For many people, the unbelievable tales of knights and dragons, love and loss, and courageous heroes overcoming all obstacles are those that made us fall in love with storytelling. Nonetheless, as we become old and life grows extra advanced, so do the forms of tales we yearn for. Though the hero’s journey might function a basis for numerous tales, these tales in the end evolve into retellings, reimaginings, subversions, and fully new creations–ones that alter our notions as to what a narrative may be. It’s this sense of shock and delight that Storyteller goals to seize. Nonetheless, the imaginative puzzle sport in the end fails to bottle that magic, failing to meaningfully evolve and as an alternative delivering a repetitive and underwhelming expertise.
The premise of Storyteller is easy but tantalizing: You create tales that yield a sure consequence by altering the order by which key occasions happen. You do that by filling in containers that resemble sketch panels, utilizing a longtime record of characters and settings to take action. As you construction your story, adjusting variables the place wanted so as to create the ending wanted to go the extent, the panels work together with one another, leading to a form of interactive butterfly impact.
The challenges begin off easy enough–make the prince and princess fall in love, assist the knight slay the monster, and so on.–then rapidly turn out to be a bit extra advanced, requiring you to know a sure character’s temperament and the way that will taste their interactions with others. For instance, the noble knight is cautious of murdering one other character. The bloodthirsty baron, then again, will leap on the alternative. Equally, the knight will all the time vie for the queen’s affection, although it stays as much as you to get her to really feel the identical in direction of him.
Simplicity is the center of Storyteller–for higher and for worse. The sport’s mechanics are straightforward to know and make for a breezy expertise, and its muted, cartoony-yet-minimalistic art work is charming. Its simplicity additionally makes for an expertise that fits transportable consoles nicely, as it is simple to select up and play just a few puzzles whereas on the go.
However whereas its premise is impressed, Storyteller suffers from feeling overly easy. At practically half-hour into the sport’s hour-long runtime, it already begins to really feel empty and much too small–too small for creativity, too small to supply a way of problem, and too small to create an attractive expertise. You rapidly uncover there are only a few variables and characters you may work together with, and they’re incessantly repeated all through ranges. This implies when you’re midway by the sport, you will don’t have any new puzzle items to ponder over or to try to squeeze into their correct place. And, after you have a grasp on how these variables work together with one another, every stage feels much less like a puzzle and extra like a fast train of tossing issues into place so as to transfer ahead.
At instances, the sport begins to really feel downright tedious, as you might be not fixing puzzles however merely arranging very apparent sequences of occasions. One puzzle, for instance, tasked me with establishing a number of totally different characters as associated by having them say, “I’m your mum or dad” to different characters. There was no problem to it, simply the frustration of getting to create a number of panels with the identical sentence spoken by totally different characters to ascertain this lineage and a few affection for one another. Regardless, and aside from one stage that took me barely longer than standard to determine, I used to be in a position to absent-mindedly breeze by your entire expertise, which fails to supply the sense of satisfaction you need from a puzzle sport.
Even the handful of non-compulsory targets scattered all through its ranges do not add a lot complexity to the sport, as they typically job you with simply tweaking a pair issues to get a barely totally different outcome. These challenges typically included issues like finishing a narrative in a sure variety of frames or with out utilizing a selected character, but are so easy you may typically knock them out the primary time you resolve the puzzle. Positive, it was cute sufficient to see a few of these variations play out, nevertheless it additionally made me want the sport supplied extra room for creativity–a bigger financial institution of variables to mess around with and extra choices on attain a stage’s finish objective.
Storyteller is irritating in that it by no means feels as in case you are really fixing a puzzle or making a story of your personal. Reasonably, you are attempting to piece collectively the precise story the sport expects from you. Whereas there are just a few ranges the place you may attain a passable ending a number of methods, these really feel few and much between. Finally, all these points stifle the expertise, lowering it to a inventive idea that does not really feel fulfilled. This additionally eliminates any replayability the sport might need, as when you play a stage, there is no profit to looking for a distinct answer and obtain a brand new consequence.
As somebody who loves fairy tales and has sunk fairly just a few hours into inventive puzzle video games like Scribblenauts, I used to be delighted by the prospect of enjoying Storyteller. Sadly, the expertise was underwhelming. Whereas its idea is fascinating, the sport in the end feels confined–held again by easy puzzles and its lack of inventive freedom.