The puzzle game I decided to play for the critical play was Storyteller! I’d seen clips of it on Tiktok and other platforms, so I jumped at the chance to play it. The game was developed by Daniel Benmergui, and is playable on many operating systems like MacOS, Windows, and is available for download on the app store and google play store. The targeted audience for the game is anyone over the age of 13
The mechanics of the puzzle game kind of switch up traditional puzzle mechanics up a tad, where it makes storytelling itself the puzzles. The mechanics of arranging comic panel scenes with various characters and settings directly impact how players perceive cause and effect, intention, and consequence.
At its core, Storyteller offers a mechanic where players drag and drop story elements, characters, settings, and emotions, into a sequence of comic strip panels. Each puzzle presents a narrative goal (ex: “Duke shoots Detective to avoid prison”) and players must discover a sequence that fulfills this requirement. Unlike traditional puzzles with fixed answers, Storyteller allows for multiple sequences to result in success, encouraging creativity within the constraints of the puzzle.
A really interesting aspect of the game, is that there is little to no dialogue throughout the entire game. Everything comes together through visual storytelling, characters body language, and emotional reactions provide you with the clues to move forward and solve the rest of the puzzle. The causes the players to use context clues to solve the problems sharpening their skill of logic and empathy.
There are a few limitations with this setup. There were a few instances later in the game where the player will most likely have to rely on trial and error in order to find the right combination to complete the story, and continual guessing is never what the developers want in a puzzle game. The guessing occurs since, sometimes body language and the other small clues given aren’t enough to key the player in on why their particular setup doesn’t meet the goal of the prompt. A small fix to the game could be after X number of failed attempts offer optional feedback to help the player get on track.
Using the MDA framework, we see that Storyteller’s drag-and-drop characters and scenes lead to experimentation and discovery, resulting in emotional resonance and humor. The game’s formal elements, objective, player actions, rules, and outcome, are intertwined with the narrative, making each choice feel meaningful.
This merging of mechanics and story reflects Jesper Juul’s idea of “half-real” games: ones that operate in both rule-based systems and fictional worlds. In Storyteller, success comes from satisfying a rule (the narrative objective), but how players reach that point depends on a shared cultural understanding of storytelling tropes.
A key ethical consideration in Storyteller is cultural accessibility. The game does make the assumption of familiarity with Western literary tropes: love triangles, monarchies, betrayal, and resurrection. Players unfamiliar with these story structures might struggle to complete the game, not because they lack puzzle-solving skill, but because they don’t share the same cultural reference points. For example, a puzzle that involves a queen marrying a villain may feel confusing to someone unfamiliar with fairy tale conventions.
The designers could mitigate these issues by highlighting universal themes more explicitly. Making cultural tropes more transparent, or allowing players to choose different cultural “story modes”, could further broaden accessibility.
