“I remember when I was a kid, the story was always the same in children’s books,” Storyteller’s developer Daniel Benmergui tells me. “But looking at the illustrations, it felt like there was potential for other things to happen differently than the story they were selling you. What would happen if I warned this character that these other characters would do this? I remember looking at the illustrations and wondering what would happen if I could change something visually to make the story go somewhere else. That prompted me to start this game where you could play around with these stories.”
Storyteller is an intriguing puzzle game that allows players to do just that, by moving characters and scenes around the storyboard to impact the narrative and arrive at the various required endings. It’s taken 15 years for Storyteller to come to fruition, though Benmergui tells me his first Storyteller prototype was completed in just two days.
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“In the very first version of the game, the only thing I did was put the story illustrations in, and you could move stuff around. It was a very early, very simple version of Storyteller. As I tried doing more things with it, I realised there was potential to do even more subtle or abstract things like manipulating characters, motivations, and emotions. The game started to become more and more sophisticated as I kept working on it. I would have never imagined back in the day that this is what Storyteller would have been like when they shipped it. It would have been unimaginable to me.”
Benmergui says there’s a story simulator behind Storyteller, and regardless of the level or objective, the simulator will run the story. There are no hard-coded solutions, so players can play around with each level to find what works.
“People may assume that each level is custom-made and we go straight for the answer, but that's not the case,” Benmergui says. “There is a simulator running the stories on each level. All that it does is check whether you fulfilled the goal. Some people will find solutions we didn't think of, and I hope whenever that happens, we add more animations or sounds into the game to accommodate that new solution. I'm looking forward to people abusing the technology in the game.”
Storyteller that draws on well-known literature but generic storytelling scenarios, but the well of inspiration is seemingly endless. There is so much that the game could utilise, but unfortunately, Benmergui tells me they didn’t have the time to implement it all. If you ever peek back at some of the original key artwork, you’ll see robots, dogs, lightning strikes, and other characters that never made the cut.
“One of these days, I'm going to show some of the stuff that didn't make it into the game like Frankenstein, Arabian Nights stories, and also some Shakespeare,” Benmergui tells me. “There's so much stuff that could be in the game, but it didn't make it because we didn't find a good place for them yet. We just ran out of time. There's a bunch of stuff that's halfway functional. I hope we get the time to finish them. There's a lot more stuff you can do with this mechanic.
“Adding arcs — a set of characters, settings, and all this stuff — is actually extremely time-consuming. There's always a high chance that that doesn't really pan out, and we'll have to drop all the work with them. There's a very high bar for new stuff to be worth putting into the main game. We crammed as much as we could in the time that we had. All the stuff that you saw in that book, there's animations for them, prototype levels, and all that. I hope we'll get to add them as an update or DLC or something one day.”
Benmergui’s hope to expand upon Storyteller is evident within the game itself. All of the levels unfold within a book, and after completing it, you can see it says ‘Tome 1’ on the back on a library label that shows who has checked it out as if teasing that this is just the first of many. Benmergui says it was put there to apply gentle pressure to publisher Annapurna. “People are going to ask. I'm going to look at Annapurna and say, 'Well, should we do Tome 2 or not?’”
As Storyteller dabbles in some of the best-known classic literature tales, I took the opportunity to ask Benmergui which game he would love to give the Storyteller treatment to. “I would like to grab one of these huge story-heavy games, let's say, The Last of Us, and just do a Storyteller version of that where you can play the whole story in 15 seconds,” he tells me. “Storyteller is very snappy. You can make and experiment in seconds. What would happen if these characters actually did survive or did not survive? How would the other characters react? And that ties back to my original fantasy about the game, which is about exploring what else could happen in this situation.”
On top of the unfinished assets they have, he wants “to go to the Middle East or Japan”, However, One of the most requested features for Storyteller is a sandbox mode, as fans want to build their own stories and see their creations unfold on the page. Benmergui explains that giving players a whole toolbox of every character and scene with eight or ten frames would be too overwhelming, and if he were to add a sandbox, it would need to feel interesting.
“There's probably a middle ground there, where I give you a very large set of things and very loose goals. The problem is that adding all these combinations of stuff happening between characters requires a lot of art and sounds. We need to be very convinced that it's worth doing. Everything we tried so far doesn't make the editor mode feel interesting to play around with. Getting stuck on design has happened before with Storyteller, and I eventually resolved all those problems. Maybe we just need to give it some time. It's something else for the future.”
Storyteller is currently available for Nintendo Switch and PC, though Benmergui also confirmed it would be coming to other platforms in the future.
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