Loving slo-mo shots of 80’s CRTs with wood-grain paneling. The click-clack of keyboard keys as you enter a text command. The whiny whir of a microfiche reader zooming in on black-and-white film.
Stories Untold is a throwback to old-fashioned parser-based text adventures modernized to take advantage of the atmospheric tension that 3D art can provide. You aren’t yourself playing a text adventure, here. Instead, you’re an unseen character interacting with a series of computers via text commands in a series of seemingly unrelated situations. With this meta setup, Stories Untold becomes, not just a throwback to text-based games past, but a meditation on the ways technology mediates the stories we tell and the way that we tell them. Fittingly, then, NoCode’s 2017 PC game has been smartly retrofitted so that its themes are expressed effectively using the capabilities of its new home, the Switch.
A more direct port — one that sought to recreate the original’s parser-based interactions on a controller — would likely have made a good game feel like inputting your eShop password for three hours. Fortunately, the version we got looks basically the same as the PC original and tells the same stories, but with some surprising alterations to its mechanics which make a game about typing work impressively well on a controller.
To do that, NoCode removed typing altogether. Instead, Stories Untold on Switch subs in a Monkey Island-style menu. You choose an action, like “Go,” and then pair it with an available object, like “upstairs.” This is a seemingly small change, but, at points, it fundamentally alters the experience of playing the game. On one hand, it makes Stories Untold easier — rather than racking your brain for a possible next step, you can simply pair actions with objects over and over until you find the right one. But, this doesn’t reduce the challenge of the moments when the game eschews text-based gameplay, which are as difficult as ever.
Across its four disparate, but connected, chapters (which I’m deliberately not telling you much about), Stories Untold frequently tasks you with punching commands into ‘80s-style computers. At first, this simply seems like an excuse to dress its text-based gameplay up with a Stranger Things coat of paint. But, the game’s fascination runs deeper than that. NoCode wants you to learn to use their virtual machines; to suss out the ways they facilitate and constrain interaction with the world.
Sometimes, that means reading an in-game manual that teaches you how to operate an X-Ray machine or acoustic resonance tech. Sometimes it means fiddling with multiple zoom lenses to make out a tiny word on a microfiche film. Sometimes it means beating your head against a wall for an hour because you just can’t figure out if the last beep in a string of Morse code beeps is a full beep or a half beep. This is a horror story where its sometimes sleek, sometimes clunk tech is both medium and monster.
With Stories Untold and 2019’s Observation, NoCode has carved out a unique niche for itself. These are games that seek to capture the thrill of successfully troubleshooting a problem while assembling a gaming PC. Sometimes, that’s overwhelming. There were moments during my playthrough of Stories Untold when I was deeply frustrated with my inability to find my error, and the game’s unwillingness to help. But, I suspect, for the people who get a kick out of researching the best graphics card or SSD for their setup, these games are catnip; inexpensive simulations of the real deal, with a moody story thrown in for good measure. But, impressively, they still manage to communicate that thrill to someone who could care less; to somehow make me, someone with a new and powerful gaming laptop, think — even just for a second — “Man, it might be really cool to build my own rig.”
Stories Untold review code provided by the publisher.
Stories Untold is out now on PC and Nintendo Switch.