Cara Ellison, senior narrative designer on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 before Paradox switched developers, discusses her love of Troika's original RPG: 'Everyone on the team helped really make that maximum goth'

Narrative designer Cara Ellison got into gaming via the BBC Micro her father had stolen from work. "He was like 'I'm borrowing it so I can work from home.' He wasn't. He stole it and he never gave it back", she says. The first game to grab her attention was the 1987 narrative adventure Acheton. "I couldn't read or write at the time, and I was determined to be able to talk to the computer."

After growing up on games like Grand Theft Auto and SimCity 2000, Ellison spent several years working as a games journalist, including for PC Gamer, before transitioning to game design, writing for titles like Dishonored 2 and the comedy immersive sim Void Bastards, with more recent projects including God of War: Ragnarok and the VR mystery game Ghost Town developed by the creators of The Room series of 3D puzzlers. Ellison was also senior narrative designer on Bloodlines 2 before Hardsuit Labs and Paradox parted ways.

Currently, Ellison works as senior narrative designer at independent studio Gravity Well Games, as well as on Sleight of Hand, a deckbuilding stealth game inspired by Metal Gear Solid and Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines. "I feel like it is the successor to Bloodlines, in a way," she says. "I guess it depends how much of an RPG we can really make out of it."

I asked Ellison to guide me along the word-strewn superhighway of her PC, a journey that took us from the shadowy waterfront of Santa Monica out into the sunless blue beyond.

What game are you currently playing?

There's a game called Titanium Court. I've been playing the demo like crazy because it's so wonderful.

It's Douglas Adams-quality writing that's so silly and a little bit satirical. It references things in the real world but it's a fantasy world. I guess the shape of it is supposed to be based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, but it's absolutely nothing like that.

It starts a little bit Dwarf Fortress-y, where it's like little guys on your screen, little pixels, and they're moving around and things. It's very conceptual art. You have to do most of the work with your brain about what it represents. But there's a little text box at the bottom, and it'll give you all the sort of story of what's happening to you, and then it will go into a match-three map where you've got a castle in the middle, and you've got to strategically match things so that things get closer or further away from your castle.

It must have taken such a long time to think about and create. It's one of these intricate little things that feels like an all-timer.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

The last game I played was Routine, because years and years and years ago, and you'll be able to look this up, I was one of the first people to report on it, because I said "I'm really excited about this game coming out".

And it [was] mainly because many Unreal [Engine] games find it very difficult to recreate organic-feeling, dirty, grimy, lived-in [spaces]. And one of the things I think about a lot to do with that is the original Blade Runner movie, because Ridley Scott came from an art-school background and he was uninterested in making sci-fi movies that had all those sharp, clean edges that were very regulation, and that look like no one lived there.

I think about that a lot, because particularly in videogames we have that problem where we will make even fantasy games—if you think about Skyrim in the Bethesda engine—things are too clean and plasticky, Mattel feeling, like they have been made in a factory somewhere … We have a big problem in games where the fact that we want these places to be so vast and huge means that everything looks like it has been made in a factory.

What's really interesting to me is that Routine was looking at the way that things like Blade Runner made something feel like it was actually a space where people lived, and they were trying to think about how to sand the edges off that Unreal-feeling a little bit.

The reason I put it down is because there's a bit where you get—Alien Isolation has this as well—to encounter a robot for the first time, and the robot will just kill you, and you're like "Oh, well, what do I do now? I just want to see the rest of this beautiful game, but this robot keeps killing me. Now I don't know what to do.

So I was like, "I'll put this aside and look up online how I'm going to get past this robot" and then I just never did. I should go back and see how to get past the robot, but then I got distracted by something else, which I think is really common.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

It is the original Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines. And that's partly because I love it, but also it's really hard to get working these days. You have to patch it, and then you have to fucking fiddle around with it, do all sorts to get it to work. Once you've done that you're like "I literally never want to do that ever again."

There's three elements that make Bloodlines a fantastic game. First of all, the atmosphere [Troika] created, it really feels like vampires live there in LA … the atmosphere of Bloodlines is spot on, perfect. Everyone on the team helped really make that maximum goth, or industrial goth.

The second aspect of this game that is so fucking compelling and amazing is the combination of three things: the writing is incredibly good, the voice direction and voice acting—also fantastically good, especially for the time. A lot of those folks, like, we had Coutrney Taylor—she's the voice of Jack in Mass Effect. She was Jeanette in the original Bloodlines, she's still around. Phil LaMarr, who was originally famous for being in Pulp Fiction, but he was in Futurama. He was in the original Bloodlines again. All these folks I've had the pleasure of voice directing since. But I love them to bits and all of that acting was fantastic.

The third thing that was really wonderful was, I think this guy might work at Apple now, but essentially, there was a programmer who did the animation loops for the conversations. All of those animation loops are a little more exaggerated than they would be if you made it in MetaHuman for example. But those exaggerations make those talking animations really real.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

Some of my Steam statistics have been ruined by being a journalist, and I'm a little bit worried.

I think this is a journalism one, because I have 103 hours in Kentucky Route Zero. I think I may have written a couple, maybe two or three articles about it, and so I had to replay [it] each time, maybe. And I remember I wrote a column at Eurogamer once where I really had to do a lot of research into this, the reading material, the reference[s] they use for Kentucky Route Zero.

A lot of it was architectural literature and plays, and I don't know, all sorts of philosophical texts and stuff that they use to put this thing together.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I have a copy of Sunless Sea both on my work computer and my personal computer, and I tried to put it on Steam Deck, but it doesn't work on Steam Deck.

I keep thinking about "Oh, I'll have to uninstall Sunless Sea at some point", but I always know I'm going to start it back up again at some point, and that's because I've literally never seen the east side of the map.

I just love going out into the fog of war on the map, and seeing how far I can get, and thinking about the economy of my ship. And I love the little Zee-Bat mechanic where you press a button and they tell you where the nearest port is. It's so nice. And then sometimes when it comes back and tells you where that nearest port is, it's somewhere you've never been before, and you're like, "Oh, shit!", really cool.

And [there's] a lot of great writing in there. It preserves a mystery as well. One of the skills that's hard to do as a game designer and writer is preserve a form of anticipation or mystery in your world. Because a lot of the time, especially when you're working in triple-A, you're compelled to give the player information. That's your foremost job, or what people want you to do. But really, what your job should be is to make them want to find out what's going on.

There's a really famous David Mamet memo on the internet where he said—he wrote this massive rant to his writers on a TV show—he calls the business people or the investors penguins, and he's like "What the penguins want is for you to give the information in the most efficient way possible. Just tell them the information. Get from A to B. That's not your job, your job is to make it more compelling and move us into the next scene. We don't come here to watch information."

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

I write all of my videogame scripts in Scrivener, unless there's an actual tool, which is rare. I wrote all of Void Bastards in Scrivener. I wrote all of Ghost Town in Scrivener. A lot of it is just because it can organise text in a really useful way. It also has screenwriting format, which is easy for actors to read from.

It's mainly because, unfortunately, game engines like Unreal have literally no narrative tools. I think the great shame of videogame engines is that they do not ship with any form of narrative tool. It's a disgrace. Even if you are a sound designer, you can work within Unreal's very basic sound design tools to put sounds in, and most people have a desire to work in Wwise because it's a standardised tool. There is no standardised tool for a narrative designer or a writer in videogames.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

It's pretty tidy, and I think that's because I separate business from leisure, although now that I'm looking at all of these icons, maybe it's not as tidy as I thought.

Okay, so I've got the Bloodlines official patch, so that's like 50 icons of different patches. VLC Media Player, which is a must. I've got a bunch of exported scripts for things like Sleight of Hand, which I'm working on. I've even got an old Void Bastards script on here that I haven't deleted. There was a point at which I was writing for Netflix's Branch Manager, which was how they made their interactive projects. There's a couple of those on there—the projects I started and then they closed down.

The wallpaper is a screenshot from Vertigo, you know when she's sitting in that green room and putting her gloves on? When I'm making horror games or things with tension, I watch a lot of Hitchcock films because it shows you what's going to happen and then makes you wait.

Working at Gravity Well, I'm thinking a lot more about more pulpy kind of fiction, like Indiana Jones style stuff … I've been rewatching a lot of Spielberg and he does the same stuff. He lifts a lot from Hitchcock. His early movies are really good at showing you a thing that could become a disaster. Thinking about how that structure functions is really important to me.