I haven’t even seen Stranger Things, but the theme music and logo of Stories Untold instantly made me think of Stranger Things. There are 4 episodes in the game, and the first three seem unrelated, but all is explained in the fourth. I won’t go into detail about the fourth episode because it’s basically a story based game, and if you explain the plot; then it is a spoiler.
In the first episode, you are playing a text-based adventure game on the Spectrum computer. You type in commands to navigate a house like “open door”, “go to hallway”. At first, you play a normal version of the game, but then replay a creepier version.
In the second episode, you are performing lab experiments by switching on machinery and turning dials. You have a computer with the instructions, so need to check them to work out which machine to turn on and adjust.
In the third episode, you are adjusting a radio to pick up a code to enter in the computer. Then you need to check microfiche for the next codes to enter. I found it difficult to see the text, and some of the instructions seemed a bit cryptic, so I looked up what you needed to do on a walkthrough.
The fourth episode revisits mechanics from the previous three. At this point, I realised there were controls to zoom and focus the text to see the microfiche, so maybe it wasn’t hard to see the text in episode 3 afterall.
However, I think this highlights the main problem with the game. It doesn’t do a great job of explaining what you need to do. When you play the text adventure, certain commands seem to work in some areas, but not others. Often, the objects you need to type aren’t displayed on screen. So for example, it tells you that you are in a room of people you don’t recognise, but doesn’t give you any more info than that. I tried “look at room”, “look at people” without success, then I assumed we needed to leave the room. I tried typing “go to kitchen”, “go outside”, but it actually expected “go to hallway”, then from the hallway I could move to the kitchen. In general, the controls are clunky and it’s a bit stressful to play.
With each episode, they seem incomplete stories. They are just experiences without a conclusion. Like I said, the fourth one does explain how they are related to each other, but even then, they still feel like throwaway experiences and the story really just exists in the fourth episode. The story is pretty similar to those stories in the show Black Mirror.