Storyteller is developed by Daniel Benmergui and published by Annapurna Interactive. It is available on Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam. I played it on my MacBook through Steam. The target audience is players who enjoy narrative-based logic puzzles, especially those interested in deconstructing fairy tales.
Rather than spatial or mathematical reasoning, Storyteller uses narrative causality as its core mechanic. With minimal guidance, it requires players to construct solutions through story logic, especially through characters’ motivations and emotional responses as people puzzle.
The core mechanic is panel manipulation. The game consists of chapters based on Western literary tropes like Adam and Eve, Dracula, and Snow White. Each level provides only a title and a set of characters and environments as hints. For example, “Three Heads Roll” suggests three executions, but otherwise guidance is minimal. Puzzle-solving emerges from characters’ emotional and behavioral responses to scene changes. A wedding may create bonds but also jealousy, while a graveyard can trigger death and grief. The combinatorics of panels creates the dynamic where players experiment through trial and error to learn how characters react to events such as violence or romance, and with each unexpected response comes the fun of discovery and narrative, as well as the aesthetics of being the humorous author, especially when familiar tropes are subverted. Fun also comes from the tactile experience such as smooth animations in literally every frame and satisfying drag and drop controls.
^ genre subversion and humor: god is happy at everyone (and god is a compass that can smile?)
Unlike games such as Portal, which rely on physics-based logic, Storyteller is based on narrative and emotional causality. Characters are not neutral objects and have fixed motivations. For instance, the queen loves herself and prefers her throne, while the baron seeks to usurp it. Logic is not uniform across roles: while the baron would jump to the throne when the queen is kidnapped, the knight will not assume the throne unless she dies because he’s loyal and in love with her. This is an excellent example of “people puzzles,” where characters must be understood through social and motivational constraints rather than treated as tools. These constraints increase difficulty but also deepen engagement, as players gradually learn behavioral patterns. Visual cues support this system: black squiggly lines indicate anger or violent intent, while question marks signal confusion due to improper context. These cues partially compensate for limited explicit hints.
^ another example of people puzzle: Lenora is kind, so when she’s heartbroken, she kills herself, whereas the evil Isobel gets jealous (with squiggly black lines on the top of her head) kills her crush’s lover
The game’s use of space and architecture is minimal but effective. Each scene typically contains a 2D illustration of a single symbolism — a church, a tombstone, a casket — designed not only to aid narrative construction but also to evoke genre conventions as an evocative space. The game architecture makes reference to real buildings to take advantage of the emotions they suggest: the church as a heart shaped rose window to convey love and divinity, and the graveyard as a withered branch and shrinking moon for grief. A notable detail is its implied 2D-to-3D spatial logic, which aids environmental storytelling. In the detective chapters, a character can be placed in a hidden observation room behind a wall painting, later revealing information in subsequent panels. This creates a mental 3D space from a 2D interface, reinforced by visual cues like eye icons. This small detail adds significantly to environmental storytelling: the design encourages players to build spatial mental models that account for unequal information across characters (the hidden witness knows more, which changes the context of the puzzle). The fact that the hidden room exists as a separate panel (almost like a separate room) and that the witness is represented only by their eyes makes the act of witnessing feel distanced yet implicated, as if the player is complicit in observing from behind this layer of separation.
^ left: heart rose window in the church — when as marriage is complete, the characters’ heart becomes part of the architecture — and the loneliness and grief of the graveyard at night. right: the detectives learns extra information as witness in hidden chamber, a 3D space constructed out of 2D panels
Finally, let’s talk about the game’s namesake: storytelling. In Storyteller, enacted storytelling operates at an unusually literal level — you physically ENACT the story by assembling it panel by panel. What makes this especially rich is the game’s layered prompt system: solving a puzzle doesn’t close the story but instead opens a new interpretive angle on it. In the “Hatey is Murdered by His Daughter” level, the same visual arrangement — a father killed by his daughter — is first solved, then reframed by a second prompt that asks you to re-read it as an act of protection rather than violence. The panels barely change, but the story transforms completely. This reflects Henry Jenkins’s point from “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” that enacted narratives operate on both broad goals and localized incidents. Here, both the broader goal of the game and micro-arrangements in the panels shift to enact the story. This design also shows players that there are multiple paths to success, adding a layer of interpretive flexibility to puzzle-solving difficulty.
To offer my critique, some levels are overly difficult. Based on puzzle design principles, solutions should be challenging but discoverable. In levels like “The Queen Suffers 4 Tragedies,” unintuitive rules, such as multiple tragedies occurring within a single panel, forced my reliance on online walkthroughs. Better bread-crumbing or adaptive hint systems could improve pacing and prevent frustration.
^ it’s intuitive to think that there are 3 tragedies in this level
One ethical issue in Storyteller is how the game turns tragedy and manipulation into playful puzzle mechanics while relying heavily on Western literary tropes that are deeply misogynist. Players frequently harm characters to solve the level, so suffering becomes just another piece of the puzzle. This is especially noticeable in the queen puzzle, where I repeatedly had to kidnap the queen so she could later be rescued by a knight. The solution often depends on familiar narrative conventions in which women are passive victims whose role is to endure harm before being saved. While the game does attempt some diversification, such as allowing queer marriages, these additions are limited because the core narrative logic still rests on traditional Western fairy tales. The mechanics of drag and drop combinatorics creates the dynamic of trial-and-error experimentation to repeated harm characters from panel to panel, while the aesthetics frame these actions as humorous. Compared to games like Undertale, where actions carry emotional consequences, Storyteller removes permanence entirely. This design made me reflect on how puzzle systems can distance players from ethical critique by prioritizing puzzle-solving over questioning cultural assumptions and gendered violence.
