I played Storyteller, a puzzle game developed by Daniel Benmergui Studio and published by Annapurna Interactive. I downloaded and played it through Netflix on my iPad or my phone. I thought it would be casual and lightweight, but the actual gameplay concept was interesting and harder than I expected, as briefly mentioned in this week’s game list. In this game, players construct narratives by arranging characters and scenes into comics. The subheading is a term that runs through the theme, and the prompt is more specific and dramatic for the scene. The goal is to create a storyline that matches the prompt. It sounds like players can create their own story, but after playing through about 12 chapters, I realized I cannot really create new stories. Players are just reverse-engineering the story the game wants.
This is why Storyteller is a puzzle. The mechanics make the game both interesting and limiting. It is about interpreting the designer’s intention. Players try different combinations, change the sequence, and learn from the correct outcomes. In that sense, the game feels less like storytelling and more like pattern recognition. It’s almost like solving a riddle where the answer already exists.
Characters fall in love, get rejected, die, or take revenge depending on how they are arranged. In the earlier levels, the system felt quite constrained. No matter how creative I tried to be, there were only a few acceptable answers. That said, there were still moments of genuine fun. As the game progresses, I have more characters, props, and settings, and the puzzles allow multiple answers. This shift makes the experience more engaging. Instead of searching for one exact answer, I started to explore variations. It was interesting to observe how characters reacted differently depending on the order of scenes. Watching these changing dynamics through simple drag and drop interactions was especially fun.
Also, I would like to talk about the humor in the prompts. For some reason, the game seems to constantly pick on Edgar as a character. He gets betrayed, killed, and heartbroken over and over again. It becomes almost a running joke. That kind of repetition adds personality to the experience, even if it’s slightly unfair to Edgar. Another aspect I paid attention to was that relationships are not limited to heterosexual pairings. The game naturally allows male male and female female relationships without emphasizing it, which made it feel like an organic part of the system.
After finishing 13+1 final chapters, the game unlocks an additional challenge mode where a devil character introduces twists into the stories. This mechanic is actually one of the most interesting parts of the game. It takes the same puzzles and forces players to reinterpret them under new conditions. It shows that the same story can be seen in multiple ways, and players can be creative within this frame.
From an ethical standpoint, Storyteller assumes that players already understand a very specific type of narrative logic. The game expects players to know the flow of the story. For example, love leads to jealousy, jealousy leads to revenge, and revenge leads to tragedy. But emotions are not always limited to certain consequences. It reflects a very particular storytelling tradition that many players might recognize from Western fairy tales.
There is a very clear box, and it is defined by cultural storytelling norms. The game includes players who are familiar with these conventions and unintentionally excludes those who are not. It is not a matter of creativity at this point. If a story doesn’t align with the game’s internal logic, it simply won’t work. The game seems to encourage players to go for open-ended storytelling, but I had to pursue a fixed structure of a valid story. This reflects a broader issue in puzzles where creativity is often simulated rather than truly supported. Players are allowed to explore, but only within invisible boundaries.
