As I write this, my current nerd obsession is the hit indie video game Hollow Knight. It’s almost everything I love in a video game: exploring a massive map, quick, action-oriented gameplay, tons of ability and power upgrades and cool moments that make you feel like a total badA$$ for making them happen. But the thing that keeps me most engaged in the game is its deep, engrossing story. The game absolutely drips with lore and backstory, and you can spend hours delving into the plethora of characters and landmarks, learning what the stories are behind them and how they all connect and form the tapestry that is the world and history of Hallownest. Okay, I don’t love the insane difficulty level of the game, but I’m not writing about that.
What I appreciate about the story is that it is not frontloaded for you. You are not told everything at the start of the game. In fact, you are told very little: the first scenes of the game are something ominous happening to what you assume is a final boss, then an ominous poem about somebody else, and finally your character “the knight” walking casually towards the village where the game will take place, and then jumping off a cliff. That’s it. Reading the instructions or game description doesn’t clue you in to much more: there’s something going on in Hallownest and people who go there aren’t coming back, and you’re there to figure out why…maybe.
The reveals are plenty as the story progresses, as is typical for many games and other storytelling mediums. But what makes Hollow Knight unique is the amount of storytelling and lore that was put into every single detail of the game. Literally everything has a backstory and a history, from the locales, to the items you pick up, to the systems you use to stay alive, to every single creature, foe, friend, boss and secondary character you interact with in the game. You can learn crucial information on just about anything you see and touch in the game, you can learn lore from speaking to random NPCs, and also gleam its relevance to the overall story (and yeah, I’m going to dabble in spoiler territory. You’ve been warned.)
One of my favorite connections is early in the game, when you are fighting your first boss, The False Knight. When you beat it, you open its massive armor to see this big-headed, marshmallow looking creature that is an easy kill. You don’t think much of it at first because you’re still getting your bearings in the game. But then after you’ve explored for a while, you see that armor again in a different place, but this time worn by one of Hallownest’s fallen Legendary warriors. You return to the scene of your first battle to see the armor still lying there, but the body of that marshmallow creature has been taken away to a hidden spot nearby, where you will find two others of its kind holding a funeral for it. A special upgrade you find early allows you to get intel on any creature you’ve killed, and it tells you that these marshmallow guys are literally the weakest, most frightful creatures in the kingdom. They literally run from you when they see you and they do not put up any kind of fight as you kill them with one hit. Another upgrade allows you to get even more backstory, where you find out one of those things wanted so badly to get stronger to protect its brethren that it stole the armor of a random warrior it found sleeping and donned it to be their hero. Yes, that is the armor of the legendary warrior you saw in another place, and yes, you just mercilessly killed a guy who just wanted to protect its friends from…well…people like you, since you just mercilessly killed its friends, too.
And there are tons of other moments like this in the game, where the entire backstory isn’t given to you all upfront, but you can collect details and bits of lore from areas all over the game and piece things together at your leisure. Connections are implied, hinted at, and alluded to, which implores you to dig deeper to find the connections and process the overall relevance to the main story. It allows for true discovery and revelation as you connect the dots and fit pieces of the puzzle together. And it adds replay potential to the game because you are not going to find everything the first time you go through it, but if you liked the game, there will be ways for you to learn that there is stuff you missed that makes the story even more complete, which compels you to dive even deeper in the game to experience what you missed. It’s a brilliant setup.
The goal of Breadcrumbing is to give a story all of its exposition without actually doing exposition. There is no need for a lengthy explanation of what came before if you offer it in bits and pieces throughout the story, and in ways that aren’t obviously a character or the narrator explaining things to you.
But now the question becomes, since the guys at Team Cherry were able to do what I call “breadcrumbing” so well, how can YOU utilize this technique in your stories? Well, I’m glad you asked…
