Storyteller is a game many people have been anticipating. It’s even possible that you heard about this game long ago and could have forgotten it – it’s gone through a famously long and difficult development, stretching back even before creator Daniel Benmergui won the Nuovo innovation award at the 2012 Independent Games Festival, more than 10 years ago. After the long wait, the game of building and tweaking interactive, comic-strip stories has finally arrived. Published by Annapurna Interactive and polished to a bright shine, Storyteller looks and feels great, barely resembling the early pixel-art prototypes we first saw over a decade ago.
The action of Storyteller happens on the pages of a grand tome, a big book of stories that you are responsible for writing and narrating. When you select a level to play, you’re taken to the page for that story: a blank setup reminiscent of empty comic-book frames, with some ingredients and pieces laid out for you underneath. The most common puzzle elements are settings and characters. Choose a location or situation to start things off: is this a scene where two characters are falling in love? Is it a tragic moment where one character visits the grave of another? Much of the appeal of Storyteller comes from the freedom you have to play around with these toys and see what happens. If you put someone through a heartbreak, and then they meet someone new… can they fall in love again? How does this little storytelling engine react? Now change the scenes around, switch the order or swap out a character, and watch as the narrative adjusts itself to take these new twists into account.
To guide you in this fiction-writing playground, each level has an objective listed at the top of the screen. Maybe you need to make sure “The Queen Marries” or someone is “Cured of Vampirism.” The goals vary as wildly as the settings, often prompting you to find a very specific thread of events that yield the desired outcome. Sometimes you’ll be crafting stories of love or righteous justice, while other levels will ask you to write terrible tragedies. I didn’t always find the objectives challenging to complete, but much of the fun of the game lies in taking your time exploring what possibilities exist in each unique arrangement of story elements.
After you solve the primary task, some levels introduce a new bonus objective. Tell the same tragic story, but without any of the characters dying. Figure out how to put an entirely different character on the throne. These secondary objectives, along with further hidden goals, are some of the best parts of Storyteller, encouraging players to plumb the depths of this literary simulation and discover what unique possibilities are hiding in the corners.
There’s no denying that Storyteller is doing something unique in the world of puzzle games. It does have an internal logic, but it’s hidden under this charming surface layer of stories and motifs, characters and motivations, and as you play you slowly tease out how these elements interact with each other and what fairy-tale rules dictate the outcomes of your stories. The game’s hand-drawn storybook style is beautiful to look at, and everything you do is textured with wonderful feedback and animation. The soundtrack is similarly impressive: I was humming along to the songs that felt like perfect accompaniments to my narratives, and I was surprised how many new tracks the game had in store as I moved through its various settings and chapters.
Storyteller might not have burned my brain with complicated logic problems, only a few complex puzzles near the end really giving me a challenge, but I don’t think that’s always the point of a game — even a thinky one. My lasting impression was one of wanting more: even taking my time savoring each new level, I was done with the game in a handful of hours, and I think there’s so much potential to further explore the interactive webs the game weaves. Here’s hoping we see some new chapters soon to follow up this unique, gorgeous, casual-friendly experience.
Storyteller is available now on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
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