10 Annoying Narrative Video Game Clichés That Need To Die

2. Amnesia

Game characters tend to eat a lot of unidentified mushroom power-ups. They also have an inclination towards regular occurrences of severe head trauma, and also often find themselves at the business end of a wizard's gnarled staff, fizzing with purple magic. All of which goes some way to help explain why there are more instances of absolute mind-deleting amnesia in the gaming world than there are anywhere else. There has to be a reason, doesn't there? Why else would those creative types at game studios insist on bashing our skulls in with the same threadbare scene-setting ploy, over and over again? Perhaps they think their audience suffers from the same affliction and won't notice that they are using yet another damn amnesia shortcut. Often it's used as a direct narrative kickstarter - the ghastly "Who am I? Where am I? And why am I wearing this poncy necklace... and why is it glowing?" storytelling convention which provides the designer with a fresh, clean canvas on which to plaster whatever personality they see fit. You and I now know that that mysterious amulet our lad is wearing will inevitably turn out to be the magical artifact that saves the world from total annihilation when the moons align above the forests of (have you drifted off to sleep yet? You're not alone) blah blah fantasy rubbish blah. But because our hero fell out of the womb and landed head first on a hard stone floor as a baby, he's now as bewildered as a dog being shown a card trick, and will have to figure all of that out on his own. All the while questing heartily to try to rediscover who he really is and why his mom scarpered as soon as he was born. This scenario, chaps, has been spat up by far too many developers for too many years. Occasionally it's used to a smaller degree to try to sidestep any questions as to why the veteran hero of the fifth sequel in a franchise still needs to wade through a tutorial about how to use his night-vision goggles. Again. "Sam, you're getting old, let's run through this again to make sure you're still on point, ok?". Whatever the justification, any form of forced amnesia within a storyline is vacuous, cheeky and lazy.