Pre-Rendered Cinematic Script

The Reach

Personal Project, 2025

My concept for The Reach requires a lot of lore and background, as it’s a CRPG with a grand scale, lots of characters and factions, and a setting that is both large and dense, but also somehow even bigger than it appears at first. The struggle for me is to work out what a player needs to know to understand this world, and condense it down into a short pre-rendered cinematic that shows off the high-level narrative of how the setting came to exist, and how inequity and injustice define its social structure.

Once this high-level view is established, the next step is to bring the focus in to a much sharper point, by showing the moments just before our game’s inciting incident. A young woman runs from corporate guards, and seems to dive to her death from a spire. A small hint of supernatural power coalesces around her to show that she may have a trick up her sleeve, and the viewer is left uncertain of her fate.

Given the geography of the setting, the metaphorical rise of a civilisation, and the literal fall of Quenna at the end, I opted to name this cinematic “Rise & Fall”.