Theatre Tales

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Theatre Tales is a family-friendly Graphic Adventure released on Apple TV in 2016 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2019. This game purportedly intends to present multiple fairy tales in a simple, wordless, kid-friendly style designed to look like a handmade puppet show. However, the notion of a game held together by little more than Scotch tape and chewing gum may be a little too accurate here.

The visuals in this game do a good job of selling its concept, with everything looking like it was pieced together as a part of a child’s puppet show, complete with popsicle sticks to move around the characters, and pieces of tape holding the background in place. It’s a sufficient presentation, but while the visuals seems stylized to look amateurish, the sound simply seems amateurish, with a simple, annoying plunky piano loop for music, and with simple sound effects like your character shouting “yay” whenever completing a goal.

However, the presentation is the least of this game’s problems. This game’s multiple fairy tales players can play through here include Little Red Riding Hood and… that’s it. Others are listed in the menu, but they are locked, inaccessible. You can’t unlock them through gameplay, an in-game shop, or DLC. They are there only to tease and to imply that there is more to this game than what’s here… which is a simple story that can be completed in all of two minutes.

It’s not even a very good two minutes, as you’re led by the nose and told what to do every step of the way. I get that this is a game intended for kids, but even then you’d hope that there would be some sense that the player has some utility here. To make matters more frustrating, players control the movement of characters using the right stick, with the left stick and D-pad being largely useless during the game.

Heck, this game doesn’t even get the story of Little Red Riding Hood right – the wolf never eats anyone, and as such never needs his tummy cut open to rescue his victims. A rather grotesque part of the original fairy tale, to be sure, but if they were going to insist on making this the only story told in the game, they could have at least included one of the story’s more interesting elements.

In the end, Theater Tales is an incomplete scam of a game, one that seeks to con young children and their parents out of a few bucks in exchange for the promise of a series of fairy tales while only providing a quick and dirty two minutes of gameplay before running off with your money. Under no circumstances should you buy this absolute disgrace of a game.

tl;dr – Theatre Tales is at least nominally a family-friendly Graphic Adventure where kids can re-enact classic fairy tales, but the only story actually included here is Little Red Riding Hood, which is simple, boring, unfaithful to the original story, and can be completed in just a few minutes. This is an incomplete, cynical scam of a game, and it’s despicable that anyone would try to bilk players out of their money for this trash.

Grade: F

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