After restoring power to the house and exploring the downstairs, we head up the stairs to what we’re told is our room and unwrap a gift that’s been left for us by our father: a retro computer and a game. The game is very good at giving you just enough of a hint to keep you progressing, so out of the car we hop with the required items in hand and into the house we go. The text adventure has us arriving at a holiday home with feelings of optimism and a sense that the place is one of happy memories. The way you’re placed in front of the desk is not just to show the setting and era that the game is set in, it’s also a way to ground you into the world. Since this is a horror game you’re going to expect eerie things to occur. The first episode is called The House Abandon, and this is the episode I’ll be referencing since it’s the one that will be the least impactful as far as spoilers go. Bravo, No Code, you’ve made me feel uneasy and I haven’t even started! This is a horror game made tenser by the fact that you are doing the very thing in the real world that the virtual ‘you’ is doing. It was as if I was playing a younger version of me. It was incredibly surreal at first to be sitting in my chair with the lights off looking at my current-day monitors, upon which was ‘me’ sat in a dimly lit room looking at something so very close to what I used to play games on as a child. It’s a whole desk space – sporting an old CRT monitor, keyboard with a built-in tape deck, and all – to really make you feel as if you’re sat there playing the game. Stories Untold is a text adventure with a difference, because it’s not just a dark screen with high-contrast text burning permanence into your retinas. They were the evolution of books to an interactive medium that exploded into a well-loved genre, even today.
These fantastic pieces of media from an age of incredibly low computational power offered true interactivity to a story that filled your mind with ideas and imaginations. Text adventure games are something of a relic, but one that is very special to a lot of developers.
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