Fuck Stories Untold

...I just finished the game Stories Untold and I am mad about it.

It's an eerie/atmospheric game, which takes place over four chapters.  The first - which I completed in May of 2018 - takes the form of a text-adventure.  Or rather, it takes the form of you, as an unidentified character, looking at an '80s desktop in first person while playing a text-adventure game on it.  I completed the other three sections over the past two days.  The second chapter, you're some kind of hospital tech, following instructions on another in-game computer screen to activate specific machines, while, in the third, you're some kind of vaguely military-flavoured character following radio instructions to input lines of code on another digital computer screen that you're looking at in first person.  The fourth chapter ties it all together, with the most cliched and trite twist imaginable.  I'm going to reveal it, because this review doesn't make sense without it.  [Spoiler Alert] your character is the same throughout all four chapters.  He accidentally killed his sister while drunk-driving and all the stories are the ways his mind tries to shield him from this reality while it tries to break through [Spoiler Over].

The game tries to immerse you and make you feel like you are the character interacting with these computers and machines.  It fails, in several ways.  Firstly, I'm not a man, so there's the initial break  in dramatic tension right there.  Yes, I know I'm role-playing, I am happy with role-playing games, but if you're going to give out concrete details like names and genders then I'm not going to feel as immersed, am I?  Doki Doki Literature Club did this very well, [Spoiler Alert] by avoiding specifying a gender - after a certain point - and by letting you enter a name (and, later, by reading it from your PC) [Spoiler Over].  Something like that might have worked better.  Another problem I had was in the controls.  At several points, you type something onto your own, real, keyboard which then appears on the screen of the digital computer in the game.  At other times, you use your mouse to click on things which respond.  There is no indication of what you can and cannot click on, and some things are unresponsive for no damn reason, which means it's hard to tell if you're trying to do something that can't be done or if it's just decided not to respond to that click (shout out to the TV screen in chapter three and the endless clicks it took to switch it between modes).  Another problem I had - and so did others - was that the games aspect ratio was wrong, making some of the buttons you had to press invisible and therefore impossible to click on.  Despite the developer claiming this was "fixed in a recent patch" as of the 19th of March 2017, this was still a problem on my copy, downloading in May of 2018.  I ended up deleting it and redownloading it now, May 2020, and it finally worked.  Well, I say it worked, I had to select the exact proportions I had my monitor set to - which I only knew because I'd been playing with them to try to fix the game - and play in full screen.  Several of the screens which involved any kind of motion were ridiculously jolty, so I tried lowering the quality.  This did not fix the joltiness, but it did make some of the information I needed to read off the in-game screens completely illegible.  With that and the random unresponsiveness of things that needed to be clicked on, I ended up just using a guide.  Oh, and I should probably mention that if you need to switch the game off halfway through one of the four chapters - like, for example, because it's making you fucking ill, as discussed below - it won't save your progress.  It saves each chapter you've completed, but not any partial progress.

Later, while playing chapter 4 and learning the, again, ridiculously cliched and trite "twist" in the story, I realised that the joltiness of the moving screens was on purpose - [Spoiler Alert] they're trying to make you feel drunk, since the character was drunk driving [Spoiler Over].  This pack of cunts were making me ill - nausea and headache - on purpose to increase the "immersion" which was fucking flawed to begin with!

Seriously, fuck these people in particular.

I've had games make me ill before - Spyro, for example - but I've never had someone fucking do it on purpose as some kind of terrible gimmick to shore up some idea of immersion and role-playing which was never going to work in the first place because I'm not a man called [Spoiler Alert] James Aiton [Spoiler Over].(stupid fucking name, btw).  I finished the game, but, tbh, it was mostly out of spite.

Oh, I forgot to talk about the other problem.  The fucking sound.  Turn it down so the music doesn't blast your ears off?  Too bad, you can't hear any of the voice acting!  I don't just mean you can't make it out, I mean you'd have no idea anyone was speaking at all if you didn't have subtitles turned on.  I can only assume that this game hates the players and doesn't think we deserve to play it if we're not willing to make ourselves physically ill for art.  I suppose I could also assume that the dev team were simply too unskilled to make a game that doesn't make people physically ill, but since The 7th Guest managed to do non-jolty first-person movement in 19-fucking-93, I'm going to assume it was on purpose.  To be complete and utter wankers.  Good job, you succeeded.

Fuck this game.