Storyteller, a game created by Daniel Benmergui and Annapurna Interactive, is a puzzle game intended for casual gamers and narrative game enthusiasts (ages 13+). It is playable on PC, Nintendo, and iOS. The game changes the act of storytelling into a puzzle, which creates an interesting and reflective commentary on how narratives are built. Unlike traditional puzzle games that might use the concept of a story as window dressing, Storyteller’s core mechanic is storytelling. It challenges players to place characters, settings, and events to create specific narrative outcomes described by the level titles. This structure doesn’t only create an engaging puzzle; it teaches players about how to create narratives, dramatic structure, and the building blocks that make some of our favorite stories that we’ve come to admire and internalize through cultural exposure.
The game’s main innovation is how makes narrative assembly into a game. Each puzzle has a title (like “Eve Dies Heartbroken” or “Surviving Spouses Find Comfort”) and empty comic panels that players must fill using a palette of characters, locations, and elements to create the specific story associated with the title. This takes storytelling (something understood as a creative, open-ended process) into a closed, methodical puzzle with concrete solutions. By doing this, the game shows that there exist formulas and patterns that undergird even our most beloved stories.
Storyteller’s mechanics are great because they embody the thematic focus so well. Every interaction relates directly to how storytelling works.
Characters react differently based on their placement, surrounding elements, and chosen setting. Place Adam and Eve together with a heart symbol, and they fall in love. Place either next to a gravestone containing the other, and they show grief. These predictable reactions become the logic systems that power puzzles, which are dynamics that emerge from the mechanical rules.
With limited panel space and characters, the game forces players to efficiently tell complex stories using minimal elements. This mirrors a key tenet of storytelling itself: use just enough to convey meaning without extra fluff. The resource constraints create what the formal elements framework would define as meaningful conflict.
The design’s elegance appears when compared to other narrative-focused games like The Room series or Portal. While those games separate their puzzles from their narratives, Storyteller unifies them completely. The puzzles are the narrative, and solving them requires understanding key storytelling principles rather than just logical deduction. In the MDA framework, this is an example of mechanics directly producing intended emotional experiences rather than being disconnected.
The game shows great design through its simplicity and depth. In the puzzle “Heartbreak with a Happy Ending” (above), players must create a story where characters experience love, loss, and love again. This shows how the game’s genius lies in how the game handles emotional states and mechanics. Characters facing gravestones show grief, and characters who meet after losing a lover can find new love. These panels help curate narrative logic that players need to manipulate.
Another great example appears in the above image “Everyone Rejects Edgar.” Here, the challenge understanding both how the character relationships work and the timing of the panels with respect to each other. The players must arrange panels to show Edgar being rejected by multiple partners, requiring an understanding of comic timing and character motivation. It also requires an understanding of how the game defines rejection, as in previous stories, the game uses death as a form of rejection. Either way, there is humor that emerges naturally from this arrangement and repetition of the same punchline.
The most impressive aspect is how this game handles complexity through its chapter structure. In early puzzles like “Seeing the Ghost of a Lover” (above), players work with simple tropes and limited elements.
By the time they reach “Surviving Spouses Find Comfort” (above), they’re juggling multiple characters across six (or fewer) panels, understanding emotional states and how to build a concise, complex narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.
A particularly clever design choice comes up in puzzles with many solutions. The game lets narrative experimentation happen while still requiring players to satisfy the core requirement of the title. This strikes the right balance between the creative freedom of the player and general puzzle constraints.
I think that, although Storyteller is a great game, it could benefit from more narrative possibilities. The game’s reliance on familiar Western tropes (love, death, betrayal) offers very clear readability and relatability to its target Western audience. What about stories of personal growth, adventure, or discovery that do not revolve around romance and death?
Also, the game sometimes struggles with its visual simplicity when conveying complex emotions. When multiple characters experience grief at the same time, the identical expressions can create some ambiguity about which narrative thread the player should follow. If the title is nonspecific to the character and all the used characters are in the same spot, then which one do we continue the story with?
However, I think the largest opportunity for improvement would be adding branching narratives. While the linear comic panel format works great, I love how modern storytelling has embraced non-linear and interactive elements for players/readers/viewers. Adding puzzles that might require players to create many possible outcomes from the same title and setup could enhance the game’s focus on narrative construction.
Storyteller makes assumptions about player knowledge that might require an extra ethical examination. The game assumes familiarity with Western narratives (as I stated previously), Western comic-reading conventions (left-to-right), and romantic tropes. For example, these assumptions are embedded in the above puzzle “A Heartbreak is Healed,” which relies on players understanding conventional romance story progressions. Doing this without death is an extra challenge, which I find interesting since the game defines death as an “easy” form of heartbreak to write up, which might make players (when thinking of their own stories later on) see this as a cop-out and a form of heartbreak, which some cultures might not see death as. This treads into tricky territory – is it Storyteller’s job to imbibe its values as culture in its players? I would argue no (I think this conversation extends beyond the scope of a singular game), and I would assume the creators would also argue no, but it’s just an unintended consequence of the game.
This leads to larger questions about inclusivity. Players from cultures that portray romance differently or have different storytelling traditions may find the logic or narrative less intuitive. Similarly, players who haven’t been exposed to the comic style and gothic aesthetic that inspire the themes in Storyteller might miss important subtext.
The game also assumes knowledge of emotional cause and effect that might not be universal. The idea that two lonely people naturally find love together might reflect narratives that are not universal, and some would argue that it’s just not real or aligned with their values.
However, I recognize that for the limited audience that this game may cater to (a Western, narrative enthusiast crowd), the game creates an elegant, minimalist system that most people within that audience could grasp. However, there are cultural traditions specific to the West that are directly implanted in this game’s aesthetic and rule systems, potentially including players (largely from its target audience) while excluding others.
What makes Storyteller amazing is how it’s recursive: it’s a puzzle game about how storytelling itself is just like a puzzle, and a storytelling game and the storytelling process itself. By turning narrative into something that is directly placed in the rules and outcomes of this game, it shows how much of what we consider “creative” storytelling is a result of predictable patterns and formulas.
The game works great because its mechanics aren’t just entertaining but revealing. Each puzzle solved taught me something about narrative structure, dramatic irony, character development, or a combination of any of the above. Players finish the game not just with the satisfaction of completing puzzles but with a better understanding of how stories work.
