izigame.me

Well, this is unexpected.
‘Storyteller’ was a game I’ve been waiting for a long time and was absolutely thrilled about. And I recognize that it must have been a lot of effort to make these systems function and look good, so kudos to the developers and artists work. My opinion is strictly personal, and I do not intend to bash on those years of labour that I completely respect.
However: my experience of this game just wasn’t pleasant. Let’s start with the obvious: it took me less than two hours to complete all the puzzles (and bonus challenges). It would be fine if the game had a cute story, or memorable characters or it elicited some kind of emotion to me or some sort of pride in solving the puzzles.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t and it didn’t.
The puzzles were really easy, as I’ve stumbled only on the last one, but breezed through the rest. I would have explored more of the options, but they don’t quite lead to anything. As a matter of fact, the game doesn’t really reward your creativity or at least, it doesn’t push you to be creative. It pushes you to stick to narrative tropes and it gets you stuck with characters that are reduced to very simple functions. As a matter of fact, only the first few chapters are a bit loose with what you can do with characters; but towards the end, you get extremely codified characters that have only one purpose and are very rigid. So you kind of resort to the same tricks all the time.
And the fact is, the idea behind this… bummed me out. Here we are, learning about the great art of storytelling, and this is what it is: barebones archetypes doing the same thing over and over again in what I felt was the most obvious way each time. I felt like this game told be that storytelling is not being creative, it’s just applying the same basic formula with the same stereotypes over and over again. The credits sequences hammered this in in a most unexpected way.
I imagine (I hope!) this is not what the developers intended, but this is what I took from the game, despite the great idea (and art direction) behind it.
I do hope that plenty of people enjoy it thoroughly, but I can’t recommend it at all as it is.