Let's compare the narrative design of Tactical Breach Wizards and Into the Breach

Some spoilers for Tactical Breach Wizards ahead.

I love Suspicious Developments' Tactical Breach Wizards and Subset Games' Into the Breach (not as much as editor-in-chief Danielle Riendeau does, but hey I do my best). Both games boil down the essence of grid-based turn-based tactical games like Firaxis' XCOM series to simple simple, efficient forms, and each gives players some degree of autonomy to test out different moves before committing to a full turn.

There's plenty to learn comparing the design decisions around both games, but I've been fixated one major point of divergence: how each game approaches narrative design.

Their strategies are completely different. Into the Breach makes the most of a sparse storytelling strategy, while Tactical Breach Wizards weaves an international escapade with snappy dialogue, fully-fleshed out characters, and a "red string" investigation board that helps players understand the who, what, where, when, and why of the game.

With such similar game design fundamentals, we have a window to explore how each game's low-budget (but still high-impact) methods improve—or maybe at times worsen—the experience.

Into the Breach goes for a (lean, and maybe too mean), narrative

In Into the Breach, Subset Games took a very light-handed approach to game narrative, stripping the game story back to very simple elements. The player controls a team of mech pilots jumping from timeline to timeline, fending off a neverending invasion of alien bugs on the verge of overwhelming Earth.

Related:Tactical Breach Wizards shows how strategy games can tickle the funny bone

On each run they encounter different leaders for each of the four "zones" they can explore who offer brief context on the game mechanics unique to each zone, and comment on the players' successes and failures at achieving mission objectives. After the player begins the final mission, one specific leader gives them instructions for how to blow up the bugs for good. If the player is defeated at any point, or if they win, these leaders (and their own pilots) will lament their defeat or celebrate their win before sending the player to the next timeline.

Image via Subset Games.

The pilot characters offer an equally sparse amount of dialogue, though they stand out by their unique reactions to being damaged, killing bugs, or protecting civilians in each mission. Their visual design and barks offer brief glimpses of their backstories and motivations, expanding the scope of the game world by implying the existence of alien creatures and fully-sentient artificial intelligence.

Aaaaand that's it. Even though this game pays tribute to the thunderous mechs of Gundam, Battletech, and Neon Genesis Evangelion, it tosses out the dense political and sometimes religious themes that accompany each series. This approach compares to the "narrative design" of a board game: the goal isn't to tell a linear narrative, but to use the essence of narrative to inspire players to engage with the core mechanics. Those core mechanics are really really really really good, but never build up to a grand finale.

A deeply-invested player can take inspiration from different pilot characters to decide their moves, but most players focused on winning will only be lightly influenced by these trappings. They mostly add an element of "oh that's cool" while you scan their related abilities.

This approach is far easier for production, as game writer Chris Avellone (who in 2023 settled sexual assault allegations levied at him) could prioritize unique, clever character barks instead of stressing over everyone's motivations and how they'd drive the plot.

I find there are flaws in its simplicity. This method never gives the player an "off ramp" to put down the game. The Subset Games team correctly identified that getting players quickly from run to run would drive interest more than any amount of dialogue, and the dense gameplay and promise of unlocking new tools would motivate players invested in the turn-based tactics.

But because there's no definitive finale (or even the illusion of one), most players' time with Into the Breach will end with them ending a session and then just...never picking it up again. There isn't a killer last memory to leave players with, one they'll want to tell other prospective players about—there's just a vibe of "oh, I've seen all there is to see."

This decision also reflects in the themes and "vibes" of Into the Breach's story. If you care about saving the worlds at all, this game's story is downright Sisyphean. The alien invasion can never be beaten back, and only a fraction of a fraction of the infinite universes can be saved. After a while I felt myself going "what's the point?" I'd regularly sacrifice worlds just to preserve pilots I'd heavily invested in, treated the end of the world as an inevitability and not something worth fighting for.

By the time I put down Into the Breach, I'd spent hours and hours delighting over the turn-based tactical synergy, but I didn't feel proud of the worlds I'd saved (especially because there's no way to reconnect with them), I just felt like it wasn't worth saving any more.

Tactical Breach Wizards celebrates its "loveable idiots"

Tactical Breach Wizards tells its tale on a shoestring budget—there's no voice acting, cutscenes have very simple animations, and Suspicious Developments put in effort to ensure players who only want to engage with the turn-based strategy game can skip as much as possible and get right to the tactical defenestrating. But for those who dive into the plot, they'll find Tom Francis' dry dialogue and sincere characters ready to engage with them.

The plot is ambitious, but possibly difficult-to-follow for players hyperfocused on the turn-based tactics. In an alternate Earth where video game-style magic is real, Magic users Zan, Jen, and their comrades race to stop a rogue group of commandos trying to kick off a catastrophic world war. Zan has a personal connection with the lead antagonist Liv Kennedy, Jen is struggling to find purpose in her post-enlisted life, and the rest of the crew has their own hangups worth digging into.

There are other design efficiencies you can spot in Tactical Breach Wizards. A lot of dialogue beats play out between encounters with two characters facing each other on either side of a door. It's a familiar, repeating beat that saves on character animation and captures the sense of two people arguing or debating while they should be focused on the fight around them (something the fight mines for comedy). Jokes and character reactions are sometimes nestled in the user interface, giving players a chuckle when they go check relevant data.

Image via Suspicious Developments.

The most ambitious narrative swing is in the personal "dreams" of each character. Tactical Breach Wizards has a bit of fun treating its "optional" missions as the characters gaming out combat scenarios while they sleep. These missions can have more creative setups, like including multiples of characters that couldn't appear in the game's main story.

Then the game goes a step further, creating optional missions that are crafted around each character in the squad. In the first of these, Storm Witch Jen is confronted by her own inner critic, and the pair argue while blasting away the enemies inside her own mind.

The international conspiracy element of the story is a little bit "putting a hat on a hat" (one character even points out that the gang hasn't progressed in their core objective for two missions), but it's hardly a great narrative sin.

The narrative design is fun! Suspicious Developments does a great job weaving the dialogue-driven tale in with charming vignettes with the same assets used in gameplay. They make for a nice respite between missions, and play nicely with the "slow and brain-stimulating" nature of its turn-based tactical combat.

I don't want to play the mission just to see the next puzzle, I want to play to see what happens next in this fantasy thriller.

So which narrative style is better?

It's not helpful to say any one way of making games or telling stories is objectively "better." Stories (and games) are experienced subjectively, and plenty of folks may bounce off of Tactical Breach Wizards' narrative design, wishing that time had gone into new missions instead.

But...

I believe more developers should follow in Suspicious Developments' footsteps, and squeeze every ounce of story out of their game that they can.

In my decade or so writing about games (and occasionally working on them) I've crossed paths with developers frustrated by how resource-consuming narrative design can be. They're tired of games bogged down by cutscenes, dialogue, or gigantic tomes full of way-too-dense-and-not-useful worldbuilding. They'd prefer to focus on efficient design and fantastic art direction. "Most game writing is really bad," is a phrase I've heard from a few professionals.

Swing by the the GDC Narrative Summit and you'll hear great arguments about how good storytelling will make your game appealing to players. That's true, but it can force writers to re-stage this argument over and over again to justify each story for each kind of game they work on.

I'd put it like this: good storytelling isn't just good for your players, it's good for you too.

Image via Suspicious Developments.

Suspicious Developments founder Tom Francis pulled double-or-triple duty designing, coding, and writing Tactical Breach Wizards. While playing, I could feel him getting something out of his brain and into the world that you can't do just by writing a blog or lobbing ideas around with friends. His ideas about how games should play and how people experience the world are imparted to the player while they figure out the best way to tactically yeet a traffic cop named Steve out a window.

"But I'm not as good a writer as Tom Francis," you might say. That's okay! I've played a few other great games recently where the writing didn't click with me, including WarTales, Cobalt Core, and Sea of Stars.

I loved these games for other reasons but in the end just didn't connect with the words on the screen. But I still felt a connection to the people making the game while I read them. Each game swung for the fences in a way that made me think "huh, someone on the other side of this screen was really, really passionate about this."

As a B2B game journalist I'm not as harsh as many players will be, and it can be scary to put yourself out there when you're not confident in your writing. But something good comes out of everyone when you try to say something about the world even while you're trying to entertain people.

Give yourself permission to tell the story bouncing around your head.