"Storyteller" Player Review: A Great Idea Held Back by Its Design

[Daisy]

I wouldn’t give this game a bad review, but it’s not exactly an easy recommendation either.

I first came across this kind of card-based interactive novel in one of the sections of Pilgrims, and I absolutely loved the concept—naturally, I was excited for this one. However, I agree with other reviewers that this game could’ve been much better if it were a sandbox (i.e., where you can write your own story).

The game design itself also leaves a lot to be desired. Flipping through the in-game book actually feels worse than flipping through a real book. It was not intuitive at all that you could press the number keys “1” through “9” to jump to Chapters 1 to 9—but bizarrely, you can’t press “10” to “14” to get to the later chapters. It would also be a big improvement if, when you're stuck, the game offered some kind of optional hints—not outright answers like in the guides, but something closer to the gentle nudges you get in escape room games.

It took me about 5.5 hours to unlock all the achievements (with some help from guides). One thing that really frustrated me was how obvious it is—even without reading reviews—that they added (or re-added, since some of it was in the original demo) a lot of content after the initial release. As a result, many of the guides written by others are completely thrown off in terms of chapter and section numbers. I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep adding more, especially since a lot of people are complaining about the price. To be fair, it is pretty pricey, especially when some AAA games are selling for less. If you're on the fence like I was, you can use sites like SteamDB to track for the lowest price before picking it up.

The highlight for me is actually one of the achievements called Silence (Hint: Make Zypce sad), which I found more creative than most of the actual game content.