Some of the best stories are ones where we already know the ending before we begin. We know Romeo & Juliet die at the end, we know Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother, and we know the princess breaks the prince’s frog curse with a wet, sloppy kiss. The important part is how it happens. We want to experience the journey, how each event unfolds, what drives these characters, and what leads to these conclusions, and that’s exactly what 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Storyteller is all about.
You’re not crafting your own tales here, you are given a title for each segment — essentially an objective — but it’s up to you to figure out how to make the events unfold with the tools at your disposal. You have a range of characters and scenes and a set number of frames you can use, but you don’t have to use them all — there are particular objectives you can complete in fewer frames and♏ without using all the characters. You’ll also find there is sometimes more than one way to achieve your desired ending too, and that’s all part of the fun of tweaking tales.
Storyteller works because of its core mechanics. The characters and situations are reactive to whatever came before them, with different scenes shaping the story in various ways. Each page is a puzzle for you to solve as the author, mixing and matching different elements together until you reach your objective. One early scenario is ‘Lenora Drinks Poison’, but it’s not as simple as placing Lenora in the poison scene. She’ll just shrug at you as she has no reason to drink poison. But if you make her get married before that and then kill off her spouse, well, now she’s got a reason.
Similarly, people aren’t necessarily going to kill each other or take up arms without a cause, so you’ll need to give them a little push in the right direction to achieve their happily ever after (or not, as the ca🌟se might be). It’s fun to swap characters and scenes in and out to see how it affects the rest of the story, as the exact same scene and character can change depending on the prior context. You could have two lovebirds kissing in the final scene, but if you then use a death scene to kill one of them off in a previous frame, you could be left with your heroine screaming in the face of her beloved’s ghost at the end as a result.
The art style is reminiscent of children’s books and is presented in a comic book style with frame-by-frame progression, making it perfectly suited to the theme. As you drag and drop characters and scenes into place, delightful animations pop the characters to life on the page. Storyteller makes an effort to be humorous with funny little situations you have to instigate, including murder, marrying your own mother, and even just making two characters wait forever, but you get tired of the same quirks bei൩ng used over and over quite quickly.
Some scenarios have a bonus objective to spice♕ things up a little. The main objective might be ‘The Queen Marries’, but then it’ll add on ‘...aཧ fearsome dragon’, leaving you to swap scenes out and work out how to achieve this extra goal of having the poor old lady marry a monster. But that’s as interesting as it gets.
While the mechanics are utterly charming, they’re not challꦯenging at all, which is a shame when Storyteller is meant to be a puzzle game. At most, there were a couple of scenarios I didn’t work out on the first attempt, but even they didn’t keep me stalled for long. I completed the game in just over an hour — that was playing at a leisurely pace, and taking notes as I went.
I don’t mind short games, some stories are better for being brief, but Storyteller seems to have such 🦋promise and scope to be larger in more ways than one that it feels disappointing to find yourself at the end all too soon. Despite reusing character models and settings across multiple stories, each puzzle starts fresh too, so༺ there’s no sense of progress or growth.
Despite the seemingly limitless scenarios that Storyteller could throw at you, it instead confines itself to an unsatisfyingly small niche of generic fantasy tropes. By the time you finish the game, it feels as though you should have only finished the first part. Coming to the end of the book — the end of the game — should have been the first part of a series of books to complete, each with increasing difficulty and options. I actually clicked around to see if I had truly finishe🧸d the whole thing as I was doubting myself, but my save file confirmed I was on 100 percent.
Storyteller would be a far stronger experience if the puzzles were more challenging and ܫthere were more scenarios to explore. I coulꦚdn’t help but feel that it was too reserved and I would have preferred if it instead gave an abundance of scenes and characters to make it harder to fathom out exactly what you needed to do by spoiling you for choice. Peeking at earlier key artwork for the game shows a range of characters and situations that I didn’t experience at all, so I wonder if the original plan was to have a larger, more varied title and that, for whatever reason, a lot of this got scrapped.
Like a good book that you simply can’t put down, Storyteller will charm you with its whimsical and 🔴inventive gameplay, so much so you’ll finish it in one sitting. But therein also lies its biggest flaw. While Storyteller has a superb foundation and core idea, the puzzle mechanics aren’t challenging, and the gameplay is too short and lacks variety, so you’ll breeze through it in no time at all.
Score: 2.5/5. A PC code was provided by the publisher.
Storyteller is a game in which you build stories using visual cues, and features a charming children's storybook art style. The only limit is your own imagination.