Moments of atmospheric brilliance ("you" getting closer and closer was clever and genuinely had me on the edge of my seat), but ultimately drives full-throttle down a frame-plot road that's been traversed by many other games, and more elegantly. It's not bad, just... overdone. In the IF genre alone you've got Photopia, Shade, and SPY INTRIGUE, off the top of my head.

Anyway, there are already reviews dissecting the ending, so I'll just talk about my personal bugbear: text parser pastiches need to stop using "USE". Actual parser games don't usually use "USE"; that's a menu-based adventure game thing. You cannot use ye flask. Stories Untold has the aesthetics of a Commodore 64 game, but the play logic is totally unlike any text parser game, in a way that I found outright distracting. I don't mean the verb selection menu--that's a smart way of levelling the playing field for people who haven't engaged with the genre--but things like AROUND being a noun which you can combine with GO or LOOK. You might say (perhaps the devs said) that real parser games are clunky, and nobody actually wants to play one, and the community of people who do play them in the 2020s is quite small. Sure. 100% fair. But if that's the reasoning... why make one? Why set this game in the 80s at all?

Moments of atmospheric brilliance ("you" getting closer and closer was clever and genuinely had me on the edge of my seat), but ultimately drives full-throttle down a frame-plot road that's been traversed by many other games, and more elegantly. It's not bad, just... overdone. In the IF genre alone you've got Photopia, Shade, and SPY INTRIGUE, off the top of my head.

Anyway, there are already reviews dissecting the ending, so I'll just talk about my personal bugbear: text parser pastiches need to stop using "USE". Actual parser games don't usually use "USE"; that's a menu-based adventure game thing. You cannot use ye flask. Stories Untold has the aesthetics of a Commodore 64 game, but the play logic is totally unlike any text parser game, in a way that I found outright distracting. I don't mean the verb selection menu--that's a smart way of levelling the playing field for people who haven't engaged with the genre--but things like AROUND being a noun which you can combine with GO or LOOK. You might say (perhaps the devs said) that real parser games are clunky, and nobody actually wants to play one, and the community of people who do play them in the 2020s is quite small. Sure. 100% fair. But if that's the reasoning... why make one? Why set this game in the 80s at all?