As I began playing Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald, I eagerly waited in the lobby ready to begin my journey. A guiding voice then led me backstage, encouraging me to help out while I waited. I immersed myself in the controls of the game, pulling levers, pressing buttons, and releasing tigers at the instructions of my guide (Dr. Langeskov). However, about halfway through the game, I realized I no longer trusted the narrator. He had become increasingly frantic, his instructions more desperate and contradictory, and what had initially felt like a helpful guide now felt like someone barely holding the game together. Yet despite this growing distrust, I kept following his orders. I looked for opportunities to ignore him, to break away from the path he had laid out for me, but every attempt ultimately led me back to doing exactly what he asked. The more suspicious I became of his authority, the more aware I became of my dependence on it. What unsettled me was not that I couldn’t determine the correct action, but rather that I could no longer determine whether the person telling me what to do deserved to be believed in the first place.
In most games, uncertainty is temporary. You begin weak, confused, and constrained, but the promise underlying the experience is that mastery will eventually arrive. Learn the controls, understand the rules, study the systems long enough, and the legibility of the game world will become clear. Even difficult choices often carry the assumption that there is a correct path hidden somewhere beneath the surface: some strategy to optimize, moral outcome to uncover, or truth waiting to be pieced together. Agency, in this design philosophy, is tied to knowledge. The more clearly a player understands the world, the more meaningfully they can act within it. However, games built around unreliable narration disrupt this promise in a more fundamental way. They do not simply hide information from the player or make mastery difficult to achieve; they destabilize the very systems players rely on to interpret the world in the first place. In these games, uncertainty is no longer a temporary obstacle on the path toward understanding, for it becomes a structural component of the game itself. The player cannot fully trust the voices guiding them, the frameworks organizing their decisions, or even the assumptions through which they interpret reality. Agency therefore stops functioning as a reward for mastery and begins to feel more like an act of judgment under conditions of incomplete understanding that only becomes more ambiguous.
Incomplete information alone does not necessarily undermine the traditional fantasy of player control. Many games withhold information strategically while still preserving the assumption that the world itself is coherent and ultimately knowable. A mystery game may obscure clues, but players still trust that enough investigation will reveal the truth. The player may temporarily lack knowledge, yet they still believe that mastery is possible. Unreliable narration changes the nature of this uncertainty entirely. Rather than simply preventing access to information, it attacks the player’s confidence in the structures through which information is presented and understood. It is this tactic that makes the narrator in Slay the Princess so unsettling. At first, the narrator appears to fulfill a familiar role: orienting the player, explaining the stakes, and providing a framework through which the world can be interpreted (Slay the Princess). The task itself sounds straightforward. A princess sits imprisoned in a cabin, and the narrator insists that killing her is both necessary and morally obvious. But the stability of this framework quickly begins to collapse. The princess shifts personalities and forms across different loops of the game, dialogue contradicts itself, and the narrator grows increasingly defensive whenever the player questions his authority (Slay the Princess). The player is no longer simply trying to determine what action to take. Instead, they are forced to evaluate whether the interpretive lens through which the game is presenting reality can itself be trusted.
Games intentionally shape the view your character has of the world. And by restricting this point of view, players are prevented from fully verifying their interpretations of the world around them. Instead, they are forced to make do with the perspective they are given and adjust as they familiarize themselves with the world. As Nagel emphasizes, the issue is not simply that players lack access to certain facts, but that they lack access to each other’s subjective realities (Nagel). He argues that conscious experience is inherently tied to a specific and inherently limited point of view; no matter how much we learn about a bat’s biology and behavior, we as humans can never fully understand what it is like to truly be a bat because a bat’s experience is bounded to a perspective that we cannot inhabit. Consciousness therefore is built around a subjective character that by nature can never be fully externally verified. BOKURA: Planet turns this philosophical dilemma into a core game mechanic. The game begins with two players embarking on a shared journey, working together to navigate a shared set of puzzles in an unfamiliar world (BOKURA: Planet). However, this assumption of shared experience and perspective begins to fracture as the storyline continues. Objects begin to appear differently to each player, environments begin to carry different meanings, and eventually, the players’ goals begin to diverge and contradict each other. In this setup, neither player possesses a privileged perspective from which this conflict can be resolved. Unlike traditional cooperative games where communication and progression through the game gradually produce a clearer understanding of the system, communication BOKURA: Planet reveals the limits of communication itself. Each player can describe their experience to the other, but there is no way to directly access or verify the other’s reality. This divergence fractures the meaning of truth in the game. Truth does not disappear, but the players lose the ability to fully confirm whether their interpretation of the world is correct. Decisions still must be made and trust must be established between the players in order to progress through the game, but players must accept that their actions can no longer be grounded in complete understanding. Player agency therefore shifts away from mastery of a knowable system to a more uncomfortable task of acting under permanent uncertainty. Nagel argues that subjective experience is inseparable from perspective, and BOKURA: Planet demonstrates what happens when a game refuses to grant players perspective on a world that can never be completely verified. Players are no longer simply deciding how to act, for they also have to decide whose version of reality to act upon.
If limited perspective prevents players from fully verifying their interpretations of the world, unreliable narration goes one step further by destabilizing the foundational authority structures that help players interpret the world at all. Narration is a universal method for guiding consumers through media, and the default is for narration to be interpreted as a ground truth. Dr. Langeskov, the Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald uses this default trust in the narrator to its advantage. The narrator begins as a familiar faceless voice. His instructive and authoritative voice guides the player and the player blindly obliges (Dr. Langeskov). But as he grows increasingly panicked and scattered, the player’s interpretation of his instructions changes. As I progressed through the game, I found myself looking for opportunities to disobey him, not because I had a clear alternative plan, but because the act of obedience itself started to feel suspicious. Yet despite destabilizing the voice of authority, the game rarely gives the player meaningful room to refuse. I remained trapped in a loop of following commands I did not trust, and that lack of control made the narrator’s authority feel even more absurd and coercive. The more I distrusted him, the more aware I became of how dependent I still was on his instructions to move through the game. This produces a feedback loop between distrust and obedience; the narrator loses credibility, but the player remains structurally bound to his guidance. And they are forced to grapple with this as they continue to follow a voice they do not trust.
Papers, Please complicates this dynamic by showing that interpretive authority does not need to be unreliable in the same theatrical sense to still distort agency. The state’s voice in Papers, Please is clear and procedural as it introduces the player to their role as a border security guard. The voice clearly conveys the player’s objective: inspect documents, follow orders, protect the nation, and earn enough money to keep their family alive (Papers, Please). Unlike Dr. Langeskov, the authority here does not collapse into panic or obvious incompetence. It remains stable and bureaucratic, providing steady instruction to the player throughout the game. However, the unreliability lies in the principles it emphasizes to the player. The game presents each command as administratively rational while designing a system in which moral action, professional success, and familial survival cannot all coexist. Paying for helpful desk upgrades may make work more efficient, but that money may also be needed for food, heat, or medicine. Letting a desperate person through the border may feel humane, but it risks punishment that could harm your own family. Additionally, following the state’s rules may keep you employed, but it also forces you to abandon your values and makes you complicit in cruelty. These competing objectives place the player in a constant state of ethical tension; no decision feels fully correct because every choice satisfies one demand only by violating another. Over time, this tension changes how the player relates to the authority issuing those demands, and the player begins to question the legitimacy of the framework itself. As a result, the player’s distrust shifts away from individual instructions and toward the system that gives those instructions meaning.
This dynamic creates a new form of unreliability. In Dr. Langeskov, the player distrusts a specific voice because it appears incompetent and deceptive. In Papers, Please, the player distrusts the interpretive authority behind the voice because its values become increasingly suspect. The state remains consistent, but this consistency no longer guarantees truthfulness. By forcing players to experience the consequences of impossible choices, the game reveals how authority can shape perception by defining what counts as success in the first place. The player gradually realizes that the system’s apparent neutrality masks a set of priorities that privilege state control over human welfare. In this sense, the game functions as a subtler form of unreliable narration where the authority never misreports facts, but it provides a framework for understanding those facts that becomes progressively harder to accept. Together, these games reveal that player agency depends not only on what actions are available, but on whether the frameworks that define those actions as reasonable, necessary, or correct can be trusted.
The uncertainty created by unreliable narration in Papers, Please demonstrates that player agency is not limited to making choices within a game’s systems; it also involves interpreting the information those systems provide. When the game presents conflicting perspectives and incomplete truths, the player must actively decide how to understand the world before deciding how to act within it, changing the location of agency in a game. In many games, agency is most visible at the level of action, such as which path to take or which ending to pursue. But when the narrator cannot be trusted, the most important choice often happens before any visible action is taken, for the player must first decide what to believe. This brings games closer to the kind of interpretive agency Roland Barthes describes in “The Death of the Author,” where meaning does not simply descend from an authoritative creator but is produced by the reader’s encounter with the text (Barthes). Unreliable narration intensifies this dynamic by weakening the authority of the guiding voice; the narrator may still speak with confidence, but confidence no longer guarantees truth. As a result, the player is forced to occupy the space between authorial guidance and personal interpretation, deciding for themselves whether the game’s framing should be accepted, resisted, or reimagined.
Slay the Princess makes this shift especially clear. On the surface, the player’s agency appears to consist of dialogue selections and branching choices, yet the emotional and philosophical weight of those choices lies less in the physical action of clicking an option than in the interpretation that makes the option meaningful. To kill the princess is not simply to choose violence; it may mean accepting the narrator’s claim that she is dangerous, or surrendering to the logic of a story that has already defined her as a threat. To spare her, likewise, is not simply to choose mercy, for it may mean distrusting the narrator, believing the princess’s vulnerability, or rejecting the idea that the game’s first voice has any special claim to truth. The princess’s changing demeanor and form make this process far more complex because she never exists as a stable object of knowledge (Slay the Princess). Depending on how the player approaches her, she can appear frightened, manipulative, loving, and more. These transformations function as reflections of the assumptions the player brings into the encounter where the player’s reading of the princess is reflected back at them through her evolving form, personality, and relationship to the world. This creates a distinctive kind of interpretive agency in which meaning is not simply extracted from the text but actively participates in shaping it. What the player thinks is not separate from what the player does because perception itself becomes a force within the game, and interpretation becomes part of the game’s causal structure.
Bastion offers a subtler version of the same problem. Rucks’ narration rarely announces itself as suspicious in the way Slay the Princess does, but its warmth, nostalgia, and personal investment in the Old World shape how the player understands the events of the game. By the time the player reaches the final decision between evacuation and restoration, they are making a choice between competing interpretations of the world that Rucks has spent the entire game describing. His narration encourages the player to see the Calamity as a tragedy that might be undone and to view restoration as a hopeful act of recovery (Bastion). Yet the game also leaves room to question this perspective. The ruins of Caelondia can be read as evidence that some losses cannot or should not be reversed, pushing the player to consider evacuation as the only viable option. The player’s agency therefore operates not only through choosing an ending but through deciding how much authority to grant Rucks’ account of the world. The final decision gains meaning through interpretation. What matters is not merely which ending the player selects, but how the player has come to understand the story that Rucks has been telling and which vision of that story they choose to affirm.
If meaning emerges through interpretation rather than being handed to the player as an objective truth, then the question becomes what conditions make that interpretation feel stable or unstable. Unreliable narration is not strictly required for a game to remove the sense of a “right” choice, but it radically changes why that right choice disappears. A game can produce uncertainty without any deceptive or unstable narrator at all. It can withhold information, place the player in a morally ambiguous situation, or limit access to another perspective. BOKURA: planet does this through the structure of its cooperative play. Neither player needs to lie for the world to become unverifiable. The uncertainty comes from the fact that each player occupies a partial reality that the other cannot fully access. Even if both players communicate honestly, neither possesses the full picture, and therefore neither can confidently claim that their interpretation of the world is complete. The disappearance of the “right” choice here comes from limitation of perspective. The players may still believe that some better or truer course of action exists, but they cannot reach a neutral position from which that course of action can be fully confirmed.
Unreliable narration adds a second, more destabilizing layer. If BOKURA makes players uncertain because they cannot fully verify one another’s perspectives, unreliable narration makes players uncertain because they cannot fully trust the systems that organize those perspectives into meaning. In Slay the Princess, the narrator does not simply withhold information or leave the player to puzzle through ambiguity. He actively pressures the player toward a particular interpretation of reality: the princess is dangerous, the situation is urgent, and killing her is necessary (Slay the Princess). His authority attempts to pre-define the moral and narrative meaning of the player’s actions before the player has had the chance to encounter the situation independently. This is what makes the game’s uncertainty feel so different from simply having incomplete information. The player is not only deciding what facts to believe, but whether the very structure that turns those facts into a story can be trusted. The “right” choice disappears because the player can no longer separate the action itself from the contested frame that gives it meaning.
In Bastion, Rucks is not overtly adversarial like the narrator in Slay the Princess, but the intimacy of his narration makes his influence harder to notice. Over the course of the game, Rucks teaches the player how to feel about the Calamity, which he describes as a loss that can be undone if enough fragments of the old world can be gathered back together. By the time the player reaches the final decision between restoration and evacuation, the uncertainty does not come from missing data, it comes from recognizing that one’s emotional and moral interpretation of the choice has been shaped by the voice that has accompanied the journey all along. Restoration may feel hopeful because Rucks has narrated the past as something worth recovering, and evacuation may feel like betrayal because his longing has made departure seem like abandonment. The player’s task, then, is to decide how much authority to grant the narration that has made one ending feel more natural than the other. In this case, unreliable or partial narration reveals that what feels “right” may already be the product of a story the player has been taught to believe.
The traditional fantasy of agency in games is that understanding leads to control. Learn enough about the world, master its systems, and the correct path will gradually reveal itself. However, these games suggest that agency is not simply the freedom to act within a system, but the responsibility of acting in a world of uncertainty. What makes this idea particularly powerful in games is that players cannot remain passive observers of ambiguity. A novel can leave readers uncertain about a narrator’s reliability, and a film can invite competing interpretations of a character or event. Games inherit these forms of interpretive agency, but they also demand commitment. Players must eventually choose, act, and accept consequences even when the truth remains inaccessible. In doing so, these games transform uncertainty from a narrative device into a gameplay mechanic. They do not eliminate the possibility of truth or morality, but they expose how often our confidence in those elements depends on voices, systems, and perspectives that can never be entirely trusted. The result is a form of agency that feels less like mastery and more like judgment. You can never know for certain what is right, but you have the responsibility of deciding what to believe when certainty is impossible.
