Stories Untold

Short horror anthology Stories Untold preys on technological nostalgia, which works three times out of four.

Wistful, lovingly textured and highly experimental, Stories Untold is a haunted house adventure with a difference.

An atmospheric collection of clever, surprising interactive short stories with a gorgeous retro aesthetic.

The puzzles are unrelenting and unforgiving, but those who rise to the challenge are rewarded with spooky sequences and an emotional showstopper of a finale

Stories Untold is bleak and disturbing, novel and experimental, and most importantly when doing all that, very clever. It's smarter than you'll realise, in fact. And why it's smart is all in the experience of playing, not to be given away in the process of reviewing. A pain in the arse for me, but worth it for you.

Each chapter of Stories Untold is framed like an episode of a Twilight Zone-style anthology television show, replete with a killer John Carpenter-esque synth-backed intro. It pays more than a passing nod to the introduction to hit show Stranger Things, but it's undeniably cool, and we'd love to see an Untold Stories 2 that continued the theme, only with a more consistent episode quality.

Stories Untold is a chilling adventure that manages to draw us right into its world through the ingenious use of its UI and perfectly realised lo-fi aesthetic. Through the walls of old technology and complicated machinery, it creates a uniquely strong bond between player and narrative, giving you a real sense of place within its world as it slowly corrupts and twists from the comfortingly familiar to something else entirely. It's one of the best interactive horror stories we've ever played and a perfect fit for enjoying alone in the dark on Switch.

As much as we’d love to go into greater detail about what exactly makes Stories Untold such a successful adventure game, it really is the type of experience you need to check out first-hand.

Stories Untold is a fascinating return to the good old days of text-based adventure games. It’s an intriguing experiment that starts off strong and draws you into a mysterious world full of puzzles, but ends with a rude awakening. The puzzles and the atmosphere as you solve them will literally consume you, which is also the game’s main draw. On the other hand, the conclusion in the fourth episode—in the form of a walking simulator—was a huge disappointment for me, especially since it was the final episode. Unfortunately, the story is rather bland, and at a certain point, you’re really only playing because you enjoy solving the puzzles, even though you can already guess how the story will end.

The joy of other titles within this market is the length of episodes that you get at each release. A fair amount of content is dropped in each instalment, so if No Code hadn’t taken the approach they had, then this would have been a failure. If you take this game on, you’ll get around 4 hours playtime, which isn’t bad value as it costs less than £9. A copy can be purchased here if you so desire! Do I recommend it? Other than its few shortcomings, it’s a great game and one you should have in your library. Will you be able to gather the clues to solve the puzzles? Play through each of the 4 episodes and link the bizarre plot together, one piece at a time.