Hollow Knight and Breadcrumbing Backstory

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.

Details in the scenery

A while ago I wrote an article explaining the benefits of environmental storytelling, where you can help convey the story and further the narrative using details in the setting and environment. This is also a way to subtly introduce lore and backstory. The settings and environments in your story should have their own history and gravitas, and including some of that when describing your settings and having your characters interact with it will give everything a sense of history and also add some depth to the story you are currently telling. It also helps create that whole “city as a character” thing I wrote about in yet another earlier post.

For instance, you could have your protagonist see a plaque etched into the cornerstone of an important building they are approaching, which explains who helped build the building, and then have that tidbit of history play a role in the overall narrative.

Allusions to past history in dialogue

Instead of having one person explain EVERYTHING all at once, you can split up all that backstory into bits and pieces, told by multiple characters with some connection to the lore. One of the many cool moments in Hollow Knight is when you explore an out of the way nook in a hard-to-reach area, only to find an NPC who is only there to tell you one thing: that the king of the land you are in is reincarnated from a giant Wurm...which helps to explain a very interesting moment you have with the carcass of a giant Wurm nearby. It allows you to connect dots and gain a new understanding of what you just experienced in the other area. Sometimes it just takes a small bit of well-placed dialogue to get the reader to understand the history of something important in the story and its importance, especially if you've planted other small clues and explanations elsewhere in the story.

Documents
having your characters come across documents that mention aspects of your world's lore is also an effective way to subtly build your world and backstory. This is a well-used trope in video game RPGs, where the player can go through libraries or bookshelves in buildings and read short stories explaining the history of the world they are playing in. it's an unobtrusive way of making the lore and backstory of that world available. You can do something similar, whether it be your protagonist reading a passage in a book, or poring over some historical legal document, or even reading an old letter from one historic character to another. Documents are an efficiant way to record moments in time, and you can use that to your advantage.

I did a lot of this in Godmode. Elijah spends a large chunk of the story trying to figure out what the heck is going on, right along with the reader. So he comes across many documents and details in the building (along with artifacts left behind by the victims) that give brief tidbits explaining where he was at and what types of nefarious work the people in that place were conducting, along with some key nuggets of information from the few still living people Elijah encounters while going through that building. By the end of the story, both Elijah and the reader have a full understanding of where Elijah was at and why things were the way they were...as well as Elijah's role in it.

Ultimately, you are creating a jigsaw puzzle of information that you are inviting the reader to piece together and draw their own conclusions about. If done effectively, you can give your story a great deal of depth and gravitas without needing to have a narrator or one particular character explaining everything in massive information dumps. Those can take the reader out of the story and bring the momentum of the narrative to a halt while you are trying to get them up to speed on what came before. Interspersing all of that information, lore and backstory throughout the story in unconventional ways can easily alleviate that problem.

Quan Williams is a published author of four novels. Check out his latest work at https://amzn.to/3gpb2wJ