Allowing players to make game-altering choices in an RPG is a tricky task. For those games that wish to tell a specific story and yet also want players to feel they have some amount of power in deciding how that story unfolds, balancing those two very opposite directions can prove to be a significant challenge. Unfortunately, due to that challenge, these choices often feel artificial in nature, with many games all but forcing players to take a specific route to retain the narrative. This is something that Limiar Studios' upcomingfantasy RPGBlackThorne Keepis aiming to avoid with its own dilemma system designed to be more gray than black and white.
At Gamescom Latam, Game Rant interviewedBlackThorne Keepcreator Roberto Garcia about the game’s choice-driven nature and what players can expect from it. During the interview, Garcia made it rather clear thatBlackThorne Keepwould keep players guessing with a dilemma system that isn’t as clear-cut as somechoice-driven RPGshave proven to be.
BlackThorne Keep’s Dilemma System Aims to Keep Players Guessing
Thanks toBlackThorne Keep’s dilemma system, it will also offermultiple endingsand branching paths. However, unlike many games that utilize this design,BlackThorne Keep’s story structure isn’t sprawling just for the sake of it. Limiar Studios has taken a more contained approach that prioritizes choices that have meaning rather than sheer volume. According to Garcia, the goal was never to create a massive epic but to create a story with purpose — one that felt personal and complete without demanding players spend an overwhelming amount of time on it. As he stated during the interview,
One of the things that we wanted to bring to the game is the idea that you have different paths, but we also don’t want it to be a 200-hour game. We wanted to tell a story that you can start and finish and feel like you understand the whole point of it. So, there are three different endings for the game, depending on different decisions you make. The game also gives you different routes you can take to get to these endings.
That tighter narrative loop actually gives the choices inBlackThorne Keepmore impact in the end. Players won’t be choosing between trivial outcomes or optional side content that ends up going nowhere. Instead, each major decision influences the story’s direction and how characters respond to the world around them. This ensures players understand the weight of a moment without being able to guess exactly where it might take them. That unpredictability is a core principle ofBlackThorne Keep’sdilemma system, and it’s part of what separates it from choice-driven RPGs that prioritize a more binary framework. Regarding the dilemma system, Garcia explained,
We have a dilemma system in the game. At some point, the game will confront you with a dilemma, and it’s never black and white, good or bad. There’s no good and bad. The whole point of the game is to show how hard it is to make the right decisions. Most of the time, you don’t know what the best decision is. So, what’s going to happen is that you’ll play the game, and you’re going to make some decisions about these dilemmas, and these dilemmas will take you on different paths and different situations, and your character will evolve based on that.
In a genre wheremorality systemsoften boil down to obvious “good” or “evil” choices,BlackThorne Keepseems to be trying something a bit more nuanced. By allowing players to wrestle with uncertainty and live with the consequences of their limited knowledge, the game leans into the gray areas that many choice-based RPGs tend to shy away from. In doing so,BlackThorne Keepcould offer one of the more refreshingly honest takes on player agency the genre has seen in quite some time.
