This week, I played Storyteller, a puzzle narrative game on many platforms (Windows, Switch, Android, and iOS), but I opted for the free mobile version. It was designed by Daniel Benmergui and published by the American game publisher Annapurna Interactive. You drag and drop scenes and characters into slots to create a story that fits the description, making it suitable for all players 6+ looking for a fairytale-themed puzzle game. Through the simple drag-and-drop mechanics, Storyteller creates puzzles where players become authors of their own story, which centers the game around experimentation and creative expression.
The mechanic of solving the puzzles via drag and drop leads to the dynamic of players literally crafting a story written on the pages of a storybook, finding creative ways to make the logic true by the end of the allocated scene slots. The base mechanics fit very well into the storybook theme and contribute to the aesthetic of feeling like you’re writing a fairytale, also contributing to one of this game’s primary forms of fun: narrative. Storyteller mainly uses enacted narrative, since the player physically constructs the story through drag-and-drop mechanics. Rather than simply observing a narrative unfold, players act as the writer, arranging scenes and characters to satisfy the story prompt. The mechanics directly contribute to this narrative style because every puzzle solution requires the player to actively build the sequence of events themselves.
Though the format of the puzzle is the same throughout the game (unlike Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, which relies on a variety of puzzle types), the puzzles feel fresh and interesting. I was surprised at how replayable the simple puzzle concept felt. One design choice that contributes to this is the introduction of new mechanics (mainly scene types like “death” or “amnesia”) throughout the game. The game keeps its mechanics simple enough to understand quickly, while still allowing enough permutations to make the puzzles feel challenging and new. Every time the game introduces a new mechanic, it expands the space of possibilities, encouraging the player to experiment with ordering to see what affects what. This helped me realize that when making a game, we don’t need to come up with 10+ puzzle types; we can instead change smaller elements of the same puzzle.
Like other well-designed puzzle and platform games, including Super Mario Bros, Storyteller gradually introduces mechanics before combining them into more complex challenges. Within each chapter, there are levels of increasing difficulty, all using the same story mechanics. For example, when wine and poison are introduced, you aren’t sure how to use them, but you start with an easy puzzle that shows how they work (first image above), and then move on to more complicated sequences (second image above). Since new mechanics are introduced gradually, I rarely felt stuck for long or overwhelmed. Instead, I was in a flow state, as I felt a balance between challenge and mastery. The appropriate difficulty level contributes to this game’s other primary form of fun: challenge.
Another mechanic that I appreciated was the visual hints of which scenes cause which character states via character thought bubbles. For example, if Lenora and Isobel got married, in the following scene, Lenora shows a heart and Isobel’s face to show that they are in love at that stage of the story (example above). This mechanic leads to the dynamic of players being able to track character relationships and emotional states across scenes without interrupting gameplay. This leads to the aesthetic of being non-intrusively guided through the logic of your current story so you can debug the errors and reach a solution. In addition, this textless form of hint keeps the player immersed in the game experience, as you are taught mechanics without explicit explanations. The simplified UI allows players to focus on the visual scene sequence that they are laying out, rather than distracting text. I’d like to take inspiration from this in my own game, remembering to cut out anything that doesn’t directly contribute to the player experience.
The game creates an emergent narrative through these reactive character-state mechanics. Because characters react dynamically to previous scenes, players often discover unexpected mini-stories while experimenting (e.g., a character who dies may reappear as a ghost later in the story). This makes experimentation and the process of solving the puzzle entertaining. The game also uses evocative narrative through simple visual symbols and fairytale archetypes. Players immediately understand meanings like hearts representing love or gravestones representing death without needing dialogue, allowing the mechanics and visuals to express information quickly and intuitively.
However, this does mean that Storyteller relies on players’ previous knowledge of Western fairytale archetypes in order to solve the logic puzzle. For example, players are expected to intuitively understand ideas like royalty, marriage, poison, ghosts, and forbidden love through visual shorthand alone. This assumption likely makes the game more accessible to players who grew up consuming Western fairytales and fantasy media, while potentially excluding players from different cultural backgrounds who may not immediately interpret these symbols and relationships in the same way. Even the tutorial story is a riff on the Adam and Eve biblical story, making it abundantly clear that this is a game for Western audiences. Non-Western players might struggle to complete puzzles due to different cultural norms (e.g., if death leads to happiness, not sadness), not through lack of puzzle-solving abilities. Although the game’s minimal dialogue makes it linguistically accessible, its puzzle logic still depends heavily on shared cultural understandings of how fairytale stories are “supposed” to work.
Overall, Storyteller shows how simple mechanics can create a challenging puzzle experience when they are integrated with narrative and visual design.
