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Stories Untold is clearly using the widespread adoration of Netflix’s Stranger Things as a tool in its marketing. The superb cover art for the game, for example, is the work of Kyle Lambert, the. Stories Untold is a very interesting and engaging horror title, building a huge story that taps into your imagination before expertly drawing that scope back in.
![Stories Untold Morse Code Stories Untold Morse Code](/uploads/1/2/7/1/127142171/523771900.jpg)
Switch
Stories Untold (Switch) Review
by Joe DeVader - January 23, 2020, 6:42 pm PST
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I guess you could say I’ve heard of stranger things (please don’t arrest me for this joke)
At first glance you may be tempted to compare the aesthetic of Stories Untold to a TV show like Stranger Things, and this is not a comparison Stories Untold shies away from. With marketing materials and a logo made specifically by the man who designed Stranger Things’ logo, this game is trying to tell you from the start exactly what kind of story you’ll be getting into. Originally released for the PC in 2017, it has found a good home among the Switch’s many unique horror titles and could easily go toe to toe with the best of them. However, this move to a new system has also come with its fair share of problems.
Stories Untold is a collection of four horror-themed tales each with their own setting and aesthetic. In the first story, The House Abandon, you find yourself at your desk playing a text adventure on an old PC. In the second, The Lab Conduct, you take control of a volunteer tasked with performing various experiments on a mysterious object. In the third, The Station Process, you work at an arctic radio monitoring station during a large snowstorm. As for the fourth, The Last Session, it’s better if you find out the details on that one for yourself. In all four of these games, it becomes obvious almost immediately that something more is going on than you have initially been told, and all four take advantage of a masterfully-crafted atmosphere that truly had me jumping more than a few times.
An unfortunate drawback to Stories Untold being brought to a console is the fact that the game was clearly designed with the assumption that you would have a keyboard and mouse in front of you, not a controller. Whenever you need to input something on the in-game PC, pressing L will bring up the input menu where you can select whatever you need, though these options will differ depending on what story you’re playing. Otherwise, a reticle can be moved around with the left analog stick, allowing you to interact with certain objects on your desk. While these controls certainly work fine in most situations, I could never shake the feeling that a mouse and keyboard would have felt much more immersive. In certain stories, pressing X will also allow to switch between a reference area that will usually contain information on what you should be doing and how you should be doing it, and an active area where you actually do the things you just looked up. For this reason, Stories Untold is one of those games where I’d recommend you bring a pen and paper along with you for the experience.
There are a few other flaws I found with the game, including a few of the puzzles that just seemed like they expected me to know too much or seemed to have problems actually providing me with the information I needed. In the second story, at one point I had to input a series of glyphs, but the only hint the game ever gave me was the answer flashing on screen faster than I could ever possibly process it. Another puzzle seemed to expect me to be able to read and decipher morse code with very little instruction, while one other expected me to input information from a microfiche that was just too blurry to read seemingly no matter what I did. While moments like these were low points of my playthrough, they didn’t actually go so far as to make me dislike the experience overall.
With its retro ‘80s aesthetic and multiple different settings and dangers to deal with, Stories Untold is a very well put together horror game, despite its flaws. Every story is short, clocking in at just around 30-45 minutes each, which makes this the perfect game to pop on during an evening get together where your main goal is to spook your friends. The voice acting is also a high point, as each performance felt believable and different in a way that truly made me sink into each small world as I went. It’s not a perfect game or even a perfect port, all things considered, but if you like a good atmosphere and a well-told series of stories, then you should probably go and contradict this game’s title when you have the chance.
Summary
Pros
- Fantastic atmosphere to truly spook any player
- Great voice acting that really immerses you in each world
- No one story overstays its welcome, making it perfect to show to your friends for an evening
Cons
- Game was clearly designed for a keyboard and mouse, not a controller
- Some puzzles that required information on screen were presented in a way I could not read
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Switch
Game Profile
Worldwide Releases
Stories: Untold | |
Release | Jan 16, 2020 |
Publisher | Devolver Digital |
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The console is much less robust than the competing bins from Sony and Microsoft, and definitely can’t stay alongside of gaming PCs, so tweaks to graphics and function are crucial. Its major pitch is its portability, so devs must optimize their video games to seem just right on 60” TVs and on the hand-held’s tiny display. And, if devs are feeling adventurous, they will also believe including give a boost to for the Transfer’s integrated gyroscopic controls.However, it’s uncommon for a developer to head as far as to switch their recreation’s major mechanic. But, that’s precisely what Remark developer, No Code, did after they introduced their debut recreation, Tales Untold, to Transfer in January.Firstly launched on PC in 2017, Tales Untold is an atmospheric textual content journey that attracts at the parser-based video games of the ‘80s–think Zork, A Thoughts Perpetually Voyaging and The Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy. The ones video games relied fully on textual content (and occasionally packed-in “feelies”) to rouse a way of position. To advance their tales, they tasked avid gamers with typing easy verb/noun pairs like “open door” right into a monochromatic DOS interface.Tales Untold tailored the textual content journey for the trendy generation. It nonetheless requested avid gamers to sort instructions, however it contextualized its tales inside a sumptuously rendered 3-d global.
In a single segment, you had been a participant at a pc, looking at as your instructions impacted the arena round you. In every other, you had been an green scientist in a lab, finding out instructions to run assessments on an unidentified object. One segment tasked you with scrolling thru microfiche to interpret Morse code. The context persistently modified, and with it, the surroundings surrounding your pc. The only consistent?
You had been all the time pecking away at a keyboard.However, for the sport’s Transfer free up this 12 months, No Code got rid of typing fully. As an alternative, the studio changed it with a menu-based means that wouldn’t glance misplaced in a point-and-click journey recreation. Within the Transfer model, the participant selects from quite a few verbs like “use,” “open” or “pass” after which pairs the chosen verb with a conditionally to be had noun. While Tales Untold on PC drew from the journey video games of the ‘80s, Tales Untold on Transfer attracts from the journey video games of the ‘90s.“We checked out previous Lucasarts video games for inspiration, the place necessarily (and occasionally actually) the participant is clicking on phrases as a substitute of typing them,” mentioned No Code inventive director, Jon McKellan.“It is advisable to take a look at Monkey Island and sort ‘Pass to Tavern’ and it might nonetheless make sense, as in the event you had clicked ‘Pass To’ after which click oned at the tavern. It is the similar concept procedure of mixing nouns and verbs.
So we felt that enter device used to be the most productive design for interactions, however no longer essentially the proper one for the enjoy. That is why we determined to have the string nonetheless sort in a extra entire sentence. So if you select ‘Glance’ + ‘Automobile,’ the digital participant would sort ‘take a look at the auto.’ It gave it the human part that textual content journey inputs permit, and added some persona again into the enter device. It seems to be easy, however it used to be rather an concerned procedure to get that proper. The important thing factor is that the enter device we settled on used to be no longer best more uncomplicated to make use of, however nonetheless thematically ‘unfashionable’ – it is nonetheless an old school means of enjoying an journey, despite the fact that it is not rather textual content journey anymore We would have liked to stay the retro-theme, so we appeared to the previous for solutions, as all the time!”In fact, changing the sport’s core mechanic is an excessive answer, and No Code didn’t get started there.
The workforce thought to be simulating a keyboard, in order that avid gamers would use the D-pad to make a choice and spell out phrases. However, it ruined the feel and appear that No Code had accomplished within the PC model. Whilst it used to be extra ‘trustworthy,’ it wasn’t a laugh.“I had performed with some on-screen keyboard designs however it felt even worse.
It is no a laugh typing out a command, letter by way of letter, slowly, and learning you spelled ‘glance’ flawed or one thing,” McKellan mentioned.“Getting one thing flawed in textual content adventures is an original a part of the enjoy, to be fair, trial and mistake. However that is terrible when the motion of inputting is rubbish. The opposite issue used to be that on display keyboards have a tendency to absorb a large number of area on display, and it is important to needless to say Tales is a 3-d surroundings recreation with stuff happening, clues to be noticed, setting to construct. Masking the display with UI each 30 seconds simply demolished the enjoy The answer needed to be one thing compact which may be stored out of the best way of the arena round it and best introduced up when it mattered. That is why it is not at the display at all times both. If we left it on display at some stage in the textual content sections, you could possibly think that the one actual gameplay is going on in that field, when that’s not actually the case–you are taking a look on the room for solutions too.”In consequence, McKellan mentioned that few alternatives–which integrated radial menus and context delicate lists located alongside the aspect of the screen–made it additional than fast sketches or mock-u.s.in Adobe Illustrator.
As an alternative, the workforce enthusiastic about “re-engineering all the recreation below the hood for the textual content sections,” a major enterprise that No Code didn’t even start to severely paintings on till once they had shipped Remark in early 2019. This modification used to be a major enterprise, however it did open up a significant alternative that the parser-based means of the PC model had precluded.“The largest factor is that we could not localize the unique recreation with unfastened textual content enter, as a result of spotting what the participant has typed in 12 languages isn’t simple.
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