Stories Untold

If you are the type of person who fiddles and plays with emulators, and sets them up to emulate a CRT on your high tech full hd monitor, this is already looking aesthetically pleasing to no end. You are treated to some fantasy machines that strongly resemble those of the good-old-days. The throwback to the Amstrad CPC in the first mini-chapter was amazingly fun to witness, listen to, and watch. The parser of the text adventure parts isn't perfect, and if you're used to typing LOOK, INVENTORY, HELP and so on, -- they don't work here. The entire narrative is very enjoyable, and has some really spooky surprises for you! All in all, this does feel like you're playing games such as LURKING HORROR again, sometimes. But sadly, there are a bunch of point and clicks in this game. And this is the kind of game where a hotspot finder would change entire worlds. Because after sitting there for maybe an hour trying to figure out how to "charge the x-ray" machine, having clicked everything, everywhere, again and again and again, you're starting to get the picture that this isn't what it set out to be. It could flow so well, because it's just trying to tell a story. But it is difficult to enjoy the story when game mechanics get in the way. If you're ready to find the needle in the haystack, go for it. If the retro charm has taken your heart, go for it. On a sidenote, you can zoom in by holding the right mouse button, but you can still not zoom in close enough to read some of the text written on devices around you. I'm not sure if this was done on purpose, but that too, is a bummer.

Really atmospheric game but short and pretty easy. It took me about 5h to finished all 4 episodes and about 2h of it was wondering what is a correct command... One importand thing. There is no real graphics settings. When starting game, I have only 2 options: beautiful and fantastic. Both look similar and both runs about or below 20 FPS in 2 last episodes on GTX 660Ti (100% use of GPU).

Stories Untold seek to emulate an old text adventure. Unfortuntely it emulates a bad old text adventure, one which has an extremely limited parser. This causes the game to become "guess the command" instead of actually playing the game. For instance, right at the start you're told there is an old generator behind the house you have to use so the lights will come on. You start in front of the house. In Zork, you would be told which direction the front was, and you could use "n, s, e, and w" to navigate behind the house. This does not work in SU, it doesn't recognize directions. A command of "go behind house" will put you in front of the house. "enter yard" puts you in a yard, but there's no indication if the yard is to the side of the house or behind it. Turns out it is behind the house, but since it doesn't say you see a generator until you explicity say "look around" (and simply saying "look" doesn't work), there's no way of knowing that. This game claims to be a horror game, but all it is is frustrating. Games like this are why "point and click" graphic adventures were created.

A short, but good game. Comprised of 5 differen't levels. It's sort of a horror puzzle game, centered around operating old electronics such as computers, radio equipment, lab experimentation equipment. Not finished it yet, but loving it.