Small Worlds. When silent storytelling is the main character of a story.
“There is too much noise.”
That’s how Small Worlds starts. There is not much to do in this game, the character is in this abandoned spaceship and they just told us that there is too much noise, that’s all we know and all we can do is explore.
Very quickly we find ourselves transported in a whole new area, there are four of them in total and each one tells a little bit of the story, a little bit of why there is too much noise in the character’s mind. The storytelling is silent, you have to understand what’s going on and no one will explain anything to you.
The way the game works is easy. You start on a very close-up camera on the character and the more you explore the more the camera zooms out until you find a little cube that will send you back to the spaceship. The interesting part is the environment. It tells the story of why this character is alone in this spaceship and why there is too much noise in their brain. Society collapsed, they’re the only survivor.
You first see a snowy place, you start exploring it. The more it zooms out the more you start to think about it. Why is there a world map full of red dots? Why are there missiles, unused? Are those graves? But then you get the cube and you go back to the ship.
Then you find yourself in a city, it looks empty. The zoom-out mechanic comes back again and there is water, clean water, and you follow it until you reach the bottom part of the city, and you see green. Something corrupted the water, probably everybody died. You find the cube, you move on.
The third scenario looks like something piercing through Earth, destroying everything around it. To reach the cube you will need to climb all the destroyed pieces of land and reach the top.
And then the last world, the cause of all of the distress. The character is inside the belly of the beast. The thing that started all of these, the doom of humanity.
After collecting all the cubes the character can reach the end of their journey, silence. A journey into the sun.
Now, that’s the way I see it. A character that couldn’t bear the idea of being the only survivor after humanity was long gone. The voices inside their head were too loud and they chose to end it. The survivor’s guilt was too much to handle.
However, the beauty of this game is how different people see different stories. The environment is the protagonist, no texts or notes to take to get a deeper meaning. All you understand is through the environment and everyone’s opinion is different. You can see a madman that tried to experiment on humanity, you can see someone that was finally able to reach earth but it was too late to save it or you can see what I see, someone that saw everything in real life and it became too much to handle all alone. The zoom-out mechanic is all about the thoughts becoming too much for someone so small in those big worlds.
The music is phenomenal too, it gives you that melancholic feeling, something went wrong and that’s nothing you can do.
Small Worlds is a small game with so much to tell and everyone should play it at least once in their life.
“Silence.”
