“It’s like a campfire horror story”
Go to garden” types the man who has forgotten how an ancient genre works. The game does not understand. StoriesUntold is an old-school text adventure played inside a modernlooking game. The first episode, The House Abandon, is set in a family home that your character is returning to for the first time in years, before the game resets and the same events take a spooky turn—complete with the room around you being manipulated as a result of your commands. Lights going off, the phone ringing, that sort of thing. It shits you up good and proper.
The other three episodes take place in different locations, with very different setups, which I won’t spoil here since the game is very reasonably priced, and you should play it. It’s an anthology, which isn’t all that common in games, and as such I’ve found it scratches a similar itch to the erratic-but-oftenexcellent tech-focused TV series Black Mirror. More than that, though, The HouseAbandon feels like a campfire horror story, one told by the biggest bullshit artist of your friendship group, who claims this all once happened to his mate’s cousin’s non-specific plumber friend, Dave Johnson. Manipulating the room around you is such a simple but perfect horror device.
In truth, the biggest horror of Stories Untold is working out exactly how you make your character open a glove compartment, or indeed, walk to the garden at the back of the house. I’d say about half of my playthrough of that first chapter was spent trial-anderroring different commands, to the point where I even started looking up how to do things on the Steam forums. According to text adventure expert Tony Ellis, not even the ’80s games that inspired this were so unforgiving about how specific you had to be. That happened to Tony, too, as well as a couple more of my friends who played the game. But the atmosphere is so convincing that I can let it go.
Horror show
Here’s the influence I hope Stories Untold has on other developers: more anthologies. Maybe it can be a Stories Untold- sized collection of four or five short stories, maybe around one theme by different developers. Given the way the anthology format is gradually creeping back into other media, such as horror films (ABCs of Death, V/H/S) or TV (Channel Zero, American Crime Story), I can see that happening. My dream BioShock sequel would be three or four extended episodes with different takes on Rapture or Columbia by different developers. StoriesUntold is evidence that something like that could work very well.