As a person who has been behind the wheel of a heavy car accident with passengers where the car flipped, and thank god I hadn't drunk one drop and nobody got hurt, this game absolutely resonated with me and crushed me with terror. Old wounds of guilt opened by a heavy game master of its own tone. But it also made me think... To follow on your point, I think guilt is a very real form of horror. Most of it is a pool of absolutely dreadful emotions created by your own self. It comes in part from reality, your actions, yes but also how you interpret them from your inner fears and imagination. Even though my accident was an accident (caused by trying to avoid a boar), the aftermath had be feeling absolute constant debilitating guilt, with strong vivid mental projection of multiple scenarios of what could have happened to my loved ones in the car, simultaneously creating and feeling said guilt for those scenarios, events, that did not even happen. In the case of Stories Untold, the fact that they materialize the guilt of the MC through stories that are much grander than the actual events of said MC feels very real to me. The absurdity of those projected stories, then later confronted with the actuals facts, creates a very strong sense of the reality wich must be accepted. And acknowledging reality, returning to it, feels to me like the first only possible step in accepting and overcoming guilt. Wich I believe is what the game was going for with the arc of its MC.
Holy crap. I’m so glad you and your loved ones are ok! ( and hopefully the boar too) But that does put a new perspective on how crushing and all consuming guilt can be, as it’s even tainting media that the character consumed, warping them back around the events of the crash.
Also James parents were doing number puzzles with him to bring him out of the coma because they wanted more information about the crash. As Dr. Alexander said "People needed answers, James."
also, what I found disappointing about this game is that it frames the kid as this terrible drunk driver and sister killer, but everyone at that party was drunk. You have the option to ask someone else to drive your sister home at one point (If I recall correctly) but anyone you ask refuses. Now admittedly he makes the choice to frame the cop and he makes the choice to do that instead of help his sister which directly contributes to her death. But it's not like he chose to drive drunk. Everyone around him made him do that. His sister took her own life into her hands when she got in a car with a drunk driver.
Yeah also, (four years late, I know, but I just found the channel), his DAD gives him the alcohol, and during this period of time, people were a lot more casual about drink driving and so on. Sure he's guilty of a lot, but the parents refusing to see him and treating him like a remorseless killer infuriates me, and makes them seem ignorant of their own culpability.
(spoilers) Yeah I liked the first three episodes but I hated how it ended. For one, when you're stumbling around after the whiskey, everyone can tell you're very drunk and your sister even gets wide-eyed if you try to drive the car without starting it. Like in establishing all the details you hear the reactions but they all encourage you to drive her home still and the game enforces it. As such it undercuts the "it was all my fault" narrative too. It makes you play out what happened in the 4th episode text adventure, but it feels like it should have ended differently. Like at least 3 other people explicitly in the text could have stopped this by highlighting how drunk you are but it's laughed off or brushed aside it really fails to sell how exactly it was "all your fault".
@@ImTakingYouToFlavorTown it was 1986.. people didnt give a fuck about you driving drunk. It IS still his fault, i mean james put the whiskey in the other car and left his sister there!
I really get what you mean about the last story kind of cheapening the others as standalone pieces. The House Abandon fucked me up a bit when I played the demo, because I read the ending -- with its circular argument with yourself that refuses to let up until you consciously agree with the terrible things part of you is saying about yourself... ("Say it: It's all your fault" "It wasn't my fault" "You're pathetic. Say it!" "No" "SAY IT") ... as a weirdly evocative metaphor for the kind of internal dialogue that comes out of a certain kind of suicidal depression, where part of you just wants you to admit that you're a shitty person and that all your problems are your own fault, and the very act of trying to refute that eventually becomes too exhausting and you fall further into depression. That was always a really personal read, I guess, but it still felt a lot more powerful than 'no actually it all was his fault after all and he's just in denial'.
I love that, in the years since this video came out, there have not only been horror game anthologies (e.g DreadX and Haunted PS1), but they actually share _more_ similarities with the structure of old horror-anthology shows by having each part be developed by a different person.
hey, i'm the one who actually first suggested you to check this out! glad you did, and that we get a cool video from it. there's definitely a lot to discuss here, so i'm glad you decided to talk about it.
I always found the 'everyone abandons you and becomes a heartless mojster' thing to be incredibly unrealistic. Even if you were drunk driving, I don't think people would just drop you for being in an accident
I actually just finished this game today and had a number of thoughts about its themes and presentation swimming through my head about it. Really glad you put this out today. It's given me even more to think about and digest.
Anyone else damn near have a seizure during the 2nd episode where you have to keep staring into a rapidly blinking array of lights? Or the part where they expect casual video-gamers to be able to interpret a full morse-code transmission?
'James never accepts that he did anything wrong.' Yeah, it's not like the end of the game requires you to type "IT'S ALL MY FAULT" multiple times or anything. It takes him until the very end of the game to accept that it's his fault, but he does, eventually. Aside from this single gripe, I agree with a lot of what you said, though.
Rats808 its not explicitly stated that he did confess though. At thw end the doctor(?) says "oh wow we're sure to let the cops know about that, but you'll probably stay here for quite some time longer though" in a dismissive manner. It could be that he told another obvious lie and that the hospital staff and everyone around him suspects what happened, but can't actually pin it on him. And now he's still continuing that lie. Also,right after the ambiguous climax it cuts to the title screen of the game/show: 'stories untold', not stories told;)
But stories untold is the name of the show he watches. If it doesn't say "Stories Told", that does not mean anything. The end of the game is supposed to signify that James has finally confronted what really happened, but him not being able to come to terms with it, as he stops the session.
I'm so glad to see this! I absolutely loved Stories Untold, and I've heard so few people talk about it! I agree that the final episode, while very clever, didn't 100% nail it's goal. This analysis of the uniting aspects of these episodes was good. Thanks for this!
While the story as a whole has its plot holes, I don’t think the last episode was bad at all. I liked how it combined all the separate mechanics presented so far and tied everything together
Loved this game. I like the way it wrapped all the different stories together by a common arc, and as a one time play, it was a really fun adventure. I think this isn't really about the protagonist (antagonist?) dealing with the consequences of his actions, but more that he's gone into this mental state where his mind goes crazy and decides to convince himself he was not wrong. Eventually with all the questioning and the like, he comes to terms with what he's done as his dreams talk to him and make him realise that he actually did kill his sister, and its, well, just a sad ending about a boy who just, fucked up, real bad. Its brilliantly told, and I'd love to see a sequel using creepier methods to tell another haunting and depressing story.
Okay so I have some specific points to address about the end scenario and why, to me, it never felt quite right. The main issue is that the evidence points that you receive through act 4 are all slanted in a strange way. Like... you overhear a comment from a cop that worked with the police guy that you hit that 'he couldn't possibly have done it, he's a father of 3 and never touches the stuff... it must have been that other guy!' or something to that effect, but the way they phrase it comes off as extremely biased. There's some other stuff but for me it never quite adds up to 'you did it', it adds up to 'everyone wants you to think you did it'. Basically, it's like... the main problem with stuff like hypnosis therapy (which I think was implied to be used on the main character but it's been a while) is that the information it uncovers about the patient is often actually implanted into the patient by the doctor, whether they do it purposefully or not. If you ask people the right questions when they're in a receptive state, it's very easy to lead them to believing in all sorts of stuff. And not just 'oh I was a queen in a past life' or something like that, but even 'uncovering' abuse at the hands of their parents or other stuff like that- things that didn't happen, but because the patient has these issues, giving those complex problems a concrete source is very psychologically appealing. It's... easy. Like, it's completely clear that Mr. Aiton was deeply traumatized by the death of his sister and feels guilt for being the one to drive her home and get into an accident, but the game's details about what actually happened are all so vague and all predisposed towards you being the True Evil who not only drove drunk but even planted a bottle of scotch on the other driver- and then it forces you to type it over and over, too... like the video says, the main character never really accepts this answer, and it creates some ambiguity in the product that I don't think was intentional.
I'm not saying the twist is on the same low level as most tired "it was all a dream ooooooh" twists, but yeah, it does strike me as kind of a narratively cowardly reveal. When a horror story suddenly backs down from the fantastical to reveal that it's actually totally mundane and realistic, all that does is drop the audience's engagement with it. It's backing down from the commitment of being weird and haunting, assuring the audience "no this is actually all fake and while the protagonist is haunted by this, you don't have to be because of the fakeness". Here, it's contextualized in a neat way, and I'm interested in themes of dissociation, especially regarding classically gen-x manchild pop culture fantasy, but that context also doesn't feel like it's criticized well enough.
I really agree, I think the DM's guide episode on plot twists covered it well with the idea that a good twist makes the story more interesting. I think it really explains why twists like this feel like such a let down.
I would say I felt the opposite, actually. Walking Dead (season 1 at least) presented very believable flawed characters reacting realistically to a fantastical situation. Life is Strange presented a climactic conflict that came across as hilariously contrived. It was practically that old meme of the child dying of cancer whose make-a-wish is he wants to say the n-word, but replace "wants to say the n-word" with "wants to kill a lesbian".
I'll admit, I'm not exactly fond of transitioning from a fantastical narrative to a mundane reality. It didn't quite work for me in The Village by M Night Shamalamadingdong, and it didn't quite work for me in Stories Untold. But in theory it could work better if done right. In truth, I think I know why it didn't quite work for me. *Firstly,* it was probably too quick of a transition between the fantasy and the reality, though admittedly Stories Untold did at least try by having some modicum of foreshadowing (The Village IIRC didn't have enough to foreshadow the tweeest). *Secondly,* the whole "it was all in his head/all just a dream" thing is something that needs to be handled with care, hinted at early on and established further in with enough time before the twist (in the case of Stories Untold, the reality hit us like a car crash and jarred us out of the experience).
[Spoilers in reference to the later half of the video] I think the 4th episode reveal works as a quietly horrific deconstruction of recent era-nostalgia trends. It doesn't dig into the fundamental problems of the 80's revival aesthetic (primarily the post-ironic glorification of harmful elements of the time) nor is it the most nuanced in execution, but something about making the player engage with intricately virtualized nuggets of consistent nostalgic aesthetics--with something very off and fundamentally pretentious about all of them--and then using the genre-fundamental mixture of discomfort and joy to reflect the player in what turns out to be the protagonists' main character arc is... Well, it's ambitious, it's abrasive, it's a bit messy and is destined to be divisive to its audience, but i think it's better off having made something of its aesthetic rather than stewing in a staunchly uncritical pit of 80's nostalgia that genre-fiction's already got plenty of lately.
I also think it works from a storytelling point of view. most people like when stories wrap up nicely, people learn their lessons and all e loose ends get tied up in a nice little bow, but if ann the genre's of entertainment, horror is one of the few where that isn't a requirement for a good story. In fact, sometimes it ruins it. I think this game is a story about a man who can not and will not accept his fault, despite knowing he kinda already has as seen from how he is tearing himself apart mentally. And in the end... He still is... And still will... Because not everyone comes out the other end of that.
I pretty much the exact same reaction as you. I thoroughly enjoyed the first 3 episodes, particularly episode 3, but my whole recollection of the game was soured by how the ending pulled out the rug from you to essentially deliver a trite "drunk driving is bad, yo".
I like how the stories are not just random tales put together with some flimsy framing device. Having them tied together in the way they are gives them, and the game as a whole more of a purpose and expands it's meaning. Who really is running away from the problems? The protagonist of the game? Or us, the people playing it?
I think you're being almost too kind to the game when you try to read into how each individual component relates to some form of guilt as proposed in the final chapter. I found the last episode contrived not only because it ret-conned everything that happened in the previous three episodes, but also because it felt like the game needed "generic tragic event" to justify its artistic experimentation. I didn't feel guilty playing as Aition and getting behind the wheel of that car because I, myself, knew it was a silly idea and yet the game kept pushing me to do it. It was painfully immersion breaking to type stuff like "don't get into the car" and "don't drive" only for the game to tell me that what I was inputting wasn't a proper command, especially when the previous few hours were a masterclass in subtle storytelling. I thought that the three episodes had strong thematic links to each other already - the atmosphere of unpredictability and apprehension was a much more compelling through-line than some unreliable subtext about drunk driving. I almost feel as if the game would be stronger if the fourth episode simply didn't exist. I did the review for this game back when it first came out, more of my thoughts are here: www.digitallydownloaded.net/2017/03/review-stories-untold-pc.html
People don't always deal or accept their guilty actions. The protagonist running from his guilt and masking it is a real thing. And not everyone gets a happy ending
Have you played Sanitarium? It was a creepy psychological horror like game, but the reveal at the end more or less had the same effect for me that you explain in this video... somewhat lessened the weirdness of the previous chapters.
It really is a great horror story for the first three parts (although the third part also suffers because it begins to reference the fourth part. It doesn't help that the forth part is so overbearing. Like, you figure it out a tenth of the way through, and the game just keeps smashing you in the face with its mundane moral.
[Spoiler Warning] Really happy to hear your insight about this game, I played it recently and loved every moment. For me I think one of the most interesting things about the game is how people feel about the main character after they have finished playing. For me it was a short sweet experience that gave me a lot to think about after I was finished and I really liked that about it. Because it was short enough for me to finish it in an evening, I could reflect on all the events more easily afterwards and I felt like I was left with a lot to reflect on. Maybe because I haven't experienced a lot of stories that end the way Stories Untold did it was more refreshing for me but I didn't see the twist coming at all and it really fascinated me as all the pieces started to come together. When I play games I often feel like I am the main character so I was just as desperately trying to justify things and divert blame, for example you can talk to your Dad before driving your sister home, he'll tell you that you've had a few so you should be careful when driving your sister home. Your sister notices that you are so drunk that you can barely unlock and start the car and yet still decides the lift home is worth the risk. None of this absolves the main character for what they have done but to me it serves to make the morality of the car crash much more grey. I would agree that he hasn't fully taken responsibility for what he has done at the end, but it feels like he's taken the first step. On the other hand am I just trying to play down how responsible MC is because I'm just as in denial as he is? Honestly I'm still not sure.
Agreed! The individual episodes didn’t make a ton of sense, but I’d have taken that over the “it was all a dream/metaphor for guilt!” trope. Still a solid title though.
Have you tried The Sexy Brutale? It has an interesting guilt and acknowledgement story that I think works a bit better. Also, several endings to choose from. It's got a kind of horror theme to it, but the art style seems more dia de los muertos inspired.
Wow people seem to really dislike the last chapter huh? Or at least one aspect of it. I guess I'm the odd one out then, I loved SU from start to finish and found the ending incredibly chilling. :)
the 4th episode completely undid the game for me. I would recommend this game only if you just play the first 3 episodes and then thats it, dont play the last one
I kind of love the 80s-revival in general, and I do think the slasher trend of it is closer to a revival than you give it credit for. Classic format Halloween (Jamie Lee Curtis and everything) is about to come back next year and, after the last two Chucky movies were good enough to deserve more than DTV releases (no, really, Curse and Cult were more worthy of cinema releases than, say, The Snowman), Freddy vs. Chucky with Kevin Bacon as Freddy and (spoilers for the end of Cult) the Dourifs as Chucky might actually be a fun boost to both of those franchises. How does Freddy fight another, differently so, post biological entity like Charles Lee Ray? That's a fun scene to imagine.
oh man, I'd not gotten around to the third and fourth stories, after really liking the first two. that's waaay disappointing! I mean--like--power to them for trying to be thoughtful, and it sounds like they sorta succeeded but as a matter of extreme taste, but I really would like some good proto-cosmic horror that doesn't turn out to have man be the real monster. there's tons of introspective media out there! I want to be the victim of an unknowing and nightmarish universe, like in real life! [I felt this way when I watched The Machinist, I was sooo disappointed it was just a story of guilt and not some bizarre world]
"But you don't see a lot of proper horror anthologies in games." Don't worry, the Dark Pictures Anthology is doing its best to make sure that remains true.
I think the idea of the ending lessening the effect of other episodes is, while in a sense correct, also part of the point. To me it's not much different from Firewatch. Both are thrillers that seem to be about government conspiracies but turn out to be about the protagonist trying to avoid dealing with their guilt and/or responsibilities, indulging in a fictional world they created for themselves to avoid real life, basically. Firewatch was more about the characters; Stories is more about the atmosphere. I like them both.
Great video. I too felt the last episode wasn't too good, and that it sort of cheapened the rest. How many times did they have to hammer the basic story of the drunk driving accident? it just got repetitive. Still, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would (I don't automatically like these 80s revival things), and really loved the weather station section. Great atmosphere all around.
Stories untold lost me at the last chapter. It was a good chapter, wrapped up the story nicely, but the first three chapters were far more enjoyable by themselves rather than tied to the overarching story of Jame's fatal mistake. An even worse example of this though, is The Sexy Brutale. Unlike Stories Untold with three enjoyable episodes, before the wrap up - The Sexy Brutale comes in with a singular story that ramps up, builds an excellent supernatural thriller and just falls amazingly flat by the wrap up. Once again, the themes are well thought out - the protagonist actually faces up to the mistakes he made, but at the same time, I just find myself wishing for the supernatural mystery that I started with.
I just finished this game a couple minutes ago. The first and second chapter were fun, I especially enjoyed the text adventure. The puzzle where you had to recognize the patterns while they flashed half off-screen was annoying but doable. The third chapter was terrible, in my opinion. It halted progress by making you deal with cumbersome controls and tedious translation of code. This is where I really felt like the developer was trying to buy time so people wouldn't finish the game in under two hours and get a refund. The fourth chapter was also annoying, it felt less polished than the others. Before you could always refer to some manual to remind yourself of what you have to do, this is absent in chapter 4. But what bothered me the most was the last text adventure part. The first text adventure was great, you could enter pretty much anything and it worked. In Chapter 4, however, the games asks you to do very specific things in order to progress. You can't take the jacket or look at the jacket, you have to check it. You can't "open the front door", you have to "leave the house". You can get in car and drive, you have to use keys, get in car, use keys, start engine, release handbrake and then you can drive. This part especially threw me off because after this you are required to hide the bottle in the blue car. I tried to do this in small steps, look at blue car, go to blue car, open door, drop bottle, none of these worked. It even told me that the door was jammed when I tried "open door". I ended up randomly typing stuff in and "hide bottle in other car" actually ended up worked. Did the door get magically unstuck? Did I break a window? I tried that and it didn't work. The game makes you do the simplest tasks in many small steps and then, at the climax, it leaves you guessing why nothing you try works. It really broke the flow and the immersion for me. Another thing, this could just be my setup, but the first person parts had a very low frame rate, and the final one even ran at only 1 or 2 frames per second. I thought it was an artistic decision, in which case it was a terrible idea because it only added to the frustration. If it wasn't on purpose then the game must be incredibly poorly optimized since none of the environments has a lot of detail. My PC isn't the best but I can run Shadow of Mordor fine on lowest settings and that game is much more complex than Untold Stories. And finally I want to point out the developers laziness of not implementing quality controls into the game settings and instead having you set them in the standard unity menu. All in all, the game had a good start and then quickly took a turn for the worse. I had the feeling the developer added padding to the game to stretch out its length on multiple occasions and do regret the purchase even though it was 66% off at the time. It took me three hours to finish it, so I can't ask for a refund.
Completely agree, the first person sections lost frames at some times (was running Mac version on an iMac on medium quality, same computer I've Bioshock Infinite and plenty other games on), and the field of view was incredibly tight and claustrophobic. I also agree with the text adventure parts, I needed a guide at the end because I didn't understand what to do at the car crash (I tried 'hide bottle' but was told this was a terrible idea and the police were bound to find it, so I figured hiding the bottle wasn't the correct option and tried to figure out how to run from the scene instead). I had similar problems with Event[0], which had some utterly awful and specific requirements for a game praised so well for its text adventure sequences.
mostly same. I *think* the many steps you have to go through to drive the car is deliberate, to show how unfit you are to drive because you keep forgetting to do things and have to be reminded about every little thing by Jen, but I can't see any excuse for the finickiness of the post-crash scene also, it kind of puts Jen at fault too for pushing you to drive her, and not stopping you as it becomes increasingly obvious what condition you're in, which seems like a weird narrative decision
FUCK. I literally, no joke, have a design document for a text adventure where my idea was to depict the computer on a desktop in a modern engine exactly like this. I thought, "Hey that's a reasonably easy to do thing that might make a text adventure more relevant." There are no new ideas.
I even had the idea that at the end of the text adventure, the player types "Open door." and you hear the door open in the room you're in. I bet they do that in this, too. Edit: Yup 4:10 I threw my hands up. God dammit.
It pisses me off that not only is this exactly the idea I had, and it's well done, but it's just a piece of a larger story. Its contained within someone else's idea. Man, what a bummer.
I don't think you have to give up on that idea because the game used it. They made a good use of it, sure, but they didn't develop it as deeply as they could. It's a short piece of limited exploration and interaction where you can see the computer and "reality" interacting in a couple of ways and then ends with you "finding" yourself 10 minutes in. Feels more like a proof-of-concept for a good game that actually explores the mechanic. Stories Untold only uses that in the first (and part of the second) quarters of the game. It's always straight-forward and deep down don't have that much reason for being almost a minigame instead of actual playable scenarios. It's used more because of what the text adventures can't do than for what they can, so there's still MUCH untapped potential there. For example, what if there was more to that first room than just the computer and the TV? What if the game character and you could interact and that be part of the beginning instead of end of the game? What if the console was all powerful, and you could change day/night with it? What if, because of that, the main character is being pursued by enemies that want that computer and you had do leave it to bar windows and door, and check if your room haven't been breached? Maybe winding/rewinding the game tape moved time forward or backward. Maybe you can change the TV channels to "see" different places, or have the TV show the perspective of cameras. Maybe you have to unplug the computer and move with it to a different place, where you have to set it up again. Who knows? You do. Now go and rock it like a new genre.
I appreciate the encouragement, and inspiration. The chances of me actually getting into game design are pretty slim though. The allure of this idea is I already knew how to do it. All that other stuff is a lot of work I have tried to learn in the past and failed miserably at :D
Would it have changed the impact if there was something to imply that the MC killed themselves at the end of fourth story rather than ending with an anticlimax? Like, those things were him processing his actions, and the only recourse he saw was to, in monster movie fashion, kill the monster.
Sure, but that's doesn't really support the developers. I guess you could search for the game, it just feels kinda unfriendly not to share a link to a game that he clearly likes.
I enjoyed the twist of Stories Untold and I don't feel the fourth episode undercuts the others; I thought James/you do acknowledge the guilt because chapter 4 forces you to type out what happened. Like, when I got to that part I didn't want to type out what happened and I tried to avoid it by typing other things, but the only way to move forward is to confess to what you/James did.
I feel like he is neglecting the whole library. I guess it's because the games on the Switch are typically less complex in terms of theming, but there are definitely many fantastic analysis potential left out by forgetting about the Switch.
Please start making no spoiler parts to the next videos you make! I love your channel but I've only seen the videos of games I've finished or am sure I won't play. I mean, it's up to you and if you don't want to well it's your choice, but I'm sure many would appreciate it.
Have you played the studios new game, Observation (it's not "new", but their latest I guess). It's really good, way better than this (and I liked this one as well).
RE: the spoilers, I personally hate melodrama, I don't see why they felt the need to go and do it. It's weird--most games like this will throw in some arbitrary gaminess to try and "be a game", but this is like throwing in arbitrary layers of narrative, and as a result functions as even less of a game. Normally I wouldn't be against it but it really does detract from the first three episodes.
I agree while the twist does work on some level it fundamentally makes the game far less interesting and engaging. It’s also rather unsatisfying conclusion to the game further given that there’s a lot of ambiguity given how problematic that sort of therapy is as someone else explained.
I disagree with you that James never confronts his guilt. In the beginning, through the text adventure game, Jessica compels you to "Say it James. Just say it!" To which you are forced to reply "IT WAS ALL MY FAULT!" And at the end of the game the staring eye of Jessica commands you again "Say it James. Tell them." You go to the Observation room. You press record. Though we don't hear what James said we heard Dr.Alexander congratulate him on his progress and say the police will want to hear about what he has to say, although he doesn't suspect they will take HIM out of here. As in he doesn't think the police will remove James from the hospital. He confessed. "It was all my fault."
SPOILERS The twist put me off, but personally its fine because I can just ignore that chapter and treat the prior chapters as their own experiences that actually happened with no consequence.
Horrors should really stop trying to do Silent Hill 2-ish twists all the damn time. It takes special kind of talent to pull off this kind of twist correctly. Most of those devs are not nearly there. Here is the hot tip number one - this kind of twist doesn't work if your main character is just some nameless randy most of the time.
He says there's going to be no spoilers but revels that the game has no jump scares, even though you thinking there will be makes the game seem scarier.
ugh, i hated the fact that is just inside someone else´s mind , it doesnt work here, its not like a plot twist of "it was just a dream", its very dissapointing , i liked it better when it was all just an anthology
Maybe the point is some people just can't deal with guilt? Have you considered that? I don't think a character has to neccessarily face or defeat their delusions to make a point about them being bad. Your critique can be... so simpleminded sometimes.
Ronin11111111 Usually for a story to feel complete the main character has to grow in some way, or overcome an obstacle, which doesn't really happen here. Of course not every story has to do that, but it's a valid criticism nonetheless, IMO.
arguably that happens *most* of the time in real life. no triumph or overcoming. just tragedy... That kinda makes this game much more depressing than scary...
Your issue with the framework story seems weird to me. You take issue with him masking his guilt and never taking ownership of it, but I think that's probably a more accurate portrayal of how people deal with guilt. They find reasons not to deal with it and never really address it. It may feel unsatisfying to end that way, but I don't see it as a problem. From only the information provided, it sounds like it has a host of other issues. I'm not sure why you focused on this piece. Maybe there is something that got lost in translation.
The framing story sounds like utter garbage. Why does it seem like every dev who tries to be "deep" always makes a game where the protagonist is an utter moron or a monster. Then they point it out and await applause like they've just broken the entire medium. Maybe I should just stay away from narrative indie titles.
Misterdelusion it’s possible to do it well, but it takes a lot of creativity. Once it was obvious that “it was all in your miiind, man”, I realized that they went to a really tired trope. There are no stakes in this kind of story.
You raise a fair point. That kind of "twist" story is way too common, especially in (indie) games, and it is very rarely done well. I've only watched a let's play of the game, but it really feels like Stories Untold would've been stronger if it let the individual episodes be . . . . well, just individual episodes, instead of trying to "cleverly" tie the story together.
These indie "stories" are really "random pieces to look mysterious; let more thoughtful people think of something that makes sense". Not just indie though (major television shows, often scifi, do this for year before a non-ending). I've given up on "mysteries" outside of (single volume) books.
And on top of that, it's just so HAMFISTED. Like, they revealed the "twist" so early in the 4th ep that I honestly expected them to do a switcheroo of some sort, like the MC was being brainwashed or something. But no, they play it 100% straight and absolutely hammer the player over the head with the themes\messages\symbolism of it all with no subtlety. To me, the fourth chapter was so bad it basically ruined the game for me.
it's a shame they ruined this game with that stupid cliched ending. I can't believe how many games in this era still end with everything being a dream or the character being stuck in some computer simulation
As a person who has been behind the wheel of a heavy car accident with passengers where the car flipped, and thank god I hadn't drunk one drop and nobody got hurt, this game absolutely resonated with me and crushed me with terror. Old wounds of guilt opened by a heavy game master of its own tone. But it also made me think...
To follow on your point, I think guilt is a very real form of horror. Most of it is a pool of absolutely dreadful emotions created by your own self. It comes in part from reality, your actions, yes but also how you interpret them from your inner fears and imagination. Even though my accident was an accident (caused by trying to avoid a boar), the aftermath had be feeling absolute constant debilitating guilt, with strong vivid mental projection of multiple scenarios of what could have happened to my loved ones in the car, simultaneously creating and feeling said guilt for those scenarios, events, that did not even happen.
In the case of Stories Untold, the fact that they materialize the guilt of the MC through stories that are much grander than the actual events of said MC feels very real to me. The absurdity of those projected stories, then later confronted with the actuals facts, creates a very strong sense of the reality wich must be accepted. And acknowledging reality, returning to it, feels to me like the first only possible step in accepting and overcoming guilt. Wich I believe is what the game was going for with the arc of its MC.
When you put it like that I guess "It was all a dream" endings can work.
Holy crap. I’m so glad you and your loved ones are ok! ( and hopefully the boar too)
But that does put a new perspective on how crushing and all consuming guilt can be, as it’s even tainting media that the character consumed, warping them back around the events of the crash.
Also James parents were doing number puzzles with him to bring him out of the coma because they wanted more information about the crash. As Dr. Alexander said "People needed answers, James."
also, what I found disappointing about this game is that it frames the kid as this terrible drunk driver and sister killer, but everyone at that party was drunk. You have the option to ask someone else to drive your sister home at one point (If I recall correctly) but anyone you ask refuses. Now admittedly he makes the choice to frame the cop and he makes the choice to do that instead of help his sister which directly contributes to her death. But it's not like he chose to drive drunk. Everyone around him made him do that. His sister took her own life into her hands when she got in a car with a drunk driver.
Yeah also, (four years late, I know, but I just found the channel), his DAD gives him the alcohol, and during this period of time, people were a lot more casual about drink driving and so on. Sure he's guilty of a lot, but the parents refusing to see him and treating him like a remorseless killer infuriates me, and makes them seem ignorant of their own culpability.
As a person that just hates the concept of jump scare, this might be the horror game that finally is inviting enough to try out the genre for real.
It really is. play it at night with something hot to drink and hours will just fly by
nah, how it wraps is really dissapointing
Mailark for some, maybe. I thought it was really clever and added replay value to try and see all the clues
(spoilers)
Yeah I liked the first three episodes but I hated how it ended. For one, when you're stumbling around after the whiskey, everyone can tell you're very drunk and your sister even gets wide-eyed if you try to drive the car without starting it. Like in establishing all the details you hear the reactions but they all encourage you to drive her home still and the game enforces it. As such it undercuts the "it was all my fault" narrative too. It makes you play out what happened in the 4th episode text adventure, but it feels like it should have ended differently. Like at least 3 other people explicitly in the text could have stopped this by highlighting how drunk you are but it's laughed off or brushed aside it really fails to sell how exactly it was "all your fault".
this right here is what i hated about the ending, its less your fault than everyone else's yet the game seems to still blame your character.
@@ImTakingYouToFlavorTown it was 1986.. people didnt give a fuck about you driving drunk. It IS still his fault, i mean james put the whiskey in the other car and left his sister there!
@@Gabe413 yes, but I find it to be more the fault of everyone else, while it seems like the game shifts the blame entirely on him.
oh man i forgot how good the music is in this game.
ikr
I really get what you mean about the last story kind of cheapening the others as standalone pieces. The House Abandon fucked me up a bit when I played the demo, because I read the ending -- with its circular argument with yourself that refuses to let up until you consciously agree with the terrible things part of you is saying about yourself...
("Say it: It's all your fault"
"It wasn't my fault"
"You're pathetic. Say it!"
"No"
"SAY IT")
... as a weirdly evocative metaphor for the kind of internal dialogue that comes out of a certain kind of suicidal depression, where part of you just wants you to admit that you're a shitty person and that all your problems are your own fault, and the very act of trying to refute that eventually becomes too exhausting and you fall further into depression. That was always a really personal read, I guess, but it still felt a lot more powerful than 'no actually it all was his fault after all and he's just in denial'.
I love that, in the years since this video came out, there have not only been horror game anthologies (e.g DreadX and Haunted PS1), but they actually share _more_ similarities with the structure of old horror-anthology shows by having each part be developed by a different person.
hey, i'm the one who actually first suggested you to check this out! glad you did, and that we get a cool video from it. there's definitely a lot to discuss here, so i'm glad you decided to talk about it.
I always found the 'everyone abandons you and becomes a heartless mojster' thing to be incredibly unrealistic. Even if you were drunk driving, I don't think people would just drop you for being in an accident
i think somewhere these people know its their fault that it happened.
I actually just finished this game today and had a number of thoughts about its themes and presentation swimming through my head about it.
Really glad you put this out today. It's given me even more to think about and digest.
Anyone else damn near have a seizure during the 2nd episode where you have to keep staring into a rapidly blinking array of lights? Or the part where they expect casual video-gamers to be able to interpret a full morse-code transmission?
'James never accepts that he did anything wrong.' Yeah, it's not like the end of the game requires you to type "IT'S ALL MY FAULT" multiple times or anything. It takes him until the very end of the game to accept that it's his fault, but he does, eventually.
Aside from this single gripe, I agree with a lot of what you said, though.
Rats808 its not explicitly stated that he did confess though. At thw end the doctor(?) says "oh wow we're sure to let the cops know about that, but you'll probably stay here for quite some time longer though" in a dismissive manner. It could be that he told another obvious lie and that the hospital staff and everyone around him suspects what happened, but can't actually pin it on him. And now he's still continuing that lie.
Also,right after the ambiguous climax it cuts to the title screen of the game/show: 'stories untold', not stories told;)
But stories untold is the name of the show he watches. If it doesn't say "Stories Told", that does not mean anything. The end of the game is supposed to signify that James has finally confronted what really happened, but him not being able to come to terms with it, as he stops the session.
I'm so glad to see this! I absolutely loved Stories Untold, and I've heard so few people talk about it! I agree that the final episode, while very clever, didn't 100% nail it's goal. This analysis of the uniting aspects of these episodes was good. Thanks for this!
While the story as a whole has its plot holes, I don’t think the last episode was bad at all. I liked how it combined all the separate mechanics presented so far and tied everything together
That framing story revealed in episode 4 is some real stereotypical indie game bingo shit.
Loved this game. I like the way it wrapped all the different stories together by a common arc, and as a one time play, it was a really fun adventure.
I think this isn't really about the protagonist (antagonist?) dealing with the consequences of his actions, but more that he's gone into this mental state where his mind goes crazy and decides to convince himself he was not wrong. Eventually with all the questioning and the like, he comes to terms with what he's done as his dreams talk to him and make him realise that he actually did kill his sister, and its, well, just a sad ending about a boy who just, fucked up, real bad.
Its brilliantly told, and I'd love to see a sequel using creepier methods to tell another haunting and depressing story.
John Mickellan gave a great talk at EGX this year and was super great about questions after. Glad to know he's been doing well after Alien Isolation
Okay so I have some specific points to address about the end scenario and why, to me, it never felt quite right.
The main issue is that the evidence points that you receive through act 4 are all slanted in a strange way. Like... you overhear a comment from a cop that worked with the police guy that you hit that 'he couldn't possibly have done it, he's a father of 3 and never touches the stuff... it must have been that other guy!' or something to that effect, but the way they phrase it comes off as extremely biased. There's some other stuff but for me it never quite adds up to 'you did it', it adds up to 'everyone wants you to think you did it'.
Basically, it's like... the main problem with stuff like hypnosis therapy (which I think was implied to be used on the main character but it's been a while) is that the information it uncovers about the patient is often actually implanted into the patient by the doctor, whether they do it purposefully or not. If you ask people the right questions when they're in a receptive state, it's very easy to lead them to believing in all sorts of stuff. And not just 'oh I was a queen in a past life' or something like that, but even 'uncovering' abuse at the hands of their parents or other stuff like that- things that didn't happen, but because the patient has these issues, giving those complex problems a concrete source is very psychologically appealing. It's... easy.
Like, it's completely clear that Mr. Aiton was deeply traumatized by the death of his sister and feels guilt for being the one to drive her home and get into an accident, but the game's details about what actually happened are all so vague and all predisposed towards you being the True Evil who not only drove drunk but even planted a bottle of scotch on the other driver- and then it forces you to type it over and over, too... like the video says, the main character never really accepts this answer, and it creates some ambiguity in the product that I don't think was intentional.
The jingle at the beginning of Stories Untold is the best.
I'm not saying the twist is on the same low level as most tired "it was all a dream ooooooh" twists, but yeah, it does strike me as kind of a narratively cowardly reveal. When a horror story suddenly backs down from the fantastical to reveal that it's actually totally mundane and realistic, all that does is drop the audience's engagement with it. It's backing down from the commitment of being weird and haunting, assuring the audience "no this is actually all fake and while the protagonist is haunted by this, you don't have to be because of the fakeness". Here, it's contextualized in a neat way, and I'm interested in themes of dissociation, especially regarding classically gen-x manchild pop culture fantasy, but that context also doesn't feel like it's criticized well enough.
I really agree, I think the DM's guide episode on plot twists covered it well with the idea that a good twist makes the story more interesting.
I think it really explains why twists like this feel like such a let down.
AND THEN THE KITTEN WOKE UP
I would say I felt the opposite, actually. Walking Dead (season 1 at least) presented very believable flawed characters reacting realistically to a fantastical situation. Life is Strange presented a climactic conflict that came across as hilariously contrived. It was practically that old meme of the child dying of cancer whose make-a-wish is he wants to say the n-word, but replace "wants to say the n-word" with "wants to kill a lesbian".
I'll admit, I'm not exactly fond of transitioning from a fantastical narrative to a mundane reality. It didn't quite work for me in The Village by M Night Shamalamadingdong, and it didn't quite work for me in Stories Untold. But in theory it could work better if done right. In truth, I think I know why it didn't quite work for me.
*Firstly,* it was probably too quick of a transition between the fantasy and the reality, though admittedly Stories Untold did at least try by having some modicum of foreshadowing (The Village IIRC didn't have enough to foreshadow the tweeest).
*Secondly,* the whole "it was all in his head/all just a dream" thing is something that needs to be handled with care, hinted at early on and established further in with enough time before the twist (in the case of Stories Untold, the reality hit us like a car crash and jarred us out of the experience).
grounding it back to reality was the poorest choice, its very dissapointing, plot twist are supposed to take you by surprise , and a good one
[Spoilers in reference to the later half of the video] I think the 4th episode reveal works as a quietly horrific deconstruction of recent era-nostalgia trends. It doesn't dig into the fundamental problems of the 80's revival aesthetic (primarily the post-ironic glorification of harmful elements of the time) nor is it the most nuanced in execution, but something about making the player engage with intricately virtualized nuggets of consistent nostalgic aesthetics--with something very off and fundamentally pretentious about all of them--and then using the genre-fundamental mixture of discomfort and joy to reflect the player in what turns out to be the protagonists' main character arc is... Well, it's ambitious, it's abrasive, it's a bit messy and is destined to be divisive to its audience, but i think it's better off having made something of its aesthetic rather than stewing in a staunchly uncritical pit of 80's nostalgia that genre-fiction's already got plenty of lately.
I also think it works from a storytelling point of view. most people like when stories wrap up nicely, people learn their lessons and all e loose ends get tied up in a nice little bow, but if ann the genre's of entertainment, horror is one of the few where that isn't a requirement for a good story. In fact, sometimes it ruins it. I think this game is a story about a man who can not and will not accept his fault, despite knowing he kinda already has as seen from how he is tearing himself apart mentally. And in the end... He still is... And still will... Because not everyone comes out the other end of that.
There is a demo on gog that includes the text adventure part of the game (the first quarter)
yet another masterful video mister Franklin , great job
and happy halloween
I pretty much the exact same reaction as you. I thoroughly enjoyed the first 3 episodes, particularly episode 3, but my whole recollection of the game was soured by how the ending pulled out the rug from you to essentially deliver a trite "drunk driving is bad, yo".
I like how the stories are not just random tales put together with some flimsy framing device. Having them tied together in the way they are gives them, and the game as a whole more of a purpose and expands it's meaning. Who really is running away from the problems? The protagonist of the game? Or us, the people playing it?
I think you're being almost too kind to the game when you try to read into how each individual component relates to some form of guilt as proposed in the final chapter. I found the last episode contrived not only because it ret-conned everything that happened in the previous three episodes, but also because it felt like the game needed "generic tragic event" to justify its artistic experimentation. I didn't feel guilty playing as Aition and getting behind the wheel of that car because I, myself, knew it was a silly idea and yet the game kept pushing me to do it. It was painfully immersion breaking to type stuff like "don't get into the car" and "don't drive" only for the game to tell me that what I was inputting wasn't a proper command, especially when the previous few hours were a masterclass in subtle storytelling.
I thought that the three episodes had strong thematic links to each other already - the atmosphere of unpredictability and apprehension was a much more compelling through-line than some unreliable subtext about drunk driving. I almost feel as if the game would be stronger if the fourth episode simply didn't exist.
I did the review for this game back when it first came out, more of my thoughts are here: www.digitallydownloaded.net/2017/03/review-stories-untold-pc.html
People don't always deal or accept their guilty actions. The protagonist running from his guilt and masking it is a real thing. And not everyone gets a happy ending
Have you played Sanitarium? It was a creepy psychological horror like game, but the reveal at the end more or less had the same effect for me that you explain in this video... somewhat lessened the weirdness of the previous chapters.
It really is a great horror story for the first three parts (although the third part also suffers because it begins to reference the fourth part. It doesn't help that the forth part is so overbearing. Like, you figure it out a tenth of the way through, and the game just keeps smashing you in the face with its mundane moral.
Typing has never been more spookier
[Spoiler Warning] Really happy to hear your insight about this game, I played it recently and loved every moment. For me I think one of the most interesting things about the game is how people feel about the main character after they have finished playing. For me it was a short sweet experience that gave me a lot to think about after I was finished and I really liked that about it. Because it was short enough for me to finish it in an evening, I could reflect on all the events more easily afterwards and I felt like I was left with a lot to reflect on. Maybe because I haven't experienced a lot of stories that end the way Stories Untold did it was more refreshing for me but I didn't see the twist coming at all and it really fascinated me as all the pieces started to come together. When I play games I often feel like I am the main character so I was just as desperately trying to justify things and divert blame, for example you can talk to your Dad before driving your sister home, he'll tell you that you've had a few so you should be careful when driving your sister home. Your sister notices that you are so drunk that you can barely unlock and start the car and yet still decides the lift home is worth the risk. None of this absolves the main character for what they have done but to me it serves to make the morality of the car crash much more grey. I would agree that he hasn't fully taken responsibility for what he has done at the end, but it feels like he's taken the first step. On the other hand am I just trying to play down how responsible MC is because I'm just as in denial as he is? Honestly I'm still not sure.
Agreed! The individual episodes didn’t make a ton of sense, but I’d have taken that over the “it was all a dream/metaphor for guilt!” trope. Still a solid title though.
Have you tried The Sexy Brutale? It has an interesting guilt and acknowledgement story that I think works a bit better. Also, several endings to choose from. It's got a kind of horror theme to it, but the art style seems more dia de los muertos inspired.
Wow people seem to really dislike the last chapter huh? Or at least one aspect of it.
I guess I'm the odd one out then, I loved SU from start to finish and found the ending incredibly chilling. :)
The Lovecraft anthology book you flashed on screen is literally the same one I bought a few days ago
the 4th episode completely undid the game for me. I would recommend this game only if you just play the first 3 episodes and then thats it, dont play the last one
The last one connects the previous 3.. it buids the history up. how is it bad?
I kind of love the 80s-revival in general, and I do think the slasher trend of it is closer to a revival than you give it credit for. Classic format Halloween (Jamie Lee Curtis and everything) is about to come back next year and, after the last two Chucky movies were good enough to deserve more than DTV releases (no, really, Curse and Cult were more worthy of cinema releases than, say, The Snowman), Freddy vs. Chucky with Kevin Bacon as Freddy and (spoilers for the end of Cult) the Dourifs as Chucky might actually be a fun boost to both of those franchises. How does Freddy fight another, differently so, post biological entity like Charles Lee Ray? That's a fun scene to imagine.
oh man, I'd not gotten around to the third and fourth stories, after really liking the first two. that's waaay disappointing! I mean--like--power to them for trying to be thoughtful, and it sounds like they sorta succeeded but as a matter of extreme taste, but I really would like some good proto-cosmic horror that doesn't turn out to have man be the real monster. there's tons of introspective media out there! I want to be the victim of an unknowing and nightmarish universe, like in real life!
[I felt this way when I watched The Machinist, I was sooo disappointed it was just a story of guilt and not some bizarre world]
Strapping in for a new episode.... awwww ye!
"But you don't see a lot of proper horror anthologies in games." Don't worry, the Dark Pictures Anthology is doing its best to make sure that remains true.
great video- but also, what a beautiful story in the game. love that sort of thing.
I think the idea of the ending lessening the effect of other episodes is, while in a sense correct, also part of the point. To me it's not much different from Firewatch. Both are thrillers that seem to be about government conspiracies but turn out to be about the protagonist trying to avoid dealing with their guilt and/or responsibilities, indulging in a fictional world they created for themselves to avoid real life, basically. Firewatch was more about the characters; Stories is more about the atmosphere. I like them both.
Well, you can use horror to mask, accept and atone for guilt. Silent Hill 2 anybody? There's even a James!
I quite liked Stories Untold - and its ending, way better than Dear Esther which I haven't understood the least bit.
Thanks for bringing this game to my attention. Quite enjoyed it!
I just blew through this game in a few hours. It is amazing. However episode 3 is FUCKING frustrating
It was alright. Played this when it released.
Whoa! Hey! You didn't give any spoiler warnings for Dear Esther!
Great video. I too felt the last episode wasn't too good, and that it sort of cheapened the rest. How many times did they have to hammer the basic story of the drunk driving accident? it just got repetitive. Still, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would (I don't automatically like these 80s revival things), and really loved the weather station section. Great atmosphere all around.
Stories untold lost me at the last chapter. It was a good chapter, wrapped up the story nicely, but the first three chapters were far more enjoyable by themselves rather than tied to the overarching story of Jame's fatal mistake.
An even worse example of this though, is The Sexy Brutale. Unlike Stories Untold with three enjoyable episodes, before the wrap up - The Sexy Brutale comes in with a singular story that ramps up, builds an excellent supernatural thriller and just falls amazingly flat by the wrap up. Once again, the themes are well thought out - the protagonist actually faces up to the mistakes he made, but at the same time, I just find myself wishing for the supernatural mystery that I started with.
I just finished this game a couple minutes ago.
The first and second chapter were fun, I especially enjoyed the text adventure.
The puzzle where you had to recognize the patterns while they flashed half off-screen was annoying but doable.
The third chapter was terrible, in my opinion. It halted progress by making you deal with cumbersome controls and tedious translation of code.
This is where I really felt like the developer was trying to buy time so people wouldn't finish the game in under two hours and get a refund.
The fourth chapter was also annoying, it felt less polished than the others. Before you could always refer to some manual to remind yourself of what you have to do, this is absent in chapter 4. But what bothered me the most was the last text adventure part. The first text adventure was great, you could enter pretty much anything and it worked.
In Chapter 4, however, the games asks you to do very specific things in order to progress. You can't take the jacket or look at the jacket, you have to check it. You can't "open the front door", you have to "leave the house". You can get in car and drive, you have to use keys, get in car, use keys, start engine, release handbrake and then you can drive. This part especially threw me off because after this you are required to hide the bottle in the blue car. I tried to do this in small steps, look at blue car, go to blue car, open door, drop bottle, none of these worked. It even told me that the door was jammed when I tried "open door". I ended up randomly typing stuff in and "hide bottle in other car" actually ended up worked.
Did the door get magically unstuck? Did I break a window? I tried that and it didn't work. The game makes you do the simplest tasks in many small steps and then, at the climax, it leaves you guessing why nothing you try works. It really broke the flow and the immersion for me.
Another thing, this could just be my setup, but the first person parts had a very low frame rate, and the final one even ran at only 1 or 2 frames per second. I thought it was an artistic decision, in which case it was a terrible idea because it only added to the frustration. If it wasn't on purpose then the game must be incredibly poorly optimized since none of the environments has a lot of detail. My PC isn't the best but I can run Shadow of Mordor fine on lowest settings and that game is much more complex than Untold Stories.
And finally I want to point out the developers laziness of not implementing quality controls into the game settings and instead having you set them in the standard unity menu.
All in all, the game had a good start and then quickly took a turn for the worse. I had the feeling the developer added padding to the game to stretch out its length on multiple occasions and do regret the purchase even though it was 66% off at the time. It took me three hours to finish it, so I can't ask for a refund.
Completely agree, the first person sections lost frames at some times (was running Mac version on an iMac on medium quality, same computer I've Bioshock Infinite and plenty other games on), and the field of view was incredibly tight and claustrophobic.
I also agree with the text adventure parts, I needed a guide at the end because I didn't understand what to do at the car crash (I tried 'hide bottle' but was told this was a terrible idea and the police were bound to find it, so I figured hiding the bottle wasn't the correct option and tried to figure out how to run from the scene instead). I had similar problems with Event[0], which had some utterly awful and specific requirements for a game praised so well for its text adventure sequences.
mostly same. I *think* the many steps you have to go through to drive the car is deliberate, to show how unfit you are to drive because you keep forgetting to do things and have to be reminded about every little thing by Jen, but I can't see any excuse for the finickiness of the post-crash scene
also, it kind of puts Jen at fault too for pushing you to drive her, and not stopping you as it becomes increasingly obvious what condition you're in, which seems like a weird narrative decision
FUCK.
I literally, no joke, have a design document for a text adventure where my idea was to depict the computer on a desktop in a modern engine exactly like this. I thought, "Hey that's a reasonably easy to do thing that might make a text adventure more relevant."
There are no new ideas.
I even had the idea that at the end of the text adventure, the player types "Open door." and you hear the door open in the room you're in. I bet they do that in this, too.
Edit: Yup 4:10 I threw my hands up. God dammit.
It pisses me off that not only is this exactly the idea I had, and it's well done, but it's just a piece of a larger story. Its contained within someone else's idea.
Man, what a bummer.
I don't think you have to give up on that idea because the game used it. They made a good use of it, sure, but they didn't develop it as deeply as they could. It's a short piece of limited exploration and interaction where you can see the computer and "reality" interacting in a couple of ways and then ends with you "finding" yourself 10 minutes in. Feels more like a proof-of-concept for a good game that actually explores the mechanic.
Stories Untold only uses that in the first (and part of the second) quarters of the game. It's always straight-forward and deep down don't have that much reason for being almost a minigame instead of actual playable scenarios. It's used more because of what the text adventures can't do than for what they can, so there's still MUCH untapped potential there. For example, what if there was more to that first room than just the computer and the TV? What if the game character and you could interact and that be part of the beginning instead of end of the game? What if the console was all powerful, and you could change day/night with it? What if, because of that, the main character is being pursued by enemies that want that computer and you had do leave it to bar windows and door, and check if your room haven't been breached? Maybe winding/rewinding the game tape moved time forward or backward. Maybe you can change the TV channels to "see" different places, or have the TV show the perspective of cameras. Maybe you have to unplug the computer and move with it to a different place, where you have to set it up again.
Who knows?
You do. Now go and rock it like a new genre.
I appreciate the encouragement, and inspiration. The chances of me actually getting into game design are pretty slim though. The allure of this idea is I already knew how to do it. All that other stuff is a lot of work I have tried to learn in the past and failed miserably at :D
i am familiar with this situation.
Would it have changed the impact if there was something to imply that the MC killed themselves at the end of fourth story rather than ending with an anticlimax? Like, those things were him processing his actions, and the only recourse he saw was to, in monster movie fashion, kill the monster.
Out of curiosity, why don't you ever link the games you talk about so we can buy them?
Because the title of the game is literally the title of the video?
Sure, but that's doesn't really support the developers. I guess you could search for the game, it just feels kinda unfriendly not to share a link to a game that he clearly likes.
It's a bit Amicus portmanteau movie in tone.
man I can't wait for the day computer games that are inside computer games to have graphics and actually show me what is goings
Any chance you'd do something on Doki Doki Literature Club?
I adore Stories Untold
When your first computer is from grandpa you don't really have to be that old.
8:10 Did he not notice the giant tentacle pylons descending from the sky at this part?
gamers don't look up
I like the story and to me the ending makes sense. I'm fine with it. I get why people don't like it sometimes though.
Justify someone getting genuinely excited for a text adventure
Damn
I enjoyed the twist of Stories Untold and I don't feel the fourth episode undercuts the others; I thought James/you do acknowledge the guilt because chapter 4 forces you to type out what happened. Like, when I got to that part I didn't want to type out what happened and I tried to avoid it by typing other things, but the only way to move forward is to confess to what you/James did.
this game is like 70% off on steam rn if ur like me and got to the spoiler part and immediately stopped the video at the spoiler part
love your videos
So basically this game is "What if FNAF was about story instead of jumpscares"?
Hey there my guy, are you going to cover anything on the Nintendo Switch?
I feel like he is neglecting the whole library. I guess it's because the games on the Switch are typically less complex in terms of theming, but there are definitely many fantastic analysis potential left out by forgetting about the Switch.
Please start making no spoiler parts to the next videos you make! I love your channel but I've only seen the videos of games I've finished or am sure I won't play. I mean, it's up to you and if you don't want to well it's your choice, but I'm sure many would appreciate it.
Have you played the studios new game, Observation (it's not "new", but their latest I guess). It's really good, way better than this (and I liked this one as well).
RE: the spoilers, I personally hate melodrama, I don't see why they felt the need to go and do it. It's weird--most games like this will throw in some arbitrary gaminess to try and "be a game", but this is like throwing in arbitrary layers of narrative, and as a result functions as even less of a game. Normally I wouldn't be against it but it really does detract from the first three episodes.
I agree while the twist does work on some level it fundamentally makes the game far less interesting and engaging. It’s also rather unsatisfying conclusion to the game further given that there’s a lot of ambiguity given how problematic that sort of therapy is as someone else explained.
I disagree with you that James never confronts his guilt. In the beginning, through the text adventure game, Jessica compels you to "Say it James. Just say it!" To which you are forced to reply "IT WAS ALL MY FAULT!"
And at the end of the game the staring eye of Jessica commands you again "Say it James. Tell them."
You go to the Observation room. You press record. Though we don't hear what James said we heard Dr.Alexander congratulate him on his progress and say the police will want to hear about what he has to say, although he doesn't suspect they will take HIM out of here.
As in he doesn't think the police will remove James from the hospital. He confessed. "It was all my fault."
SPOILERS
The twist put me off, but personally its fine because I can just ignore that chapter and treat the prior chapters as their own experiences that actually happened with no consequence.
Perhaps... this particular story... was best left... untold...
Say what you will, I thought it was a masterpiece
A horror game without jump scares?
Finally a horror game I can play...
Can't stand the low effort jump scares.
And yes, I'm scared of it.
Wow that fourth section just ruined it. I was honestly going to buy the game but learning THAT is the ending? Hell no.
Horrors should really stop trying to do Silent Hill 2-ish twists all the damn time.
It takes special kind of talent to pull off this kind of twist correctly. Most of those devs are not nearly there.
Here is the hot tip number one - this kind of twist doesn't work if your main character is just some nameless randy most of the time.
YOOOO
I fucking love the ending. Just cause it wasn’t aliens or something supernatural, doesn’t mean that I can’t be good
You don't like a story about someone masking guilt, and not owning up to it?
He says there's going to be no spoilers but revels that the game has no jump scares, even though you thinking there will be makes the game seem scarier.
Im the only one who is here because of Markiplier
ugh, i hated the fact that is just inside someone else´s mind , it doesnt work here, its not like a plot twist of "it was just a dream", its very dissapointing , i liked it better when it was all just an anthology
Maybe the point is some people just can't deal with guilt? Have you considered that? I don't think a character has to neccessarily face or defeat their delusions to make a point about them being bad. Your critique can be... so simpleminded sometimes.
Ronin11111111 Usually for a story to feel complete the main character has to grow in some way, or overcome an obstacle, which doesn't really happen here. Of course not every story has to do that, but it's a valid criticism nonetheless, IMO.
arguably that happens *most* of the time in real life. no triumph or overcoming. just tragedy... That kinda makes this game much more depressing than scary...
Your issue with the framework story seems weird to me. You take issue with him masking his guilt and never taking ownership of it, but I think that's probably a more accurate portrayal of how people deal with guilt. They find reasons not to deal with it and never really address it. It may feel unsatisfying to end that way, but I don't see it as a problem. From only the information provided, it sounds like it has a host of other issues. I'm not sure why you focused on this piece. Maybe there is something that got lost in translation.
The framing story sounds like utter garbage. Why does it seem like every dev who tries to be "deep" always makes a game where the protagonist is an utter moron or a monster. Then they point it out and await applause like they've just broken the entire medium. Maybe I should just stay away from narrative indie titles.
Misterdelusion it’s possible to do it well, but it takes a lot of creativity. Once it was obvious that “it was all in your miiind, man”, I realized that they went to a really tired trope. There are no stakes in this kind of story.
You raise a fair point. That kind of "twist" story is way too common, especially in (indie) games, and it is very rarely done well. I've only watched a let's play of the game, but it really feels like Stories Untold would've been stronger if it let the individual episodes be . . . . well, just individual episodes, instead of trying to "cleverly" tie the story together.
Dear Esther had literally the same twist, even down to the drunk driving. I don’t even consider this a spoiler cause it’s so trite.
These indie "stories" are really "random pieces to look mysterious; let more thoughtful people think of something that makes sense". Not just indie though (major television shows, often scifi, do this for year before a non-ending). I've given up on "mysteries" outside of (single volume) books.
And on top of that, it's just so HAMFISTED. Like, they revealed the "twist" so early in the 4th ep that I honestly expected them to do a switcheroo of some sort, like the MC was being brainwashed or something. But no, they play it 100% straight and absolutely hammer the player over the head with the themes\messages\symbolism of it all with no subtlety. To me, the fourth chapter was so bad it basically ruined the game for me.
it's a shame they ruined this game with that stupid cliched ending. I can't believe how many games in this era still end with everything being a dream or the character being stuck in some computer simulation
amerikan 80s nostalgia is the worst what happened to all art in 201x and cheap postmodern have died with hitler in the rest of the world
Ehhhh... the ending sounds disappointing. I think I'll skip it.
Could u do the game "Getting over it"