Waiting as a design decision

A route in an otome game does not let you skip ahead. You spend hours with someone before a particular silence means anything, before you understand why one gesture is the one that gives them away. Someone you were certain about in the first hour can leave you feeling completely different by the end, and the only way to get there is the slow way. A route that let you skip ahead would be handing you facts about a person instead of teaching you the person.

I have been playing these games for most of my life: Code:Realize, Hakuoki, Amnesia, Collar x Malice, Mystic Messenger, Dandelion, and others I keep returning to. They do not look like where a conspiracy thriller comes from, and they shaped Pantheon more than I expected when I started writing it.

Two gates, two feelings

A thriller and a route both gate information, and they gate it toward different feelings. A thriller withholds a fact: a file nobody can open, a name nobody will say, something hanging over a scene until it finally drops. The pleasure is anticipation turning into dread. The gate exists to be sprung.

A route withholds a person, and the waiting is the part you came for. The games I keep going back to are the ones that understood that, and stretched the uncertainty out instead of rushing to resolve it. Anyone who has tuned the pacing of a romance route, or of any long reveal, knows the design problem from the inside. Hold too briefly and the payoff is a summary. Hold too long without giving the player anything to read in the meantime and they stop caring what is behind the gate.

What I brought across

Pantheon runs slow burn across sixty-three chapters. I did not learn to sit on two people not saying the thing from spy novels, where a held breath is usually a countdown. I learned it from games that let me stay unsure about someone for forty hours and made the staying enjoyable, and from manga and manhwa that let a suspicion sit on the page for volumes before answering it.

A thriller taught me what to withhold. A game taught me that withholding it could be the pleasure itself, rather than a delay before the pleasure starts.

If you have ever finished one of those games certain you had misjudged somebody in the first hour, that is the feeling I spent sixty-three chapters trying to get onto a page.