Stories Untold Reviews
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.
Playing an 8-bit style text adventure on the Nintendo Switch is novelty enough but this inspired mix of weird horror and puzzle-solving is more than just a blast of '80s nostalgia.
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
Short horror anthology Stories Untold preys on technological nostalgia, which works three times out of four.
Stories Untold is a very interesting and engaging horror title, building a huge story that taps into your imagination before expertly drawing that scope back in. A couple of puzzles don't quite stick the landing, but the game is engaging over its three hours.
This version of Stories Untold is not the best - you'll miss the feeling of keyboard typing - but these stories are still worth hearing.
Review in Italian | Read full review
If you're looking for a tense, unnerving experience in a simple yet eerie setting, this is it.
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.
Stories Untold is a gloriously 80s homage which doesn't rely on too much familiarity or retreading old ground. It's a fantastic, fascinating example of interactive visual storytelling.
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.
Stranger Things meets Zork. Stories Untold starts as an experimental text adventure set in the 80s, full of lo-fi technology, nostalgia and terrible text parsers, and it slowly becomes a creepy, captivating story you won't forget soon.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Everything comes to a head in the final chapter. "The Last Session" does a serviceable job rolling my previous experiences into a cohesive yet predictable end. It may not have been a stunning revelation, however it was a satisfying one. All in all not a bad way to spend about three hours on a Saturday afternoon. Stories Untold is a great journey to take part in and one I'm glad to have taken.
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.
In this text based adventure, the 4 stories packed with clever enigmas and tinted with a very pleasant retro atmosphere are really fascinating.
Review in French | Read full review
A whirling nightmare made of green phosphor screens and infinitive verbs
Review in Italian | Read full review
Stories Untold is about the haunting feelings and stories we haven't told even ourselves. It's about unraveling the truth and facing our fears. For players looking for a new episodic thriller, Stories Untold was an amazing way to kick off 2020 on the Nintendo Switch.
That’s not to say there aren’t problems with Stories Untold. The puzzles aren’t terribly hard, the scares aren’t particularly scary… But for what the game is trying to do, and actually accomplishes in its final act, it’s hard to really care about any of the minor flaws. I cannot recommend this game enough. I can see Stories Untold being one of the best, most unexpected indie gems of this year.
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.
It is unfortunate that Stories Untold builds up such an immersive experience just to ruin it with such a humdrum story. If you are a fan of adventure games you will have to try it, even if in the end you will be left wanting more puzzles and a story that would do them justice.