The Art of Environmental Storytelling: How Dark Souls, Bioshock, and What Remains of Edith Finch Tell Stories Without Words

In the world of video games, not all stories need to be told through cutscenes, dialogue trees, or exposition dumps. Some of the most powerful narratives emerge from the careful placement of objects, the architecture of spaces, and the subtle details that players discover as they explore. This technique, known as environmental storytelling, transforms game worlds into rich tapestries where every corner has a tale to tell. Today, we'll explore how three vastly different games—Dark Souls, Bioshock, and What Remains of Edith Finch—master this art form in their own unique ways.

Dark Souls: Archaeology of a Fallen World

FromSoftware's Dark Souls series has become legendary for its cryptic narrative approach, where the story isn't handed to players but rather scattered across the dying kingdom of Lordran like archaeological artifacts waiting to be discovered.

Walking through the Undead Parish, you might notice the countless hollowed soldiers still standing at their posts, suggesting a sudden catastrophe that left them frozen in their final moments of duty. The placement of corpses tells stories of desperate last stands—a knight's body slumped against a door they died defending, or merchants found dead still clutching their wares, hinting at the chaos that consumed even the most mundane aspects of life.

The architecture itself serves as a history book. The grand cathedral of Anor Londo, with its impossible scale designed for giants, immediately communicates that this world was not built for humans. The gradual decay visible as you descend from the pristine halls of Anor Londo to the flooded ruins of New Londo tells a story of civilizational collapse that spans millennia. Even item descriptions and their locations contribute to the narrative—finding a knight's armor set near a grave suggests a story of loyalty beyond death, while discovering powerful artifacts in hidden corners implies desperate attempts to hide treasures from the spreading darkness.

Bioshock: A City's Ideology Written in Decay

Where Dark Souls uses environmental storytelling to hint at ancient mysteries, Bioshock's Rapture wears its history on its sleeve—or rather, on its water-damaged walls and broken neon signs. Ken Levine and his team created an underwater city where every leaked pipe and shattered storefront window tells the story of utopia's transformation into dystopia.

The genius of Rapture's environmental storytelling lies in its layers of history. Art deco posters advertising plasmids still hang on walls, their cheerful 1950s-style illustrations contrasting horrifically with the blood-splattered floors beneath them. You can trace the city's downfall through these environmental details: pristine areas give way to makeshift barricades, elegant ballrooms are converted into makeshift medical facilities, and children's classrooms feature disturbing crayon drawings that hint at the Little Sisters' tragic existence.

Audio diaries scattered throughout enhance the environmental narrative, but even without them, the story is clear. A ransacked jewelry store next to a corpse clutching a pistol tells of desperation and greed. Protest signs and vandalized statues of Andrew Ryan reveal the political tensions that tore the city apart. The very geography of Rapture, with its clear class divisions between the opulent upper levels and the industrial lower areas, serves as a physical manifestation of the objectivist philosophy that doomed the city.

What Remains of Edith Finch: Every Room a Life Story

Giant Sparrow's What Remains of Edith Finch takes environmental storytelling to perhaps its most intimate level. Where Dark Souls and Bioshock tell the stories of fallen civilizations, Edith Finch focuses on a single family home where each room becomes a perfectly preserved memorial to its former occupant.

The Finch house itself is a character, its impossible architecture—rooms built upon rooms, additions jutting out at odd angles—physically manifesting the family's inability to let go of the past. Each family member's room, sealed after their death, becomes a time capsule that tells their story through carefully chosen objects. Calvin's room with its swing set visible through the window, Barbara's child-star memorabilia gathering dust, Lewis's therapy letters mixed with fantasy drawings—each space is curated to reveal personality, passions, and ultimately, fate.

The game's masterstroke is how it uses the physical act of exploration as storytelling. The secret passages between rooms mirror the hidden connections between family members' stories. The cluttered, lived-in feel of the common areas contrasts with the shrine-like preservation of the bedrooms, showing how the family both celebrated and was haunted by death. Even the journey to reach the house, through overgrown paths and past abandoned vehicles, sets the tone for discovering a family consumed by its own mythology.

The Power of Silent Narratives

What makes environmental storytelling so powerful in these three games is how it respects player intelligence and curiosity. Rather than forcing exposition, these games trust players to piece together narratives from visual clues, creating a more engaging and personal experience. When you discover the story yourself—whether it's understanding a Dark Souls boss's tragic past, recognizing the human cost of Rapture's failed experiment, or feeling the weight of the Finch family curse—the emotional impact is far greater than any cutscene could achieve.

Environmental storytelling also allows for multiple levels of engagement. Casual players can enjoy the surface-level experience while dedicated fans can dig deeper, discovering new details and connections with each playthrough. This creates communities of players who share theories and discoveries, turning single-player experiences into collective archaeological expeditions.

The Future of Environmental Storytelling

As games continue to evolve as a medium, environmental storytelling remains one of the most unique tools in a developer's arsenal—something that no other medium can replicate in quite the same way. While films can show us spaces and books can describe them, only games allow us to inhabit and explore them at our own pace, making discoveries that feel genuinely our own.

The success of these three games, each representing different genres and approaches, proves that environmental storytelling isn't limited to any particular style or theme. Whether building worlds of cosmic horror, social commentary, or intimate family drama, the environment itself can become the most eloquent narrator of all.

The next time you play a game, take a moment to really look at the world around you. Notice the placement of objects, the wear on surfaces, the way spaces connect or divide. You might find that the most powerful stories are the ones nobody ever speaks aloud—the ones written in rust and ruin, in sealed doors and scattered photographs, in the very architecture of the worlds we explore.