National Geographic:
Saints and Strangers

To build intrigue around the National Geographic’s Thanksgiving miniseries, Saints and Strangers, we created a narrative game that invited to see if they could have survived this dark chapter of American history.

Can you survive the first Thanksgiving?

The real story of Thanksgiving is more deadly than many realize. We created a ‘choose your own adventure’ style narrative game, based entirely on the real events that occurred in Plymouth in 1620. Players could choose to follow in the footsteps of the Pilgrims, or try to forge a different path. Either way, survival was far from guaranteed.

Game trailer

We crafted a trailer for the game, leveraging footage from the show paired with UI elements from our gameplay.

Game narrative

As the sole writer on the project, I wrote the entire script and story for the game. Crafting a cohesive, branching narrative was an epic challenge, requiring hours of mapping the plot points out and seeing how they could connect, developing storylines for multiple characters, and finding ways to give players a sense of control while still telling a historically accurate tale. In the end, this game had 196 possible narrative paths—all rooted in historical fact.