The interactive fiction by Zach Sanford, recently launched as an extended edition on the Playstation Network and Xbox One, offers players a different kind of subtle storytelling.

Three Fourths Home is a piece of interactive fiction that showcases how developers are capable of telling intimate, emotional stories in unique ways. Game makers have plenty of tools to work with, including player input, sound, and visual style.

Developed by Zach Sanford, Three Fourths Home takes place as a long car ride through Nebraska, set against an emotional conversation between Kelly and her struggling family. It’s a visual novel of sorts with a branching narrative that takes pride in its subtle gameplay and art design. The story, with its excellent writing and nuanced characters, is the focus here, but Sanford uses other tools to tell it. The game sports a simple, but effective, black-and-white aesthetic that complements its somber tone. Its ambient sound -- windmills, rain, sirens, and thunder -- also creates an unsettling atmosphere.

Three Fourths Home explores how difficult it is for people to keep moving onward, forgetting their past, and facing their demons. In order to progress through the game's conversations, you need to continue driving forward. The second you let go, everything decelerates into slow motion. Your dialogue options vanish, the stormy weather is at a standstill, and even the birds hastily flying overhead slow down.

The player can't reach the finish line by simply doing nothing. You have to keep pushing through by keeping your foot on the pedal and overcoming your obstacles, no matter how challenging they might be.

Three Fourths Home’s Genesis

Sanford actually came up with the idea for Three Fourths Home from his own similar experiences and a bit of strange luck.

“I started working on Three Fourths Home shortly after going through an experience not unlike the game’s protagonist, Kelly: I had to move back to Nebraska after having lived elsewhere in the seven years since I’d finished up high school,” Sanford shared with me. “So a fair bit of the groundwork for the story was bits pulled from my own life. The characters and their specific experiences are more of a mishmash of different people in my immediate and extended family.”

After moving back to Omaha, Sanford lost his PC containing his progress on an existing game, and rather than rewrite his old project from scratch, he decided to try something new. “I wanted to work on something smaller that I could finish in a few months. Three Fourths Home was the idea that I landed on.”

Despite its short length (players can complete it in about two hours), Sanford still had to overcome a slew of obstacles during Three Fourths Home’s development. In particular, he had to figure out the best way to execute an interactive story. How do you deliver a focused narrative while also making the player feel like an active participant? On the other hand, Sanford didn’t want to constantly bombard players with dialogue choices. Instead, he knew he had to come up with a clever way to complement Three Fourths Home’s writing with its gameplay.

“I think the biggest challenge of interactive storytelling is right there in the name – making the story something that is interactive in a way that feels natural,” says Sanford. “That doesn’t necessarily mean having sprawling dialogue trees with a million different outcomes (though it certainly can). The more interesting challenge, to me, is tying the storytelling into the actual interaction that enhances both aspects. For Three Fourths Home, marrying the forward momentum of driving a car to themes in the story (inevitability, people and life circumstance changing over time, etcetera) was an attempt at finding an interesting way to do that.”

Sanford adds, “I’ve never written a movie or TV show, so I’m definitely not the most qualified person to make the comparison, but I imagine that the issue of player input is the biggest (and most obvious) difference between the mediums. Not that writing for one or the other is inherently ‘easier’ each just requires a different approach due to the way that the narrative is presented and consumed.”

Since Three Fourths Home is a visual novel, Sanford had to nail the way the game looks. Visual novels almost always heavily rely on aesthetic, especially since they employ simplistic mechanics. The popular Danganronpa series is a great example. The story is about a group of teenagers forced to kill each other, Battle Royale-style, in order to survive. Its art style is colorful and far from subtle. This works well with the constant murders, violence, and gore you’ll be witnessing in these games.

Three Fourths Home is the total opposite, sporting a soft monochromatic art style with moving backdrops. Sanford decided on this design for two main reasons.

“The art design came about fairly early on in development, with one eye to the tone of the story that I was going to tell,” Sanford says. "The starkness of the visuals was something that I hoped would communicate the relatively dire straits that Kelly and her family find themselves in. That said, the simplicity of the design was also a concession to the fact that I was writing, coding, and designing the game all on my own (while my brother provided the soundtrack).”

Where Can These Games Go Next?

In the past few years, we have seen a growing number of titles like Three Fourths Home. Is it just a sign that the game industry is naturally maturing with the types of stories it wants to tell and how it wants to tell them?

Or is the explanation a bit simpler? Is it just because we have more independent developers and their games than ever before, and they're the ones willing to tell their stories differently? The indie sector does allow for experimentation.

“I think it’s the combination of a lot of things,” says Sanford, giving his own reason for this increase. “The maturation of the medium itself (whatever that actually means), sure, but emotionally mature games are hardly new. We’re also in this time filled with designers who grew up in the 80s and 90s who’ve never been in a world without video games. So why wouldn’t they try to tell stories in different ways?”

The wider accessibility of game creation tools like Twine and Game Maker has also played a big part. “Anyone can stay up until 3 am between shifts and make something,” Sanford says. “There’s still some barrier to entry in regards to coding and asset creation and whatnot, but most of what I know I’ve learned from figuring out what I need to know and just Googling it. The knowledge is there for anyone looking for it.”

Sanford is most interested and excited about how developers continue to deal with, and integrate both the gameplay and narrative aspects of a title. “I don’t think there’s really an endgame as far as ‘the perfect marriage of story and mechanics,’ as that’s going to be something different for each narrative. But it’ll be interesting seeing where developers take it.”

Just as last year brought us Dontnod's Life is Strange and Sam Barlow's Her Story, you can expect2016 to also bring in a range of innovative games and stories for players to explore. As for Sanford, he’s currently busy working on his next projectTo Azimuth, an adventure game about two siblings searching for their missing brother, as well as an alien abduction. Like Three Fourths Home, we can expect Azimuth’s story to take center stage.

Alex is a freelance writer who thinks Breaking Bad is the best show ever made, and that The Sopranos is horribly overrated. Yell at him on Twitter: @RParampampam.