Story based games with multiple point of view

The short video above is the introduction to my upcoming game Bionic Heart 2. What does it have to do with the title? Simple, because is a visual novel game that tells a story from multiple point of views (from now I'll abbreviate it with PoV).

For those familiar with the first title, this time you'll be able to play not only as Luke, but also as Tom, Tanya and Tina. If you don't know the first game, I urge you to find out about it immediately here! http://www.winterwolves.com/bionicheart.htm

Of course it's not a new thing. Several other games, movies, comics have used this peculiar form of storytelling. I find it very interesting... at least from my PoV ;)

I had this idea this Spring, when I was playing the game Heavy Rain, which uses this system too. And I thought it would work pretty well for the sequel of one of my early "cult" visual novels, Bionic Heart. Is fun how some games, despite selling much less than other games, can still be popular and have a following of "true fans". The first game definitely had many true fans!

Back to the topic, I find telling the story from multiple point of view very interesting. Because you can play as different characters and see the events and the various situations from their perspective, which is an interesting thing. Even in real life, how many times you wondered how it would be to be in someone else's shoes?

From the gameplay point of view, this is also interesting because decisions made with each of the four playable characters will have an impact on the game world and on the story. This really intrigues me, and since you always play in first person (even if you control a different character every time) it doesn't ruin the immersion.

A step forward could be having the option of choose which character to control in several situations. This is partly what I did on Planet Stronghold with the quests and the skills usage, but of course it was in a very smaller scale (also it was a RPG, so was only during short scenes).

Definitely making a game like that will result in a refreshing and interesting experience for the player, in particular for a game with several mysteries/secrets to unveil (like Bionic Heart 2!) but the effort in writing/planning it must not be underestimated, because is easy to make mistakes like plot holes or wrong chronological order of events.