Art provides a way of describing the world. It can be used to describe the inner world of the artist, her flashes of emotion and invention, and the outer world, the intricate webs of identity and belonging we all must navigate. Writers make use of signs and signifiers to make maps of their pocket universes. Photographers frame the world within meaningful compositions, while filmmakers speak through sequence and rhythm. Games have access to all these tools and more, which often results in muddied and half-done art. Awkward prose and sloppy cinematics are built from thoughtless pastiche and used to paper over uninteresting mechanics. The games that commit themselves to a specific style and approach are the ones that tend to stand out in resplendent focus.

Though it has been heavily marketed as a “cinematic” game, Mafia: The Old Country portrays its world principally through the language of diorama and theater. Its Valle Dorata, a fictional region in 1900s Sicily, is elaborately detailed. The touch of Hangar 13’s environmental artists is evident on nearly every surface, from its dusty roads to its meadows of vibrant lavender, to its dreary brown factories, to its lamplit mines, to its undulating seashores. The art direction is going for realism, sure, but more than that, it’s effectively communicating a tone, a texture, and a sense of place. The game’s lighting design perfectly captures the intensity of the Mediterranean sun, which burns away clouds and bounces intensely off the pale stone facades of the region’s houses and walls. It’s a sweeping three-dimensional space, a grand and convincing backlot, through which you can navigate your character, Enzo, learning more about him and the world he inhabits in the process.

One of the game’s main locations is the Torrisi vineyard. It is the home base of mafia boss Don Torrisi, and the place where Enzo usually returns between missions. It’s one of the busiest sites in the game. Honking jalopies come roaring through its iron gates. Background conversations in clipped Sicilian bounce off the manor’s high stone walls. Cooks bicker in the kitchen, and the vineyard laborers stomp away in their tubs of sloshing grapes. It’s an audiovisual cacophony, and it all feels alive.

The Old Country’s cutscenes are where it most closely resembles the world of cinema. Here, the camera’s control is wrested away from the player and cuts are introduced. The frame is tighter on each character’s face, in order to catch the intricate nuances of their expressions. These moments are generally fine, and there is exceptional character work and voice acting throughout. Still, the greater wealth of narrative detail in the game is to be found in the spaces between these cutscenes, which are closer to interactive theater than they are to linear, cinematic narrative. As with interactive theater, where the action takes place not on one single stage but is spread out over an explorable space, players in The Old Country are less passive observers than active participants, encouraged to co-create the story through their interactions with it.

Some may protest that the bounds surrounding what one can and can’t do in the game are small, and tightly controlled, but being able to act within a predetermined set of options doesn’t erase the potency of that action. The many small choices we make as Enzo shape the tone of the story, shape how we understand and internalize its themes of power, loyalty, romance, and betrayal. Do we go out of our way, for example, to talk to Isabella when she calls for us, leaning into the game as a classic romance, a story about young, doomed love? Or do we brush her off and thus refocus on Enzo’s vocational rise through the ranks of the Torrisi clan? Does Enzo hurry past Father Ciccone after meeting in secret with Isabella, out of a sense of shame, or does he stay and let the priest greasily press him for a confession, keeping up a brave face and providing pat responses? Does Enzo stop and read every last pamphlet and newspaper clipping, attempting to gain a better understanding of the world around him? Does he examine the artwork in his bachelor pad, or stop to see what’s for sale in the market, or look up to gaze at a far off church steeple glinting in the sun? All these moments are invitations to stop and examine the world, which, when accepted, serve to enrich the experience of the game, making it feel deeper, more tactile, more real.

By choosing the focus of Enzo’s gaze, we are choosing the focus of the narrative. Unlike in the rigid cutscenes, we control the camera for most of the game, and, in turn, Enzo’s point of view, what he observes, his interiority, and how he relates to the world. Enzo is more than a body attached to a gun. Thanks to the wealth of detail in The Old Country’s Valle Dorata, thanks to the freedom we are given to take in this wealth, we are capable of understanding far more about the world than if we were sprinting through it. We can understand Enzo himself, see beyond his clean, handsome exterior. 

Videogame spaces are often richly imagined and intricately crafted, even when, more often than not—on their way to shoot a dozen minions, or to jump over a bottomless pit—players rush through them, knocking over detailed clay pots, stomping through gardens, leaping over delicate glasswork or power sliding over elaborately tiled floors. The visual layers of these spaces have gotten more detailed over the years, overstuffed with more verisimilitudinous texture; but the things you do in these spaces are often the same things you’ve always done, the tried and true interactive coda of videogames, going back to the nascent years of Atari and Amiga.

Common complaints about poor writing in games are perhaps misdirected. The reams of text that are crammed into your average videogame executable do not—cannot—make us believe in its narrative to the same extent that its world does. The magical space of a well-executed game world like The Old Country’s transcends the limitations of the form. The shortsighted and lazy criticism of it being “on rails,” pointing out the lack of total freedom your avatar has to travel up and down every staircase, or open every door, misses the point of a world made real by other means: by the heft and solidness of its setting and its characters. In accomplishing this small bit of theater, games like The Old Country surpass their programming and become living objects. They can almost be smelled, or tasted; they can be touched, and in turn, they touch us.

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Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Bluesky as @youmeyou.