HomeReviewsStoryteller

Storyteller review: a delightful bookish puzzler that ends before you’re readyMore of a novella

More of a novella

A story in the puzzle game Storyteller in which a man called Bernard has turned into a werewolf, eaten a woman in the forest, turned back into a man, and then been kind of ambivalent about it - the player has got the story wrong

Storytelleris a make-your-own drama puzzle game, taking place on the pages of a book and within empty comic-ish panels on those pages. For each puzzle you’re given a set of characters and scenarios (the Baron, the Knight, the Queen; a wedding, a kidnap, an execution) and are tasked with arranging them in a combination that fits the story title you’re given (The Queen Marries). It’s playful and cute, with surprising depth that draws inspiration from classic stories. It’s also very short. I’d wager you’ll have hunnerpercentedStorytellerin two hours max, which will sound like mana from heaven to some, but may disappoint you if you’ve been waiting for Storyteller forover a decade.

That’s not to say that Storyteller doesn’t have more going on than it did 11 years ago. I found the runtime annoying because Storyteller seemed to end just as I was properly getting into it. Your tome of interactive tales is divided into 13 chapters, each with four puzzles, for a total of 52 challenges. The early ones teach you the basics of people falling in love, dying, being broken-hearted, but also free to marry again (characters get over the death of loved ones pretty quickly). It’s here you learn that the order in which you do things is important, and that states must be reversed. If you kill someone off in one scene, you have to resurrect them later, or whenever you play them for the rest of the story they appear as a ghost. If the dastardly Baron disguises himself as a dragon, then a dragon he’ll stay until you have him take the disguise off again.

Watch on YouTube

Cover image for YouTube video

Similarly, you learn what states people need to be in to perform certain actions. If you have the poison scenario you know someone either needs to be very sad or very angry; if Edgar’s lover has died he’ll drink it himself, but if she was murdered he’ll poison her killer. It’s impressive and complicated, but Storyteller is good at helping you along, both in adding new constraints that shape the puzzles - many characters will marry whoever you put in front of them, but the King is strictly hetero, so he’ll only cheat on the Queen with the maid - and in the animations.

A wrong and incomplete story in Storyteller where the queen is supposed to suffer four tragedies - but many places in the story panels are missing a person

A story in the Storyteller puzzle book, where the player is moving a story panel in an effort to recreate a kind of Hamlet but with fantasy dwarves

A story puzzle in Storyteller where a man called Edgar has remarried and then killed his second wife - because she poisoned his first wife!

I was just getting into the harder puzzles when I twigged that my completion percentage in the front of the book was at 95. “Surely not!”, I thought. I got properly stumped on a puzzle for the first time, only to discover it was the last one! I’m pretty sure I played levels in the Storyteller demo that didn’t appear in Storyteller proper. Which isn’t a cardinal sin or even that unusual in games, but it, along with the fact that the book in the game is marked Storyteller Tome One, leads me to suspect some DLC could be on the cards. Or pages. Whatever metaphor would work. Which is lovely in that I welcome more Storyteller, but if I’d had my druthers the more would have been… right now.