Stories Untold has a killer setup and manages to pull off the "deliberately vague" angle surprisingly well. It's also painfully hard to review, because it's probably best experienced with as little advance information as possible. Overall it seems to ape a retro, late 80's TV-show aesthetic very similar to "Amazing Stories," with the dated computer hardware and synthesized musical score. The game play is split across 4 chapters and mostly consists of solving an array of puzzles before proceeding to the next. Most are simple exercises in following directions, but some of them can be mind-numbingly complicated requiring the decryption of Morse code or identifying rapidly-flashing pictographs. The game has no time limit or failure conditions, however, meaning that with patience and tenacity anyone can eventually see the game's conclusion. It's also almost completely devoid of cheap jump scares, earning Stories Untold two immediate gold stars for dodging common puzzle game pitfalls. I was having a great time until I reached the conclusion of the game's third chapter, when the overarching story connecting the vignettes started to come into focus. Without any spoilers, the ending really seems too predictable and overused to cap off what was shaping up to otherwise be one of the best suspense-adventures I've played in the last five or more years. If you do enjoy the odd experimental type game, or any atmospheric horror games, if you're a fan of the retro aesthetic, or you're just looking for a way to kill a couple hours, you could certainly do a lot worse than Stories Untold. Aside from a few lapses into predictable patterns, it's a wholly unique experience.
