I’ve been looking forward to this game for years (I believe it won the IGF Nuovo award back in 2012) and it finally released yesterday! The demo was brilliant so obviously this was a day one purchase for me.
I didn’t expect to jump into this quite so quickly but I fired it up for a quick go and… well, it’s very snackable and delightful so here I am.
In Storyteller you have a small pool of people, places and panels, and above it all is a title which determines the ‘story’ or victory condition so, for example, ‘Lenora drinks poison’. As the storyteller, you’ve got to figure out the configuration and order of the pieces to fit the title. Lenora won’t just drink the poison though so what will motivate her to…?
This did worry me! I’ve just played for about an hour and apparently I’m 35% of the way through. I’ve smiled and laughed to myself several times and had a few ‘aha!’ and ‘ohh!’ moments so even if there isn’t much more, in my eyes it’s money well spent because not many games elicit those reactions! However, if I am left wanting more, I really hope more is on the way because this is just a lovely concept, beautifully presented and well executed. It reminds me a little of Amanita’s Pilgrims (which in turn was, I think, based on the mushroom picker’s card game from Samorost 3) and that was also a delight.
Some of Storyteller’s sounds are really nice and playful too. I particularly like the mbira/kalimba-like noises on the menu when you mouse over each item and the ‘shovelling soil’ sound when you drop somebody into a grave :)
I don’t remember the possibilities in the demo so it’s difficult to say whether there are fewer but certain levels have alternative victory conditions/titles still which have been interesting to puzzle out. Some folk have said it’s easy, and it mostly has been so far, but I’ve also got stuck a couple of times now which has been a nice surprise. Right now I’m just enjoying it while it lasts!
That’s somewhat encouraging. As I noted in the Indie thread, I wasn’t really expecting a long game, but the “hour and a half” being reported in the Steam reviews was really troubling.
Glad to hear you’re enjoying it. IIRC (and it’s been awhile, so I may in fact not be recalling correctly) most of the demo puzzles had an alternate, often thoroughly cheeky solution. It was a big part of the appeal of the demo for me, so reports that there’s less of that in the full release were discouraging. It sounds like it’s probably somewhere between, in that there are some of these but they are perhaps lower density than in the demo.
Thanks for the write-up. I’ll probably continue to wait a bit, either to hear more or for a discount, but it seems inevitable I’ll pick it up sooner or later.
Once I’ve finished it, I’m going to check out a video playthrough of the demo to see how much it’s changed. That’s one perk of all the streamers and YouTubers recording their experiences!
Just a quick update: a few of the puzzles have been kicking my butt. Hah! ‘Queen Suffers Four Tragedies’ was tough, but the one that really ate my time up was ‘Duchess Gets Butler Arrested… while the duke isn’t home’. I just couldn’t see the solution.
I’m currently at 3.2 hours and 75% complete so, uh, I’m probably a bit dim. Either way, this is still making me laugh, smile, aha and ohhh a lot!
Steam reviewers were a mistake. This thing is a toybox, and not just a puzzle game with single solution per level, so crying about it being “only” 90 minutes is not only infantile, but misleading.
It sadly seems to lack the sandbox mode that would allow it to meaningfully claim that title, which is a damn shame.
As noted above, reports suggest strongly that many levels do indeed only have a single solution. The alternative solutions that made the demo such a joy appear to be somewhat thin on the ground, though I’ll leave it to @geggis to tell me how thin once they’ve finished up.
It’s pretty clear that people are literally running out of things to do after a very short time. That doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable or “infantile” thing to complain about.
I forgot to update this thread! I wrapped Storyteller up a week or two ago (stalled by work and a holiday) but I had such a great time with it. I got really stuck on a few levels (one in particular I could solve the hard way, but not the easy way) and I even swung back round to get all the achievements which are basically extensions of the challenges. I rarely bother with achievements.
I also watched a longplay of the demo to compare and while some of the content was cut (like the Adam and Eve stuff, specifically with tempt and judgement), most of it is either still there or just integrated differently. The ending was lovely and I really hope there’s a ‘Tome II’ now!
More Storytelling due in September, with a restored and rejigged demo chapter, namely the Adam and Eve stuff mentioned above, as well as some extra challenges and twists on previous puzzles.
That is exactly what I was hoping they’d do in terms of future development. I’m very glad to see it, and much more at ease with picking up the game now!
I picked up Storyteller on mobile and have really been enjoying it.
Back in 2009, the designer, Daniel Benmergui (Today I Die, I Wish I Were the Moon), was soliciting donations in exchange for custom pixel art, and he made this image of my wife and me. I still love it.
I just played this on mobile as well, and had a good time. Got through all the post-game challenges (the devil-stuff, not all the stamps yet) as well. The game and its logic is generally pretty simple, but it’s really elevated by the animation and sound as well as those occasional moments when you combine some things and get a surprising result–even if it doesn’t help you solve the puzzle at all.
That is so awesome! But for pete’s sake, AWS, your wife shows up in a lovely blue dress and all you can be arsed to don is a pair of underwear? Actually, looking closer, is that Spider-Man underwear? Dude.
