Since this week is the first few days of the fall of the year, many gamers are looking for new, cozy titles to play as the days shorten and Halloween approaches, and the newly released Beacon Pines fits well into this category. Beacon Pines Created by Matt Meyer, Brent Calhoun and Ilse Harting of Hiding Spot Games, it tells the story of an anthropomorphic deer and his group of friends dealing with mysterious events in their hometown. Unlike the prototype for the game, which was a rhythm-based RPG fighter, Beacon Pines is instead completely combat-free and relies on branching storylines.
Beacon Pines acts as a magical storybook where players can explore the events surrounding the titular city and the group of characters within it as they learn about the overarching mystery, the disappearance of Luka’s mother, and more. This isn’t a one-off story, though, as each path has its own choices, consequences, and things to discover along the way, including the game’s most important item: charms. Game Rant spoke to Meyer and Harting of Hiding Spot Games about the challenges of creating an indie game with branching stories that complement the main plot while creating different endings.
How Beacon Pines’ Story-Driven Approach Works
In Beacon PinesCharms are words that players can use to change the meaning and effects of a sentence, be it during a conversation or the description of what’s going on, and these can lead to multiple endings based on the consequences of a particular choice. Playing a particular branch not only allows players to learn more about some of the characters and the eerie machinations behind the nefarious happenings in Beacon Pinesbut also gain access to new charms that could open up other possibilities later on.
Still, Beacon PinesThe story isn’t necessarily linear, in the sense that players can use a feature called the Chronicle, which allows them to go back to any branching point of the story and replay it with different charms. This can make for a more complete experience, as going back to unexplored branches may very well hold the key to even more discoveries, which ties in well with the game’s multiple endings. In addition, different charms can affect the relationship between: Pines’ beacon sympathetic main character and other characters, opening up even more options, as Meyer noted.
“One of the decisions along the way was” Does playing a charm (we call the words charms) only change the conversation you have or the relationship with the characters, whether you are on good terms with them or if they hate you ? Or, what we ended up doing, there are fewer of these decision points where you play a charm, but they completely change the story? “It’s kind of a fun appeal, the idea that a single word completely changes everything from that point to To.”
As regards Beacon Pines‘ multiple endings, they can vary drastically and change the experience significantly as some of them can be reached quite early in the game. Others take players in different directions or can even lead to a character’s untimely demise or the natural ending of their arc, but Meyer confirmed that there is only one canonical ending where the Beacon Pines credits are rolled. This does not mean that the other endings are less valuable than the canonical ones, and instead they are all smaller parts of the whole.
“We only throw credits on one of the endings. It’s the ending that we think has our ideal, canonical ending, but the game has a lot of endings. It’s the bane of trying to write a branching story. If you really wanted to design a story, you could think of it like, “Well, there’s a direction I want to take this story, not ten,” but we tried to embrace that and squeeze as much juice out as possible and say, “Every branch is the best version we can make of that branch, so let’s write it as the canonical version of its own little story path.”
Having multiple endings means that each of them makes the story richer in terms of context and perspectives, making the Chronicle all the more necessary to jump back and forth between different chapters. According to Meyer, the Chronicle became much clearer and easier to handle when the group used a diagram Harting created to keep track of the branching stories, all of which led to an appropriate conclusion. Because of the cute aesthetic and general creepiness of the story, the developers of Hiding Spot Games describe: Beacon Pines as “Winnie the Pooh meets Weird stuff,” and considering how creepy the atmosphere can be, it’s just right.
Beacon Pines is now available on PC, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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