Leaving Blank Spaces in Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn

I've been planning to write a review of Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn for almost a month now, but I always ended up getting stuck on what to say. Flintlock is a good video game; it's a tight 10-15 hour experience that I truly enjoyed.

The more I tried to write down my thoughts though, I realized that what I wanted to say about Flintlock was less concerned with the game part (the hackin', the slashin', and the double jumpin') and more about the world of the game. I kept coming back to the oft-quoted "Make maps, leave blanks" from Dungeon World.

So, instead of my review (it's a solid 4 out of 5 if we must use numbers), here's a video about the world of Flintlock and how it does something I wish more media would do: leave more blank spaces.

Transcript

There’s this pretty famous saying in the tabletop scene talking about how to build worlds. If you’ve listened to an actual play podcast, watched Critical Role, or have played tabletop games, you’ve probably stumble across a phrase from Sage LaTorra’s and Adam Koebel’s Dungeon World: “make maps, leave blank spaces.”

It may sound counter-intuitive at first: the purpose of a map is to remove blanks, to show how one piece connects to another. But, worlds built for storytelling—fictional or not—don’t need to be contiguous. Building a large map of regions, cities, and peoples is usually a good place to start with sweeping tales of fiction. Filling in too much of the connective stuff can make an expansive world feel small.

Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be much mainstream uptake of the concept. There’s inevitably something happening in every corner of Westeros, if that one island from Eternals isn’t onscreen, we should always be asking about it, and every cameo character in a Star Wars thing has a robust Wookiepedia page.

More and more, it feels like the large world media with the biggest budgets is more concerned with filling in six month gaps in timelines or returning to tried and true characters on tried and true planets in tried and true particular cantinas. And honestly, I think that’s why there are so many grumpy fans.

The trick is to stop with a loose map or outline. Leave large blank spaces for things to happen organically. The possibility of something happening elsewhere does two things to a reader or player: makes a world feel grander than it probably is, and injects suspense into the narrative.

It’s impossible to know what the people in that faraway land believe or what could happen over that hill. And what goes for more than just literal maps: it’s just as valid for histories, cultures, and even characters. Show, don’t tell, but don’t show me everything.

I’ve been enamored recently by Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, a Souls-lite game made by A44 taking place in a flintlock-fantasy world. Beyond the Napoleonic uniforms and interesting take on Souls-like gameplay, what keeps me thinking about Flintlock weeks after I finished it, is that it's practically a mater class on making maps and leaving spaces.

In Flintlock, you play as Nor Vanek, a sapper or explosives expert, ten years into her service at Dawn. Dawn is a massive city protected on one side by precise stone walls mimicking 18th century Star forts, and on the other by a Seussian mountain. Ten years ago, a massive door in the mountain (fabled to be the door between the realms of the living and the dead) was opened, and an invasion of zombies poured out of the heart of Dawn.

For ten years, the Coalition has been laying siege to the metropolis of Dawn, holding the invasion of the dead back.

Especially in the early hours of Flintlock, you don’t know what is in that trench or past that doorway. Hopping into a world in media res, is a great way to get the action started, but you can get bogged down quickly if you layer on the proper nouns. Very rarely do I leave a game world with a laundry list of questions about cosmology, culture, or literal borders. And that’s what makes Flintlock feel so unique.

Throughout the game, you’ll visit three main places: The Kneeling Peaks, Wanderer’s Rest, and Dawn; the snowy mountains, the sandy desert, and the modern, decayed metropolis, respectively. There are maps of each region that help you navigate, but travel between regions requires talking to your camp of companions, packing up, and traveling for weeks.

From the player’s point of view, there’s not a world map; how these places connect, either physically, politically, or culturally can only be inferred. There are some oblique references to how the Judges of the Peaks feel about the Coalition, but there’s never an explicit explanation of what the Coalition actually is. Coalition of what? Nations? People? True Believers? That’s a huge blank space that leaves so much open to possibility.

Flintlock is a 10-15 hour game, spent in three(ish) distinct open zones. Each of those places feels rich with culture, but just like Nor, you’re an outsider on a mission. Every city, village, and coffee shop is laden with stuff that just begs the question “why?” For a shorter game, constrained by the budget of independent development, this world feels bigger and more mysterious than most AAA titles. The writing and world design are a subtle magic trick, somehow making the nine-armed, faceless being at the center of every coffee shop feel normal.

Flintlock doesn’t going out of its way to reveal its world or history. At most, you can infer things from item descriptions or the few scraps of paper you pick up in your travels. There’s hints of Old Magic, of Sorcerers, and of a people who once worshipped the Gods you’re tasked with defeating, but no longer do. But there’s never a why or how.

Your companion throughout the game is Enki, one of the handful of Old Gods. He fills in pieces of the past here and there, but always on a small scale: lending a feather to an astronomer or a family in the desert. It appears that the machinations of man are insignificant to the gods.

You won’t find a grand explanation of how the people lost their faith or who created the Coalition. You barely understand who the gods you’ve killed are, let alone what they’re the God of. Even by the end of the game, there are more mysteries than answers, more blank spaces never to be filled in. Take it from a guy with a game lore podcast: oftentimes the best worlds are built with a few points of interest and nothing but blank spaces between them.

Thanks for watching. See you next time.