Over the past few years, indie games have been the ones I've thought about the most when I've put them down, or when reflecting on my favourite games in any given year. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Immortality, for example, was not my Game of the Year last year but it is the one that will stay with me for the longest. Triple-A games are engineered to give you hours of fun, and the best ones do it successfully, but only on a rare occasion do they leave much of a lasting impression beyond enjoyment. Because of this, while my most anticipated games of the year are big, meaty triple-As like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man 2 or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 4, I also have my eye on indie games that I hope will linger long after the credits. This has already paid off with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Paranormasight, but in the case of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Storyteller, I've been left wanting.

I can't remember Storyteller getting any major promotion, which is a little odd for a game published by Annapurna. Storyteller was suggested to me while watching trailers for a couple of other indie games I'm hoping will leave a mark, and I was hooked on the idea instantly. The game is made up of a series of blank pages, and you are given an assortment of characters to fill in the comic book style panels on each page. You choose the backgrounds and place the characters, telling a story.

Related: Storyteller Review - A Novel꧅ Idea But Not Quite A Bestseller

For example, you start off with a wedding scene and a graveyard, and three characters. First panel: two characters marry, second panel: one of these characters dies, third panel: the surviving character and unused character marry. Simple. If you marry one pair, then try to marry one of them off again, they will refuse, because they're already married. As you go on, the stories can get more complicated - they may involve witnessing a murder, transforming into a vampire, or kidnapping a queen - but at the same time, they never go anywhere. While character designs are repeated, the stories don't carry over between panels, and because the game gives you specific solutions to find, you don't feel much like the titular storyteller at all.

The duchess getting the butler arrested in Storyteller.

As for the stories themselves, they're built around fantasy themes of royalty, plots, and monsters, but that only gives us the feeling that we've seen it all before. We can create some twists for ourselves, but because it's a puzzle game, not a storytelling game, we're left coming up against dead ends. Some might stump you for a minute or two, but the game never feels like it's pushing you very much, and the whole thing took me only just north of an hour to beat. I'm all for short games made under better conditions, but there's a limit to that, especially when the whole affair is so thoroughly lacking in any sense of progress. You can skip between puzzles at any time, so you're never stuck even when you are.

I mentioned Paranormasight earlier, and strangely enough, that makes for a solid comparison. The horror game is a visual novel held together by a character known as The Storyteller, and it offers exactly what Storyteller lacks. While I wouldn't expect Annapurna's offering to explore the clash between Eastern and Western horror while posing ethical questions and violent twists at every corner, Paranormasight is ultimately a predetermined story that you are only steering slightly, but it manages to pull you in, and when puzzles stump you, even if you can duck out and return, you feel like you have overcome something significant when you figure them out.

The level where the Queen must marry in Storyteller.

If Paranormasight is an example of how to do narrative games correctly, Storyteller's short runtime, lack of cohesion across each puzzle, and surprisingly restrictive nature reveal all the possible pitfalls. Even when Storyteller offers multiple outcomes, they're usually the case of swapping two characters around, rather than finding a fresh way of thinking. Ultimately, it's a good idea, but the execution is lacking - unlike the 17 or so repetitive executions I had to perform in these medieval stories. Don't judge a book by its cover, judge it by the words of your favourite gaming journalist instead - Storyteller's tale might be best left untold.

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