Stories Untold

About Stories Untold

Stories Untold was made by No Code, a Glasgow studio led by Jon McKellan, who worked on Alien: Isolation, and Omar Khan; the studio now goes by Screen Burn, the name Steam lists, and later made Observation. Devolver Digital published it on Windows on 27 February 2017, and a Mac version followed. It came to Nintendo Switch in January 2020 and to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 27 October 2020. It grew out of a single free episode, The House Abandon, which the full game includes in a remastered form and which is still offered as a free demo.

The game is a compilation tape of four short stories, each with its own setting and way of playing. The first sets you at a desk in a 1980s bedroom in front of a tape-loading home computer and an old television, typing commands into a horror text adventure about pulling up to a neglected family holiday home. As you play, what happens in the text game starts to touch the room you are sitting in. In the second, The Lab Conduct, you face a wall of lab equipment and follow a detailed manual to run experiments on what looks like a human heart: switching on a camera, setting the monitor's viewing modes, powering a drill and tuning an amplifier and signal generator. Later stories hand you a microfiche reader and a large radio receiver to scan for coded messages and translate.

What frightens is how much rests on the machines. You read, type and follow instructions in a dark room lit by a monitor and a desk lamp, and the synth soundtrack, inspired by 1980s horror films, builds slowly. Nintendo Life found it less all-out horror than an emotional and unsettling one, with a final chapter that has the reviewer recoiling from the screen. The rating boards note blood, violence, strong language and references to alcohol.

Next to other desk-bound horror games, its difference is the variety: each story uses a different machine and a different kind of puzzle, and the four are tied together at the end. HowLongToBeat puts the main story at about two and a half hours. It suits players who like slow, reading-heavy horror and old technology, and anyone who enjoyed games built around a single desk and a screen, such as No Players Online or Dead Letter Dept.

How to play Stories Untold

1. Start the first story and sit down at the home computer on the desk.
2. Type commands into the text adventure and read what comes back; on Switch you build commands from a choice of words.
3. Keep an eye on the room around the screen as well as the text.
4. In the lab story, read the manual and work the equipment step by step as it instructs.
5. In the later stories, use the microfiche reader and tune the radio to find coded messages, then translate them.
6. Play the four stories in order; the last one ties them together.

Tips

• Use short commands in the text adventure and try examining everything mentioned.
• Play in a dark room with headphones; the store itself asks for lights off and headphones on.
• If you are stuck on equipment, reread the manual or instructions; each step expects the one before it done exactly.
• On Switch, the radio in the third story can be fine-tuned with buttons on the radio itself, and a lean-in button brings small screens closer.

Questions