Okay...normally I'd post a steam review of this, but the problem is that I got it for free on epic's game store and they don't do user reviews. So I'm plumbing it down here just for giggles. Read at your discretion...this is just me ordering my thoughts on it more than me caring about an audience. Oh...and I'm not blocked by some arbitrary max review size. yeeeeey! 
The hardest part about Stories Untold is, believe it or not, how to rate it. I got it for free. The initial price is ten bucks. I've played through it. Would I recommend? Eeeeeerrrrrmmmmmmmm....
(note: this is also the reason I don't turn it into a gbatemp review: it won't let me publish anything without a score.
Let's go the hard way. Suppose you're a brilliant science student. At one point you're assigned on a group project with the only girl in the class as well as the town idiot. Your task is to measure how much ice expands when it freezes from being water. For this task, you were given a starting amount of lukewarm water, two ice cubes and some measuring equipment.
...and then the local idiot decides to throw the ice cubes in the water before you can get around to actually MEASURING THE SIZE OF THE THING. You being proactive, you search around for other cubes and water (nope), search through notes on hints (some) and feeling annoyed at village idiot who sits around saying the three of you are going to fail. But you don't give up: instead of working forwards, you deduce from the resulting volume, the expanse as it should have been and the starting volume what the missing factor (the size of the ice cubes) should have been. You throw in a bit of variation to make it seem genuine, and voila. You've cheated but impressed the girl in your class and passed. Along with the village idiot. The three of you get an equal grade (except, of course, the invaluable impressing score on the girl(1) ).
I tell this story because I feel that this game underwent a similar situation. It's a horror game in four episodes, but they are not equal in quality. And that's putting it mildly. So what's the situation here...
First and foremost: the overall feel of the game. While new, stories untold is a throwback to how things where in the eighties. Think landline phones, old monitors, tape recorders and such. It clearly has an "old materials" theme and vibe that steals the atmosphere from 'Stranger things' a bit TOO well. But ey...it's better to steal from the best than to remain in mediocrity, right?
Ahem...let's get down to the individual parts:
1) 'the house abandon': lemme get right down to it: the first chapter isn't just good or even great. It's downright BRILLIANT! Granted...it's a variation on a text adventure game, so of course many people are going to be turned off. If you want gore or even monsters in your horror game, then you aren't going to find it here. Stories untold is the sort of horror game that aims to get under your skin and question your sanity.
And how does it do that? Well...it presents you with a wall with some decorations (phone, alarm clock and the such) and an old CRT computer screen that starts to play an eighties "the house abandon" video game. Aside from Leisure suit larry and kings quest 2, I've never played such a text adventure game (and these examples are a generation after that). This is all a slow start: you arrive at a house. You've got to type things like "get out of car", "open the door", "get the keys" and similar things. About 3/4th of your screen is in normal quality (HD, I even dare say) but the gaming monitor you play on is, of course, filled with lines and slow text. This is a drag, but take it from a horror movie afficionado: horror games have to invoke a bit of boredom first to get you into a groove of what to expect of the world. So where nineties video games had you point 'n clicking your way through something like this in a few minutes, you spend a relatively long time on actually getting into the house. Where you got a present: a brand new video gaming machine. With a game called "the house abandon".
You see? This already gets intriguing (not only are you playing a video game in a game, but it is about to go deeper...). It's at that point that the second part of psychological horror comes into effect: things are starting to become 'off'. You seemingly restart playing on the CRT monitor, but it's as if the game has somehow invaded the reality.
Spoiling more would be a shame, but as you can imagine: this is creeping because the medium in which the horror presents itself is a video game itself. Okay, it helps that I played it on a dark rainy night when I was alone at my to-be-renovated-house, but it would've scared me otherwise as well.
2) the lab construct: this short story has you as an assistant (or test subject?) in an almost typical eighties laboratory. Where the previous chapter a clear text adventure, then this is the point & click variant. What you are doing would already be a spoiler. The episode itself was mostly okay, yet hindered by me because I had thought they'd all be text adventures. I was playing this on a trackpad of a laptop (again: renovations...my gaming desk isn't ready), so things weren't smoothly either.
...but just near the end the devs had made a grave technical error. As (I assume) most gamers' minds work, once they are on to something, they want to follow it through. The story was leading up to something, and I was there experiencing it when it failed. And...it's a technical error but not a typical game crash. What happened was that certain images that I needed to translate simply flashed by too fast. No...wait: it was worse. It was fast, but not too fast that I couldn't make it out. It was like a platformer that ended a level in a jump that was literally impossible. As a result and my investment, I spent waaay too long on attempting to figure out what I was missing before (on hindsight: rightfully) assuming it was something with the game. I felt like cheating when I looked it up on youtube, but the only worse feeling of feeling stupid because it was something you SHOULD have known is the feeling that the puzzle had no real answer. In this case because the puzzle wasn't solvable by itself. It was also the last thing to do, so what was obviously meant as a big reveal/climax at the end was simply ruined for me in the same sense as someone telling a joke you already knew. I simply was out of the mood for this one. Worse is that this is a known bug (
) but AFAIK it was never properly patched.
3) The station proces: this...is the proverbial village idiot of the project. Oh, don't get me wrong: it's not like the devs intentionally made this one bad. But this one has you playing a lone scientist somewhere in a snowed in abandoned station, working the radio. Armed with a tuner and microfilm, you have to search the airwaves for the correct frequency.
I get the horror in this. There are voices and weird sounds, and it's easy to mistake the white noise for having actual meaning. The unfolding of the story itself is also fairly decent and if it wasn't for 2 incredibly glaring issues (one of them could be attributed to me but the other one is certainly an oversight of the devs) it might even have scared me. But it felt flat.
Why? Because after a few test runs, the frequencies to search for aren't given to you anymore but sent in code. Code that's on a microfilm. A microfilm that is, genuinely, near unreadable to me. I get the appeal. I get the puzzles. I get that this is aimed at ham radio enthusiasts boldly building a radio to intercept information. But damnit: MAKE THE (encrypted) INSTRUCTIONS READABLE!!!!
That in itself is already pretty en nerving. I searched for a pdf about this in the game folder in the vain hope that I would find the microfilm content, print it out and work out the puzzles that way (honestly: I would have). But that doesn't exist. And for some reason these are 20+ pages that you MIGHT need.
And as if that wasn't bad enough: the idea of these puzzles is similar to - I'm not making this up - getting around old DRM. You see, old games assumed that nobody would dare copy the manual as well, so they got around the ease of copying floppy disks by, at random intervals, ask you questions like "what word is printed on page 7, column 37 word 4 of the manual?" to make sure that if you were a software pirate, you at least pirated the manual as well (which pirates of course did, so it basically screwed everyone alike).
Now...strange as it might be, it would actually be interesting a concept for a bit. Using the microfilm to find the right page, zoom in and out and rotate to where it's readable...IF IT WAS READABLE! But it had a blur on it that there were letters I had to guess by their shape for the first assignment. And as it always goes: the next one was on a different page and required some basic programming.
...to which I said "screw this". I just went and found a spoiler that put the letters in a more clear fashion so I could work things out from there. It was very much breaking immersion, but I had no other choice.
And I was lucky at finding that, because remember where I said "a bit"? It's this episode's main gameplay loop. You've got to perform this at least half a dozen times. So not only is the main gameplay loop unreadable, it would've outstayed its welcome far more than it was worth.
So there I was, pretty annoyed of the incredible lack of testing this episode had. This had its effect on the story, which I started to deem dull and predictable. But keep in mind: it's impossible for me to say whether it was or wasn't. If you tried watching a movie like the matrix, big lebowski or whatever exceptionally great movie you would fancy while having an incredible itch or having to go to the toilet the whole time...you wouldn't be able to properly give an opinion on the movie. It's not a fair comparison because in this case the aggravating is in the gameplay, but surely you get my drift.
But alas: there is one more thing. At the end of this short episode, there is a part where you venture out. And...on paper this absolutely could have worked. But this suddenly puts you in a 3D FPS perspective where thus far you were operating on a flat plane. And at this point I have to admit to you that I picked this game to play on the premisse that I wouldn't have to use a mouse (which was only true for the first episode) nor need a heavy graphics card (I was basically playing this on a throwaway laptop). And on top of that: as a Belgian, the first thing I do in all PC games is check the settings. We have AZERTY keyboards, so WASD is in a pretty weird location (W is where your Z is and Q is swapped with A). This game had no rebindable keys. The arrow keys luckily worked as well, but could only comfortably be used by my right hand (while my left hand operated the track pad). Result: what was meant to be an eary walk through the snow with you being anxious about what might lurk there while you went for an errant...accidentally had me playing something almost akin to QLOP or 'getting over it with Ted Foddy'. While the actual level wasn't much more than a themed winding corridor, I managed to lose track of my orientation twice because the controls were so terrible.
Also...you know how quite some FPS and TPS games take the camera away from you on certain sections to pan over a specific part of the level where something cinematic is going down? That's done because devs know players: there is always some yahoo moonwalking through rapture admiring the leaking pipes of the underwater city rather than looking at the animations of little sisters devs spent hours on to prepare for the gamer.
A yahoo...or a stupid Belgian fumbling with his inability to properly move in a 3D environment while attempting to look all over the place (honestly: if you thought the blair witch project had bad camera movement you haven't seen me stumbling through this stupid section. I hate track pads).
And as such, this section ended in minority. if the devs had taken the camera and panned it properly, it would've ended in the proper cliffhanger...
4. The last session: this story is the hardest to judge. On a technical aspect, it's better than the previous chapter (none of those antics here aside from a small reoccurrence of the third one)...but it does this thing I absolutely hate in any story: it attempts to wrap things all together. You see, the game is like those horror anthologies that thus far only movies do: like the movies VHS and VHS2,or the tales from the crypt series. Or like those books containing bundles of short horror novels. Video games don't really do that (in horror, that is: minigames are usually something for party games). This would have been a fourth...if this fourth episode didn't pull the rug from underneath. The idea is that you're a psychiatric patient who watches horror episodes ('stories untold') in order not to having to deal with the trauma you carry with you.
This section uses a lot of walking in first person as well, but because there's no Z-axis (it's all on one floor) or confusing snow to throw off your sense of direction (or sends your framerates in the single digits), it's not as irritating.
However, the story is what does that here. If this were a better written game, it would have been a major plot twist that made all sorts of 'clicks' with the player. It would make sense out of all the mysterious things you saw and offer a different narrative on the horrors than what you originally thought you'd experience in the earlier games (erm...the ingame horrors, I mean: not my antics with the controls).
Alas...could have...should have...would have. Unfortunately, this isn't like that science project from my intro where we submitted one paper in the end. These are three completely different games with basically no overlap aside from a "use eighties electric equipment" (this one uses betamax and tape recorders, by the way) note. You can't just say "yup...let's write all that together in one final episode" and call it a day. Because then you're not writing for a video game but some sort of fanfic at best. The narrative in this game is, simply put, a mess. You hop between the mechanics of the different earlier games, and I get the idea that the devs wanted their audience to have a "aaaaah...so THIS is what this is all about!" feeling that went into crescendo as the final climax came closer.
...except that it doesn't. The cuts between the gameplay sections are lame and the only decent part of the finale was that they at least realised that their first episode was where the genuine horror came from. It has somewhat of a scary mood going if you forget even the remaining 2/3rds of this episode, but even then the final twist that came out of nowhere.
Conclusion:
In one of my earlier gbatemp years I gave "the static speaks my name" a high spot on my 'best games of the year' list, despite it being free and only 10-15 minutes long. And for good reason: while you mindlessly slaughter zombies and don't bat an eye, the sensation of having played the static speaks my name sends chills to my bone even thinking of it now (it's basically ten minutes seen through the eyes of an extremely depressed person).
The first episode of this game is a strong contender in that category of actual horror games that I played. It scared me to my core, which isn't a mere achievement (quite often when I hear people talking about how scary a movie was I have to suppress rollying my eyes and saying "you think that is scary? Try watching Srpski movie or A l'interiéur"). The rest - and especially the latter two episodes - are like those village idiots hoping that they'll be graded on the average. But why? Again: I got stories untold for free (thank you, @Epic games ), and that first episode was longer than 'the static'. Why should it deserve a lower spot because it has a lower average?
But likewise: I won't argue that if you look at the package as a whole, the average is much lower than it could have been. Hence this review. I hope you liked reading it...
(1): note: this story truly happened...except that I don't really describe myself as 'brilliant' but rather 'adequate enough to pass'. And I was just too shy to talk to the girl/woman in that full teenage period that we were in
The hardest part about Stories Untold is, believe it or not, how to rate it. I got it for free. The initial price is ten bucks. I've played through it. Would I recommend? Eeeeeerrrrrmmmmmmmm....
(note: this is also the reason I don't turn it into a gbatemp review: it won't let me publish anything without a score.
Let's go the hard way. Suppose you're a brilliant science student. At one point you're assigned on a group project with the only girl in the class as well as the town idiot. Your task is to measure how much ice expands when it freezes from being water. For this task, you were given a starting amount of lukewarm water, two ice cubes and some measuring equipment.
...and then the local idiot decides to throw the ice cubes in the water before you can get around to actually MEASURING THE SIZE OF THE THING. You being proactive, you search around for other cubes and water (nope), search through notes on hints (some) and feeling annoyed at village idiot who sits around saying the three of you are going to fail. But you don't give up: instead of working forwards, you deduce from the resulting volume, the expanse as it should have been and the starting volume what the missing factor (the size of the ice cubes) should have been. You throw in a bit of variation to make it seem genuine, and voila. You've cheated but impressed the girl in your class and passed. Along with the village idiot. The three of you get an equal grade (except, of course, the invaluable impressing score on the girl
(1) ).I tell this story because I feel that this game underwent a similar situation. It's a horror game in four episodes, but they are not equal in quality. And that's putting it mildly. So what's the situation here...
First and foremost: the overall feel of the game. While new, stories untold is a throwback to how things where in the eighties. Think landline phones, old monitors, tape recorders and such. It clearly has an "old materials" theme and vibe that steals the atmosphere from 'Stranger things' a bit TOO well. But ey...it's better to steal from the best than to remain in mediocrity, right?
Ahem...let's get down to the individual parts:
1) 'the house abandon': lemme get right down to it: the first chapter isn't just good or even great. It's downright BRILLIANT! Granted...it's a variation on a text adventure game, so of course many people are going to be turned off. If you want gore or even monsters in your horror game, then you aren't going to find it here. Stories untold is the sort of horror game that aims to get under your skin and question your sanity.
And how does it do that? Well...it presents you with a wall with some decorations (phone, alarm clock and the such) and an old CRT computer screen that starts to play an eighties "the house abandon" video game. Aside from Leisure suit larry and kings quest 2, I've never played such a text adventure game (and these examples are a generation after that). This is all a slow start: you arrive at a house. You've got to type things like "get out of car", "open the door", "get the keys" and similar things. About 3/4th of your screen is in normal quality (HD, I even dare say) but the gaming monitor you play on is, of course, filled with lines and slow text. This is a drag, but take it from a horror movie afficionado: horror games have to invoke a bit of boredom first to get you into a groove of what to expect of the world. So where nineties video games had you point 'n clicking your way through something like this in a few minutes, you spend a relatively long time on actually getting into the house. Where you got a present: a brand new video gaming machine. With a game called "the house abandon".
You see? This already gets intriguing (not only are you playing a video game in a game, but it is about to go deeper...). It's at that point that the second part of psychological horror comes into effect: things are starting to become 'off'. You seemingly restart playing on the CRT monitor, but it's as if the game has somehow invaded the reality.
Spoiling more would be a shame, but as you can imagine: this is creeping because the medium in which the horror presents itself is a video game itself. Okay, it helps that I played it on a dark rainy night when I was alone at my to-be-renovated-house, but it would've scared me otherwise as well.
2) the lab construct: this short story has you as an assistant (or test subject?) in an almost typical eighties laboratory. Where the previous chapter a clear text adventure, then this is the point & click variant. What you are doing would already be a spoiler. The episode itself was mostly okay, yet hindered by me because I had thought they'd all be text adventures. I was playing this on a trackpad of a laptop (again: renovations...my gaming desk isn't ready), so things weren't smoothly either.
...but just near the end the devs had made a grave technical error. As (I assume) most gamers' minds work, once they are on to something, they want to follow it through. The story was leading up to something, and I was there experiencing it when it failed. And...it's a technical error but not a typical game crash. What happened was that certain images that I needed to translate simply flashed by too fast. No...wait: it was worse. It was fast, but not too fast that I couldn't make it out. It was like a platformer that ended a level in a jump that was literally impossible. As a result and my investment, I spent waaay too long on attempting to figure out what I was missing before (on hindsight: rightfully) assuming it was something with the game. I felt like cheating when I looked it up on youtube, but the only worse feeling of feeling stupid because it was something you SHOULD have known is the feeling that the puzzle had no real answer. In this case because the puzzle wasn't solvable by itself. It was also the last thing to do, so what was obviously meant as a big reveal/climax at the end was simply ruined for me in the same sense as someone telling a joke you already knew. I simply was out of the mood for this one. Worse is that this is a known bug (
google 'stories untold glyph'
3) The station proces: this...is the proverbial village idiot of the project. Oh, don't get me wrong: it's not like the devs intentionally made this one bad. But this one has you playing a lone scientist somewhere in a snowed in abandoned station, working the radio. Armed with a tuner and microfilm, you have to search the airwaves for the correct frequency.
I get the horror in this. There are voices and weird sounds, and it's easy to mistake the white noise for having actual meaning. The unfolding of the story itself is also fairly decent and if it wasn't for 2 incredibly glaring issues (one of them could be attributed to me but the other one is certainly an oversight of the devs) it might even have scared me. But it felt flat.
Why? Because after a few test runs, the frequencies to search for aren't given to you anymore but sent in code. Code that's on a microfilm. A microfilm that is, genuinely, near unreadable to me. I get the appeal. I get the puzzles. I get that this is aimed at ham radio enthusiasts boldly building a radio to intercept information. But damnit: MAKE THE (encrypted) INSTRUCTIONS READABLE!!!!
That in itself is already pretty en nerving. I searched for a pdf about this in the game folder in the vain hope that I would find the microfilm content, print it out and work out the puzzles that way (honestly: I would have). But that doesn't exist. And for some reason these are 20+ pages that you MIGHT need.
And as if that wasn't bad enough: the idea of these puzzles is similar to - I'm not making this up - getting around old DRM. You see, old games assumed that nobody would dare copy the manual as well, so they got around the ease of copying floppy disks by, at random intervals, ask you questions like "what word is printed on page 7, column 37 word 4 of the manual?" to make sure that if you were a software pirate, you at least pirated the manual as well (which pirates of course did, so it basically screwed everyone alike).
Now...strange as it might be, it would actually be interesting a concept for a bit. Using the microfilm to find the right page, zoom in and out and rotate to where it's readable...IF IT WAS READABLE! But it had a blur on it that there were letters I had to guess by their shape for the first assignment. And as it always goes: the next one was on a different page and required some basic programming.
...to which I said "screw this". I just went and found a spoiler that put the letters in a more clear fashion so I could work things out from there. It was very much breaking immersion, but I had no other choice.
And I was lucky at finding that, because remember where I said "a bit"? It's this episode's main gameplay loop. You've got to perform this at least half a dozen times. So not only is the main gameplay loop unreadable, it would've outstayed its welcome far more than it was worth.
So there I was, pretty annoyed of the incredible lack of testing this episode had. This had its effect on the story, which I started to deem dull and predictable. But keep in mind: it's impossible for me to say whether it was or wasn't. If you tried watching a movie like the matrix, big lebowski or whatever exceptionally great movie you would fancy while having an incredible itch or having to go to the toilet the whole time...you wouldn't be able to properly give an opinion on the movie. It's not a fair comparison because in this case the aggravating is in the gameplay, but surely you get my drift.
But alas: there is one more thing. At the end of this short episode, there is a part where you venture out. And...on paper this absolutely could have worked. But this suddenly puts you in a 3D FPS perspective where thus far you were operating on a flat plane. And at this point I have to admit to you that I picked this game to play on the premisse that I wouldn't have to use a mouse (which was only true for the first episode) nor need a heavy graphics card (I was basically playing this on a throwaway laptop). And on top of that: as a Belgian, the first thing I do in all PC games is check the settings. We have AZERTY keyboards, so WASD is in a pretty weird location (W is where your Z is and Q is swapped with A). This game had no rebindable keys. The arrow keys luckily worked as well, but could only comfortably be used by my right hand (while my left hand operated the track pad). Result: what was meant to be an eary walk through the snow with you being anxious about what might lurk there while you went for an errant...accidentally had me playing something almost akin to QLOP or 'getting over it with Ted Foddy'. While the actual level wasn't much more than a themed winding corridor, I managed to lose track of my orientation twice because the controls were so terrible.
Also...you know how quite some FPS and TPS games take the camera away from you on certain sections to pan over a specific part of the level where something cinematic is going down? That's done because devs know players: there is always some yahoo moonwalking through rapture admiring the leaking pipes of the underwater city rather than looking at the animations of little sisters devs spent hours on to prepare for the gamer.
A yahoo...or a stupid Belgian fumbling with his inability to properly move in a 3D environment while attempting to look all over the place (honestly: if you thought the blair witch project had bad camera movement you haven't seen me stumbling through this stupid section. I hate track pads).
And as such, this section ended in minority. if the devs had taken the camera and panned it properly, it would've ended in the proper cliffhanger...
the room you started in had somehow changed into the room of the first episode
4. The last session: this story is the hardest to judge. On a technical aspect, it's better than the previous chapter (none of those antics here aside from a small reoccurrence of the third one)...but it does this thing I absolutely hate in any story: it attempts to wrap things all together. You see, the game is like those horror anthologies that thus far only movies do: like the movies VHS and VHS2,or the tales from the crypt series. Or like those books containing bundles of short horror novels. Video games don't really do that (in horror, that is: minigames are usually something for party games). This would have been a fourth...if this fourth episode didn't pull the rug from underneath. The idea is that you're a psychiatric patient who watches horror episodes ('stories untold') in order not to having to deal with the trauma you carry with you.
This section uses a lot of walking in first person as well, but because there's no Z-axis (it's all on one floor) or confusing snow to throw off your sense of direction (or sends your framerates in the single digits), it's not as irritating.
However, the story is what does that here. If this were a better written game, it would have been a major plot twist that made all sorts of 'clicks' with the player. It would make sense out of all the mysterious things you saw and offer a different narrative on the horrors than what you originally thought you'd experience in the earlier games (erm...the ingame horrors, I mean: not my antics with the controls).
Alas...could have...should have...would have. Unfortunately, this isn't like that science project from my intro where we submitted one paper in the end. These are three completely different games with basically no overlap aside from a "use eighties electric equipment" (this one uses betamax and tape recorders, by the way) note. You can't just say "yup...let's write all that together in one final episode" and call it a day. Because then you're not writing for a video game but some sort of fanfic at best. The narrative in this game is, simply put, a mess. You hop between the mechanics of the different earlier games, and I get the idea that the devs wanted their audience to have a "aaaaah...so THIS is what this is all about!" feeling that went into crescendo as the final climax came closer.
...except that it doesn't. The cuts between the gameplay sections are lame and the only decent part of the finale was that they at least realised that their first episode was where the genuine horror came from. It has somewhat of a scary mood going if you forget even the remaining 2/3rds of this episode, but even then the final twist that came out of nowhere.
honestly: only open the spoiler if you've already played it or are sure you never want to play it...you can't unwatch it.
the protagonist from the 'house abandon' got drunk and then got into an accident that killed his sister...and he feels remorse because he planted - and this is the player having to do this, despite there'd be no indication whatsoever - a bottle of whiskey in the car seat of the other car, thus putting the blame on the other driver
Conclusion:
In one of my earlier gbatemp years I gave "the static speaks my name" a high spot on my 'best games of the year' list, despite it being free and only 10-15 minutes long. And for good reason: while you mindlessly slaughter zombies and don't bat an eye, the sensation of having played the static speaks my name sends chills to my bone even thinking of it now (it's basically ten minutes seen through the eyes of an extremely depressed person).
The first episode of this game is a strong contender in that category of actual horror games that I played. It scared me to my core, which isn't a mere achievement (quite often when I hear people talking about how scary a movie was I have to suppress rollying my eyes and saying "you think that is scary? Try watching Srpski movie or A l'interiéur"). The rest - and especially the latter two episodes - are like those village idiots hoping that they'll be graded on the average. But why? Again: I got stories untold for free (thank you, @Epic games
), and that first episode was longer than 'the static'. Why should it deserve a lower spot because it has a lower average?But likewise: I won't argue that if you look at the package as a whole, the average is much lower than it could have been. Hence this review. I hope you liked reading it...
(1): note: this story truly happened...except that I don't really describe myself as 'brilliant' but rather 'adequate enough to pass'. And I was just too shy to talk to the girl/woman in that full teenage period that we were in
