Storyteller is a single-player story-building puzzle game that has released after 15 years of development. The comic-strip layout starts players out with a prompt, settings, and characters. From there, they must create a story that fits the description. Storyteller's early prototype won the Independent Game Festival's innovation award, the Nuovo, in 2012. Now, 11 years later, the finished product is ready to hit the market.
Developer Daniel Benmergui told Game ZXC in a recent interview that he wanted Storyteller to be as experimental as possible, but didn't want to make players jump through hoops whenever they wanted to try a different outcome. Benmergui also emphasized how Storyteller started from a simple concept, but blossomed into a puzzle game that encourages unconventional outcomes, nudging players into its "weird corners."
Storyteller Gives Players Creative Freedom
Storyteller lets players put twists on classic stories like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the Bible's Adam and Eve, and work from Edgar Allan Poe, to name a few. Level prompts appear on top of the screen and must be achieved by dragging and dropping the provided elements into the comic strip, which forces the characters to react to either each other or the action.
But there's more than one possibility for each level. Benmergui discussed how a player may perceive the prompt differently, so he said he wanted to anticipate that and if players wanted to try different scenarios. Benmergui used Heavy Rain as an example of video games that have a choose-your-own adventure format, but when it came to pursuing a completely new path, it wasn't as simple. "You have to go back, you maybe have to load a game, you have to wait for animations and all that stuff. So for Storyteller, all experimentation is to be very snappy. You try this, and then you can try this and decide that. You can scrap the whole story and start over, and it's just a matter of seconds."
In the level that's a "pint-sized version" of Romeo and Juliet, Benmergui explained that the goal is to create two occasions where a character (or characters) drinks poison, but Storyteller doesn't specify how that happens. It's up to the player to make their own version.
The Freedom Can Lead To "Weird" Outcomes
Benmergui and his team made levels of Storyteller by going in with an idea from a specific story. This idea can play off of typical motifs like love, death, heartbreak, ghosts, secrets, kidnappings, and more. They ask questions -- "Do we need a new rule? Do we need a new character? Do we need a new setting? Do we need something to make this happen?" -- then play-test the game and see how close they can get to achieving the level's prompt. Once that's working, they would ask, "We had to add all these elements to make this story work, what else can we do with that?” and "What else can we do with these elements?" After that, they start combining the outcomes. "You may try weird stuff. So what happens when you try that? At some point we bump into that, and we are like, “Well, let's handle this and do something funny about this."
Storyteller has found a way to create an interactive fictional world for people who love books, people who love puzzles, and storytellers. The number of possibilities per level may also appeal to fans who enjoy critical thinking as some of the game's later levels may get a little more challenging.
Storyteller is out now for PC and Nintendo Switch.
