“An honest tale speeds best being plainly told,” says Queen Elizabeth in Richard III. It’s a surprisingly modern attitude — that the most effective yarns favour clarity and brevity. Storyteller, a new puzzle game based around building narratives, seems to have taken the monarch’s advice to heart. It packs 51 headscratchers into just a handful of hours, while attempting something strikingly ambitious: the deconstruction and remixing of western literature’s most famous tales.
It does so by fusing together two relatively young forms: the comic strip and the video game. At the start of each puzzle, you are given a title, “Seeing the Ghost of a Lover” for example, and a number of panels, characters and scenes to manipulate. For example, you place the wedding scene down and then drop Adam and Eve into it. They fall in love. Next, you select the graveyard, with “Adam” on the tombstone and Eve kneeling next to it. She mourns her late husband. Finally, you create another wedding scene featuring the biblical duo; however, this time Eve sees the spirit of her deceased partner. Et voilà! The story is thus complete.
Beginning with three panels, the puzzles eventually ramp up in complexity to panels spanning eight. All the good stuff is here: the aforementioned love, death, heartbreak and ghosts, as well as resurrection, amnesia, jealousy, revenge, monsters and even Oedipal incest. Some of the most satisfying puzzles are those grouped under “Secrets”, whose comic strips involve demanding royalty, resentful butlers and good old-fashioned detective work. Indeed, there is a joy in working backwards like a detective during these plot-driven conundrums, arriving at solutions that often playfully subvert the tropes on which they are based.
Beyond a handful of characters who possess immutable traits — chivalrous knight, treacherous usurper and a malevolent dwarf named Hatey — Storyteller offers an enjoyably flexible approach to classic sagas. This is demonstrated most clearly in the game’s attitude towards love and its many wrinkles (including triangles and affairs). Want the maid to have a crush on the queen? Not a problem. Think two curse-ridden frogs should share a kiss on a gondola? The game will duly accommodate that too.
Yet by the time credits roll, it feels as if Storyteller hasn’t quite capitalised on the rich possibilities of its ingenious premise. The game is undeniably funny, but lacks a few punchlines. Moreover, its tour of the world’s most beloved stories is whistle-stop to a fault and ends a little too abruptly.
There’s no doubt that this elegant and charming game understands its source material, but it seems not to have applied all of this learning to its own. What’s arguably missing is a rip-roaring crescendo where all of the various elements — plot, character, form and style — coalesce. As it stands, Storyteller lacks the closure of its greatest forebears.
★★★☆☆
Available now on PC and Nintendo Switch
