Stories Untold

Stories Untold is a horror anthology game made up of four short episodes, each presenting a different slice of dread through lo-fi interfaces: old text adventures, CRT monitors, tape decks, and clunky 80s hardware. You are almost always sitting at a desk, reading text, typing commands, or turning physical dials. That sounds inert. It is the opposite of inert. No Code understood something that a lot of horror designers miss, which is that the gap between the player's imagination and what's on screen is scarier than any jump scare rendered in Unreal Engine. The first episode drops you into a text-adventure-within-a-text-adventure and lets the meta-layers slowly unspool. Each subsequent episode recontextualizes what came before, and the final revelation earns its emotional weight rather than just pulling a rug. The writing is precise and restrained, the kind of prose that trusts you to fill in the horror yourself. If you grew up with Zork, Infocom titles, or even just 80s genre horror films, the references land with a specific warmth before they curdle into something unsettling. Mechanically the game is minimal by design. You type, you click, you listen. The sound design does enormous lifting here. A low hum that shifts just slightly off-key, static that builds in tiny increments, silence that feels loaded rather than empty. The soundtrack functions more like a pressure system than background music, and wearing headphones is essentially mandatory if you want the full effect. It's one of those rare games where closing your eyes and just listening tells you almost everything about the emotional state the developers intended. The legitimate criticisms are real though. The four episodes are uneven in tension. One mid-game chapter drags in a way that even a generous read can't fully excuse, and the runtime of roughly two to three hours means this is closer to an interactive novella than a full game. Players expecting mechanical depth or replayability will find neither. The point-and-click elements and interface puzzles are never genuinely difficult, and anyone wanting agency over story direction will hit a wall fast. This is a linear experience, full stop. Who it's for: anyone who liked Tacoma, Observation, or the early work of Jon Ingold, anyone who misses horror that works through suggestion and atmosphere rather than spectacle, and anyone willing to sit with a game that asks almost nothing of your hands and everything of your attention. Stories Untold knows exactly how long it needs to be and stops there. That kind of editorial discipline is rarer than it should be.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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