Stories Untold

Horror games have a tell. They lean on jump scares, on gore, on the cheap adrenaline of a monster lunging from a closet. Stories Untold does none of that. Instead, it sits the player down in front of a CRT monitor in a dark room, hands over a keyboard, and lets imagination do the work of terror. It’s a rare game that understands the scariest thing on screen is often just a blinking cursor.

Developed by No Code—the Glasgow studio founded by former Alien: Isolation designer Jon McKellan—the game began life as a single free experiment called The House Abandon before expanding into a four-part anthology. That origin matters. The DNA of Alien: Isolation is everywhere: the fetishistic obsession with analog hardware, the way light pools and menaces, the sound design that makes a humming machine feel like a held breath.

Released February 27, 2017 by Devolver Digital to an 81 on Metacritic, Stories Untold occupies a strange but valuable niche. It is not a big game, and at $9.99 it’s priced like it. But it swings at ideas most AAA studios wouldn’t dare attempt, using skeuomorphism as a weapon—every knob, cassette deck, and microfiche reader is a tactile lie designed to lull the player into believing they’re safe behind the interface.

This is interactive fiction that interrogates interactive fiction. It asks what happens when the game being played starts playing the player. In a market flooded with open-world bloat and live-service grind, its confidence and restraint feel almost radical. Four episodes, four machines, one deeply personal wound at the center of it all.

• Four-Episode Anthology Structure: Each vignette runs on entirely different mechanics—a text parser, a lab console, an Arctic monitoring station, a fractured memory—that only reveal their connective tissue in the final act.
• Diegetic, Hardware-Driven Gameplay: No “interact” button. Players type commands, flip switches, tune dials, and thread microfiche. The machine is the interface, and the interface is the horror.
• Elite Sound Design: The mechanical clack of keys, the whir of a cassette rewinding, the low electrical hum—this is a game built to terrify with the eyes closed.
• Meta-Narrative Payoff: The disconnected episodes converge into a single, gut-punch story about guilt and trauma that recontextualizes everything that came before.

The Gameplay Loop

There is no single loop in Stories Untold, and that’s the point. Each episode hands the player a new machine and a new set of rules, then dares them to figure out how it works with minimal hand-holding.

Episode One, “The House Abandon,” is the hook and the thesis. It’s a text adventure on an old computer, with commands like open door and go upstairs. Then the room around the desk begins to respond to what’s typed on screen. The wall between the fiction and the “reality” of the game dissolves, and the design is genuinely unnerving—a magic trick built to feel impossible.

Episode Two moves into a laboratory, running experiments on an alien specimen by following a manual and manipulating a bank of controls. Episode Three is the standout: an Arctic monitoring station where the job is decoding messages, threading microfiche, and battling mounting isolation as the radio crackles with bad news. Episode Four pulls the threads together into the memory-piecing finale that reframes the whole anthology.

The connective mechanic across all four is observation. The player is constantly cross-referencing an on-screen problem with a physical manual, a chart, or a set of printed instructions. This is old-school puzzle design—the kind that assumes attention and punishes its absence. When it works, the satisfaction is deep and tactile: the design makes the player an operator, not a tourist.

Where the Friction Lives

Here’s the honest part. Stories Untold is occasionally as frustrating as the 1980s tech it worships.

The text parser in Episode One is rigid. It wants specific verbs, and if intent is phrased slightly wrong, it stonewalls—not because the puzzle went unsolved, but because the developer’s exact syntax went unguessed. That’s not tension. That’s onboarding friction masquerading as difficulty, and it’s the single most dated thing about the game.

A few later puzzles drift into obtuse territory, demanding a leap of logic that feels more like reading the designer’s mind than reading the room. These moments are rare, but in a game this short, a ten-minute stall in front of a machine can puncture the carefully built atmosphere. Dread doesn’t survive contact with a walkthrough.

Still, these are the scars of ambition, not laziness. The friction is a byproduct of a game committed to its bit—one that refuses to modernize the very mechanics that make its horror feel authentic. You take the good with the annoying. Mostly, it’s good.

The Emotional Architecture

The meta-structure works because it serves the story rather than showing off. The convergence in the final episode isn’t a twist for its own sake—it’s an emotional detonation. The disconnected experiments and vignettes turn out to be the fractured coping mechanisms of a single mind processing a single event. When it lands, it recolors everything that came before, and the retro trappings that seemed charming suddenly feel like a cage.

The aesthetic is immaculate analog decay. Scanlines bloom across the CRT. Light falls in tight, claustrophobic pools that leave the edges of every room thick with implication. No Code understands that darkness you can’t see into is scarier than any monster you can.

Technically, a game of this intimate, single-room scope is light on hardware by design. But the real technical achievement is the audio engineering. The tactile sound of hardware isn’t decoration; it’s the load-bearing wall of the entire experience. Headphones are non-negotiable.

On Steam, this is the definitive version. The keyboard-and-mouse setup is thematically correct. Typing commands into a text parser with an actual keyboard collapses the distance between player and character at the desk. Your hands do what their hands do. That’s the whole magic.

The Nintendo Switch port is a comfortable way to experience the story—the portability suits its bite-sized, one-sitting length—but console controls introduce friction the PC version doesn’t have. Typing and precise dial-tuning via a gamepad or touchscreen feels one step removed, slightly clunky where the mouse-and-keyboard version feels immediate. It’s a good port of a game that was born on a desktop and never quite forgets it.

Stories Untold is not for everyone, and it never wanted to be. It’s short, it’s occasionally stubborn, and it asks players to find horror in a keyboard and a dial rather than a shotgun and a horde. What No Code built here is the kind of thing bigger studios spend nine-figure budgets chasing and miss: a game that makes the player complicit in their own unraveling.

It’s a solid, distinctive work with real flaws—the parser, the obtuse stretches—and it earns a recommendation for the right audience rather than a blanket one. Buy it. Play it in one sitting, at night, with the lights off and headphones on. Forgive the parser its stubbornness. What’s left afterward is one of the smartest, most quietly devastating horror experiences the medium has produced—proof that innovation isn’t about scale. It’s about nerve.