone's passion project, and making a great branching story is an immense task at the best of times. They had the right idea here, they just didn't convey it well. Yet in that, we can appreciate what other games get so right about choice. And if that's the consequence of the creative choices made, it's a silver lining in the end.
Human Within is available now on the Meta Quest platform.
