I’m currently working on a feature I’ve been planning to implement since the start of development, initially just because I thought it would be funny: Sad Sack Mode. 

The feature is a special setting that can be toggled and causes the protagonist, Doyle, to fail every skill check he attempts regardless of his chances of success. Because of the fail-forward design, you can still complete the game while failing every check. Ever since I moved away from a death mechanic and instead adopted the fail-foward model, I've been curious about being able to fully explore how it would work when pushed to an extreme. More importantly, though, the idea of stumbling ahead while sustaining countless injuries and screwing up everything you do like some kind of emotionally fragile dark fantasy Mr. Bean is very funny to me.

The more I thought about it, I eventually decided that it could actually be an interesting feature not just as a joke, but as a way of consciously controlling your experience of the narrative. With that in mind, I decided Sad Sack Mode would need a companion setting, Hotshot Mode, which would allow Doyle pass every check regardless of the odds. Truly the duality of man.

Both of these settings would undercut most of the core mechanics, though. As a way of preventing players from unintentionally ruining their initial experience, I’ve locked them behind the first full completion of the game. This way, subsequent playthroughs (to get a different ending, for example) could be controlled more precisely, or if there were checks that went one way in your original playthrough, you could ensure that you see the other outcome without having to rely on randomness. Or, you know, you could just use Sad Sack Mode as a joke.

Hopefully these unlockable settings, along with achievements (which I’ll get into in a later post), will offer some variation and new goals for replayability. There is randomness in the game, after all, but one of the core intentions in the design is for the player to drive the narrative, not random chance. It only makes sense for subsequent playthroughs to allow that level of control even in the more minute details.