Storyteller Review: The Story Is Yours to Tell

Daniel Benmergui’s puzzle game Storyteller all but explains itself through its presentation as a hardbound book filled with blank panels and cartoon illustrations to place within them. A short prompt at the top of each page outlines the story you must tell using the illustrations, which are broken up into characters and backdrops that correspond with a specific action, such as a wedding chapel for marriage or a bottle of poison for committing murder.

The bulk of the game consists of mixing and matching those elements. The earliest puzzle provides little nude caricatures of Adam and Eve along with a grassy “Love” backdrop that, when the characters are placed on it, sparks romance. In what amounts to a series of “if-then” equations expressed through squiggly storybook art, statuses like being in love then inform how the characters react in other contexts. Placing Adam on the tombstone in the “Death” backdrop will kill him, which prompts grief from the smitten Eve. But if Adam and Eve aren’t established to be in love, her reaction to his death will be a shrug. After all, who is this man to her?

Where Storyteller gets a little more complicated is that the characters aren’t necessarily interchangeable. Some are already predisposed to certain actions, while others must be coaxed into reacting appropriately to a given situation. The Knight loves the Queen from the start, for example, but the Queen doesn’t love the Knight and will reject him. And in order to fulfill one puzzle’s objective to marry the two, the Knight must perform an action that gets him into the Queen’s good graces and thus makes her more receptive to his advances. Similarly, the conniving Baron is already predisposed toward pushing other rulers off cliffs.

Broken up into themed chapters that tend to involve the same characters and settings, Storyteller is about discovering these changes by logic, by familiarity with the story archetypes, or by total accident: a dead character will appear as a ghost in a future panel, and a ghost interacts differently with its murderer than with anyone else. The game’s best puzzles gradually iterate on these statuses, forcing you to scrutinize variables and reactions that you’re already familiar with to serve a more involved objective, like getting the Queen to marry a dragon or getting the Mirror from Snow White to extol the beauty of an ordinary frog.

But for as pleasant and intermittently clever as it is, Storyteller’s breezy style comes at the cost of any real complexity. Because the game’s variables and statuses are meant to remain hidden in order to avoid overcrowding the screen with information, none of the puzzles can ask very much of the player. It avoids providing too many illustrations to experiment with and too much information to keep straight in your head. A few of the later puzzles demonstrate how easily this spareness can devolve into tedium, with several that require you to establish the family ties between dwarves. Though Storyteller has its share of clever moments, the game never quite finds the depth beyond the cozy archetypes that make up its exterior.