Horror games are probably my favorite genre, even if I don't feel as though I like very many of them. It's the same as with horror films, where it's incredibly difficult to key in on something that is truly scary, because what is truly scary is something with finesse, a sharp, pinpoint anxiety that must be well executed and effective in its own right. A lot of my favorite pieces of media in the horror genre generally leave me thinking about a lot of things well after the story is complete. In film, this would be the likes of Rosemary's Baby and its ability to frustratingly take away Rosemary's agency as the film goes on, her suffering completely preventable if only she could break through the pressures and control of her social and familial circle. Similarly with The Shining, where we feel as though the whole story is happening on the hinge between sturdy reality and mobile unreality, wildly swinging in the wind, where a man finds himself becoming unwound and threatening toward his family (symbolism of alcoholism abound). In games, this comes with Silent Hill 2, where James Sunderland's character is developed more and more to our horror, or SOMA to some degree, where, despite some truly dull gameplay outside of some puzzles, the plot itself is a horrifying mix of existentialism and sci-fi (side note: SOMA is a game I never got around to reviewing last year, but would definitely recommend with a rough 8.5/10). Horror requires a significant psychological weight and a fine tuned execution to properly work, the former of which is precisely what I found so frustrating with Stories Untold.
The spoiler-free summation is this: Stories Untold is four mini-games based around the text adventure genre and more modern takes on adventure games, where reading and analyzing documentation is the main gameplay loop. All of this is framed in a faux Netflix type show, with each game showing an intro very much like Stranger Things. The trick with the game, if it isn't too much of a spoiler, is that messing around with these text games, electronics, etc. generally has some twist that is usually pretty surprising, and makes you rethink what you're actually doing in the game. As vague as that is, if it sounds interesting to you I'd like to give you the chance to try the game out, though my recommendation for the game is mild. If you like horror games, I'd suggest you try this one out as it lasts about 3 hours, and its greatest strength is in its atmosphere and execution, where its story is by far its weakest point. It also costs only $10.
Spoilers from here on out.
I was not able to finish any of the three stories without feeling disappointed by the end. The execution was good and extremely effective most of the time, and to see these ideas squandered for something easy and shallow was frustrating. The director for the game, Jon McKellan, is a bad writer. He has some good ideas on game design, but his storytelling tastes of well water.
The first of the four stories has you sitting in a very 80s styled house in front of an old computer (the computer is a fictional brand and model, but it reminds me of a ZX Spectrum +2). There are pictures of your family on the desk, wood paneled walls, a small desk lamp, and a fictional game called The House Abandon starting up on the screen. The game then acts as a text adventure like Zork, where you type in commands on the screen and try to finish the game. The game tells you you've found yourself in your car outside your childhood home, and to check the glove box before going in. In the glove box is the key to the house and a letter from your dad, telling you to turn on the generator before you go inside, and that he has a present for you in your room. You turn on the generator, enter the house, and go upstairs to your room and find the present. It's your old computer, and a game of The House Abandon. You plug up the computer and start the game. Outside the game, the power goes out, and the game restarts. The pictures of your family have black marks over their eyes, and there is something red on the wall. The game starts up again, but this time the house is described as unpleasant. The key is still in the glove box, but the note now says some creepy message like "GET OUT" or "RUN AWAY" (the note changes repeatedly over the course of this section). When you go around back to turn on the generator in the game, you'll notice the light outside the game has flickered back to life. When you walk through the door in the game, you distinctly hear outside of the game the door open and shut downstairs. Above the computer, the alarm clock starts going off, and the computer text starts typing out that you hear an alarm upstairs, and that you feel a presence up there. You must type "turn off alarm" to stop it. The you in the game notices. Thus far, the game has done something rather clever, making you feel as though you were playing a nostalgic throwback when in reality you are playing a meta game, where you are both victim and killer. The effect is eerie, and one I have yet to experience in a game. Wondering where this is going, I plow on. The you in the game goes up stairs (under your instruction), and sees you sitting at the computer, breathing heavily over your shoulder. The game promptly starts to freak out, forcing you to type out "it is my fault" multiple times before the computer says "finally", and the you in the computer apologizes to your mother, father, and younger sister. Then the story ends. It was a killer idea that ended in some plain, uneventful guilt narrative that is unclear and largely meaningless. So I did something to my family, and now I am forced to repent through this game, with its meta horror meant to be a self destructive reflection? It feels forced, it feels try-hard, and it disappoints a rather effective build up.
But we trudge on. The second story has you in a medical facility, surrounded by machines and a digital manual on a computer nearby. You cross check the manual with your equipment in order to complete a series of experiments on an alien organ. Eventually, this leads to the organ popping, and an orb floating out of the container. You connect with it psychically to read its memories, where you interact through a text adventure game on the computer. You attempt to clumsily guess what the alien did in order to progress, but it does feel like guessing. To the developer's credit, and this goes for all of the text adventure stuff in all four stories, the parser is relatively loose, meaning you generally don't have to run through synonyms trying to find that one key word and phrasing the game is looking for (with a few exceptions). Once you go through a couple of these memories, you are thrown into a memory that your superiors, who are communicating with you over speaker, realize isn't the memory of this orb, but rather an alien they have in confinement somewhere else in the facility. As you type out that alien's escape, sirens go off, and your superiors promptly freak out. The game ends once the alien is able to free its comrades, and you are surrounded by orbs. This one was never all that interesting, but it was fine enough, and the ending would have been fine if your superior hadn't been given the final line: "You're going to regret this, Mr. Aition". It's a shallow threat, one you know they can't follow up on, so it feels more like a last ditch effort to make you feel something about this story, when in reality it feels forced.
In the third game we find ourselves at a monitoring station in Greenland, where you are surrounded by a radio, a computer monitor, and a microfilm projector. There are two other outposts in communication with you, and you must put the correct frequency in the radio to receive a series of numbers, and those numbers must be typed into the computer (at times these numbers are in code, which I found rather inventive). Once in, you have to type in three commands that look like bash console commands, of which you can find in the microfilm on the proper page that shares the keyword in the frequency. You do this several times, and are slowly dripped information about New York being destroyed, about "things" out in the winter storm, and slowly different outposts go out. You're told that "one of them" is on your roof, and you can hear it moving around. Eventually, one of the transmitters is misaligned, and you are required to go outside to realign it. On your walk back from the transmitter, out in the distance you can see two cars wrecked in a head long collision. You hear a voice of one of the people at the other outposts, who tells you you need to come back, that you're almost there, and I began to feel dread in my stomach. It seemed so obvious, but I kept on, hoping the game was pulling a fast one on me. Once back, you can clearly see a giant tentacle monster on your roof, and you are confronted with a "To be Concluded" before credits. Not so scary, but relatively fun and interesting.
The fourth game starts up like the others, with the Stories Untold intro starting up before being unceremoniously paused, and a voice saying "alright, that's enough of that." It's the voice of your superior from the second game, who tell you you were in a coma recently (that pit in my stomach justified), and he wheels you on a wheel chair through hospital hallways to an interrogation room with a camera and a tape recorder. You hit record on the tape recorder, and find yourself in the outpost in Greenland again. The doctor, who was the voice of your superior previously, asks you to go through your memories again, mentioning that last time you had deluded yourself into thinking you were in an outpost in Greenland. You receive another signal, you type in the code, and you reference your microfilm projector for the proper commands. But the command manual is gone, and in its place is an incident report, stating that there was a head on collision, where one of the drivers is James Aition (you), and the other a retired police officer. The police officer died, and reeked of alcohol with an empty bottle of whiskey next to him. There was a passenger in your car, your sister, but if she was hurt or deceased is blacked out, which I find incredibly condescending that the game doesn't think I can piece together what is happening by now. To shorten this up, you go through pieces of each of the previous three stories, each slanted a bit toward the true events that you were projecting onto: the outpost was a metaphor for your sense of isolation after your parents stopped talking to you after the crash (can you guess what happened to the sister?), the science experiment used the same equipment the doctor used to recognize and treat an internal hemorrhage in your head, and finally the 80s styled home is where your parents and sister threw you a going away party before you were to travel abroad. Your dad bought you a bottle of very strong whiskey, and you get very drunk. Your sister stupidly asks you to drive her home, despite the fact that the text adventure game plainly describes your actions in a drunk way. This could be reflective and not necessarily accurate to how the events transpired, but there are several moments where your sister is described as "looking at you with concern" that I don't quite believe that interpretation. You wreck, you freak out about the whiskey, and despite the fact your sister is trapped in the car and you know the car is about to blow, you dump the whiskey bottle out on the police officers car instead of saving her. The game throws you into the hospital again, that alien orb following you around with your sister's voice, blaming you and chastising you for what you did, until finally you return to the interrogation room, where the doctor says they will inform that police, and the game ends.
The execution of each of these four stories is mostly impressive, with stylish visuals despite the limited camera the nature of the game provides, and does a better job telling its story than I've probably given enough credit for in my quick rundown of the game's flow. The problem, obviously, is in the story. From any analytical view outside of maybe technical, as the technical aspect of the game does tell its story, the story is a failure. For starters, the plot doesn't make much sense. Why didn't his sister realize he was drunk, when he was impressively drunk? How did she not notice he was literally driving with an open bottle of whiskey in the car? How did pouring that whiskey in the other car do anything when, if he was that drunk, he would have reeked of alcohol? How would the hospital not have tested his blood alcohol level? It feels like such a ridiculous scenario, and worst of all to serve such a trite point. Secondly, the plot means little. It harps on guilt toward the protagonist and gives him little in character development or even meaning in his guilt, just that he did a very bad thing and the game is going to torture you for that. And don't misunderstand me, because I understand this is very similar to the plot of James Sunderland in Silent Hill 2, where his torture is our torture, but that is in service to exploring a character and how they deal with and interpret guilt. In all of the stories in Stories Untold, each one is trying to fantasize away the trauma, but none of these fantasies are invocative of the themes. I never felt as though I was experiencing something with a character (or characters, as the game plays it until the end), and thus little development was ever accomplished along the way. The themes at the end are expressed in the very beginning of the game, and see little to no development as the game progresses. Information is not given to us, it is repeated. The conclusion doesn't shock us, it is cliche. The game wants to wow you with its tragedy, with its flawed protagonist, but it is empty of substance required to give this weight outside of shock value.
I hate this game's story, but it is a credit to the game's execution and entertainment value that it doesn't weigh my rating down too much. The game is an experience I would recommend, but one that is bound to frustrate anyone pining for those special games that touch on something deeper, that utilize the medium to explore characters and themes. This feels like a shadow of other, more interesting and promising games. It feels trendy, it feels fake. But it is well done, and it was fun, and it was cheap. Boy, was it cheap.
6.0
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