Stories Untold

Genre: First-Person Graphic Adventure / Text Adventure / Horror Game

Players: 1

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Review:

Stories Untold is a compilation of four short stories first released on PC in 2017 (with the first short story based on a prior version of the story released in 2016) that play out as a combination of First-Person Graphic Adventure and Text Adventure, with Horror themes strewn throughout them. The stories are all seemingly self-contained although gradually the connection between them is revealed, and in many ways the dark tone and focus on technology is evocative of the Netflix series Black Mirror, although thematically much of Stories Untold feels a lot like another Netflix series, Stranger Things, both due to its less-visceral take on the horror genre, but also its overall presentation and the 1980s setting.

On the note of that presentation, it’s hard to comment on it. Much of the game takes place in stationary environments with players interacting with various machines, and there’s not much here to be impressive. Without giving too much away, I will say that later on the game opens up a bit, and at that point the results are mixed, with some nice lighting effects and terrible slowdown issues. However, the graphics aren’t really the focus here, so the flaws can be somewhat forgiven.

The sound and writing, on the other hand, are both quite good, making excellent use of the video game format to do some clever fourth wall breaking, with all of the game’s stories having the environment around you affected by your interactions with the machines, sometimes in surprising ways, and with some parts supported by some pretty good voice acting as well. I hesitate to go too much into detail for fear of spoiling things.

The gameplay itself, where there is gameplay, is honestly just different forms of tedium. A text adventure game, a series of commands to follow out of a rulebook, reference guides that need to be paged through to find proper answering codes to code words… there’s nothing terrible here, and at a few points there are even some interesting puzzles, but much of the way this is presented to the player feels a lot like busywork. However, the stories here are fascinating enough to compel you to keep going.

There is one other downside here, and that is the game’s length – all four of the contained short stories are over within the span of a few hours, and there isn’t much replay value. And with much of that time spent on the aforementioned busywork, I can’t help but feel like this game would have benefited from some work to develop its gameplay elements to better compliment the already-solid story.

As it is, Stories Untold is still a unique and interesting experience that’s worth playing if you have the patience to put up with all that busywork (and, very likely, look up a few things online when you get exasperated with said busywork), and especially if you’re a fan of shows like Black Mirror and Stranger Things. The game’s compelling story and fourth wall-breaking elements give it something unique and interesting, even if it doesn’t fully live up to its potential.

tl;dr – Stories Untold is a First-Person Graphic Adventure with some Text Adventure and Horror elements to it, and it features four compelling stories that combine into one fascinating fourth wall-breaking experience. It’s a short experience, though, and one padded out with busywork. However, if you have the patience for it, it’s still an experience worth having.

Grade: B-

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