Stories in Games?

[Kriven]

Even in games without cutscenes, you could still have a story shown in the environments and the ways things interact.

For example, Super Mario 64 has an entire subplot about the war between the Bob-Omb races, but it's only really mentioned in a single line of dialogue about that. But there's way more story than that. The Red Bob-Ombs are sending in a small team of soldiers, possibly even the remnants of a rebel team after the Black Bob-Ombs eradicated their comrades, to infiltrate the last of the Black Bob-Omb strongholds and topple the tyrannous King Bob-Omb. While they've made some headway, the Black Bob-Omb fortress is simply too heavily guarded. The normal path along the bridge is of course a no-go and easily spotted from atop the fortress, and moreso it would require battling the Black Bob-Ombs guard Chomp. They could run through the canyon (which had at one point been a moat, but the water was drained by a heroic Red who sacrificed himself for his cause), but the Black Bob-Ombs have already secured the position. The Red Bob-Ombs are shown to have made some advancement up to the mountainside, even securing two cannons along the way, but it seems that they were either wiped out or forced to retreat. All they can do is hope for a miracle.

Super Mario 64 is generally considered a rather story-less game. "Save the princess yet again." Okay, but there's way more going on than that. Stories can be as much of the world as the platforms and mushrooms and coins. It's not enough to just drop details onto a setting "because they fit." You have to think about why that object is put there, and how it got there, and how it's in the state it's in and how it reflects on the characters around it. All that makes a story, even if there wasn't one.