In the span of 20 days, I’ve killed Dracula like 3 times now, I don’t know why so many games have an obsession with him but I’m starting to pity the poor bastard, like, he only shows up in one puzzle and his purpose is to perish, now that’s a true tragedy…

During its initial release, a portion of the discussion around Storyteller revolved around how it really wasn’t what it seemed at first; from promotional material and even its descriptions, you’d be led to believe this is a game about creating stories, using the characters and options available to form your own visual narrative, an idea that even the game’s own opening text seems to be pointing towards, when in reality this is pretty much a puzzle game. In each of the levels you get a set of characters and scenarios and from there you need to reach a specific result, and for many this prospect was less enticing than that supposed original ‘’go wild and crazy with your imagination’’ idea, but I believe that throwing Storyteller to the side simply because it isn’t something that ‘’sounds cool’’ is silly at best, especially when what it really is still sounds incredibly promising.

Building up a narrative and creating a story to reach a specific ending is a fantastic concept, an idea so fascinating that can lead to so many cool experiments, and gamifying the act of forming a world, giving life to a set of characters with a finale in mind is far from being an idea always bound to backfire, it’s a genius one with a super strong premise… one that Storyteller fails to realize.

Being simple is a good thing, and then there’s being simplistic; each of the puzzles feel… barebones is the word I want to say, but I’m not entirely sure it’s the right one; no challenge is designed badly or unclear, but they also aren’t great. I’ll admit I definitively wasn’t a having a bad with the experience, but I also wasn’t feeling particularly excited or even just really that entertained, it’s a very ‘’going through the motions’’ kind of game, where none of the puzzles are particularly challenging and few have those moments where the pieces fall into place and you feel like a genius. As such it could be seeing as a cozy or pick-up-and-play style of game, but considering just how short it is and how little it attempts in that time to actually make it a super relaxing or enjoyable experience, I find it hard to call it one. You just do puzzles until its over… and without ever fully tapping into true ‘’imagination’’ territory.

It's hard to feel as a storyteller when there’s so little space of possibilities; as I said the fact there’s always one ending for each of the puzzles doesn’t bother me, but that the characters have a set of behaviors that you cannot change and that there’s basically only a single way to achieve said ending does. At first it’s fun to learn how each of the characters behave, but after a while it quickly turns into an automatized experience, where you see your objective and think ‘’oh yeah, I know which character has to do each thing’’ which might sound good, but in practice feels like placing pieces of the same puzzle over and over, sometimes rearranged, sometimes with a different set of pieces. The secondary objectives that some of the levels have as well as the stamps and the Devil re-tales are an interesting spin for sure, and especially towards the end this concept shows its highest potential, but it just not involving nor realized enough to be memorable or that fun.
The game doesn’t tell stories, just broken scenarios, and you aren’t tasked with forging them, just to fix the… I don’t know if that even makes sense, but what I’m getting at is that Storyteller, even at its best, doesn’t seem to strive for much despite shooting pretty damn high, and I’m left with the sensation that many other puzzle game accomplish the idea of creating your own path or solution much more consistently than the game about creating tales.

The game isn’t a incredibly ended open experience with player experience at its focus, nor does it want to be and nor it should be judged as such, but what it is is a overly simple, limited and average puzzle game that’s only somewhat enjoyable. It may not be something that it isn’t, but it also is not even close at being a true accomplishment of what it aspires to be, and that’s much, much more tragic than the former option…