When Storyteller was first revealed a few years ago, I was instantly attracted to the quaint art-style and unique puzzle mechanics.
Now having played the full release, those feelings haven’t changed, however the game didn’t quite live up to what I had expected.
Storyteller has you solving miniature puzzles in the form of comic strips. You’ll be given the title to a story, and a series of settings and characters, which will need to be arranged in a way that makes the title make sense.
The art-style is minimalistic but effective, so too the music. The characters are all lovingly drawn with some nice little animations to boot.
Characters can be swapped around within the story as long as the end result remains true to the title; and the touch controls on the Switch made re-arranging things a breeze.
The game would have you believe that there are multiple ways of telling each story, but apart from swapping out characters, I could only really see one solution for each puzzle.
It would’ve been nice to have more setting and character options at your disposal to be able to get more creative with your solutions.
There are multiple concepts that show up briefly, only to disappear for the rest of the game; the vampires and werewolves were criminally underused for my tastes!
Some sort of over-arching narrative, spanning the collection of puzzles would’ve been nice, but unfortunately what we get is a series of unconnected tales.
My favourite part of the short experience was when I had to make a Prince save ‘Tiny the Dwarf’ from his froggy curse.
The Prince was pretty averse to kissing Tiny for some reason, even if it was to save him! I eventually figured out the shallow Prince would still smooch Snowy the Princess, even after she was frog-ified.
So I ended up tricking the Prince into thinking he was getting fresh with Snowy the frog, but actually it was our old pal Tiny!
Storyteller contains 51 puzzles, each taking anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes to finish. I had the entire game done in under 2 hours which was a little underwhelming.
With its simple art style and straight forward mechanics, I don’t think expecting 100+ levels is being unreasonable.
I love the concept, but sadly the execution is lacking. The puzzle mechanics are shallower than I would’ve liked and without a cohesive structure, after the last puzzle is solved you’re left thinking ‘is that it?’
The game feels more like a first draft than a published novella.
