![]() Stories Untold is so purposefully developed to be played alone in the dark that they even make a point of telling you to turn the lights off in their system requirements.Īfter a few moments of darkness your computer reboots. This is a great test to see if you are wearing your headphones or not. ![]() Four stories, one on-going nightmare about the perils of data entry.Īs the in-game narrative twists back into the primary storyline, thunder cracks through the silence of the house and the electricity snaps off. The House Abandon is more comparable to flipping through family photos - with all the sense-memories and emotional baggage included in that territory - than it is wandering through a haunted house. Don't worry - you're not expected to be fluent in the arcane grammar of text adventures in Stories Untold, and exploration is, in any case, pretty minimal. Why not go upstairs and put it together?Īs with the Zorks and Hitchhiker's Guides of the early 80s, you rely on clunky text commands to navigate. It's empty, but your father leaves a note saying he's left you an old computer to occupy yourself with. You've arrived back at your family home after some time away. Once the in-game game is loaded, the player uses the wood-veneer monitor to explore in a familiar text adventure style. The House Abandon marks your arrival to your old bedroom desk with a sinister Speccy loading game screech. The camera eventually rests its gaze on a stack of video games, with in-game box art designed by Kyle Lambert, an illustrator whose previous work includes the poster for Netflix pop culture phenomenon Stranger Things. There's a tape recorder, a TV display encased in a circa 1986 faux-wood veneer, and a keyboard-integrated personal computer that bears a striking resemblance to the now-classic ZX Spectrum 2. The episodes all start like something you'd find on cable TV late at night, with opening credits that dreamily bob between family photos and the technology of an alternate 1980s universe. The game straddles genres in a way that keeps you on your toes. Now, with publisher Devolver Digital, the studio has remastered its earlier release and expanded it with three additional episodes, each less than an hour long. McKellan and his team came up with the idea as a Ludum Dare entry in August of last year, resulting in the exquisitely creepy interactive horror game The House Abandon (available for free on itch.io). Something is wrong but you can't quite put your finger on it. Tonally, think Black Mirror or Welcome to Night Vale. The series is presented as a game within a game - or possibly a game within a game within an episodic TV series - which exists in a universe that is like this one but not exactly. Now heading the Glasgow-based indie studio No Code, McKellan has translated his experience as a maker of creepy, lo-fi science fiction environments into a new digital anthology of retro, tech-centered horror stories called Stories Untold. As the game's UI designer, McKellan helped to formalise the method for making digital look analog - including weird experiments like running game footage through a battered old VHS player for authentically ancient-looking results. McKellan's distorted-VHS aesthetic will be familiar to you if you've played Alien Isolation, the 2014 release that recreates the analogue visual style of Ripley Scott's 1979 film right down to vector distortions in the title sequence. Will future generations look back on plasma screens as wistfully as we do CRT boxes? Whether this kind of nostalgia is unique to our particular moment in time or not, it's become something of a recurring theme in the work of designer Jon McKellan. It's almost as though a wormhole keeps opening up between the 1980s and the 21st century, creating a strange fusion of both periods. ![]() Even for me, most of my memories from the first decade of the Noughties are inexorably linked to that French opiated dancefloor aesthetic which penetrated my radio during my early 20s. We're nearly two decades into the new millennium, but so much of our cultural identity is still lodged somewhere in the latter half of the 20th century - the retro synths of Kavinsky and Cliff Martinez invading Hollywood through Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive in 2011, the 16-bit carnage of Hotline Miami. If you'd rather not spoil things for yourself, play before reading. ![]() Wistful, lovingly textured and highly experimental, Stories Untold is a haunted house adventure with a difference.Įditor's note: Emily discusses the premise of each Stories Untold episode below.
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