A Reminder: You Should Be Quite Excited About Storyteller
Games and storytelling have never exactly been the most natural of bedfellows - what with our medium's love of frequent, control-arresting cut-scenes and exposition-heavy codexes, among other things. But Storyteller creator Daniel Benmergui's making it look easy in a way that will hopefully elicit a rhythmic chorus of face-palms and "oh, duhs" from developers the world over: by keeping things simple. In short, the idea is to "solve" a brief, few-panel-long story by inserting items and characters as you see fit. The result? Heartbreak, romance, drama, laughs, suicide, amnesia, and more. It's looking quite special, in other words. Craft a love story for the ages between it and your eyeballs after the break.
Adorable, right? And also surprisingly dark. As of now, Benmergui says there are 35 levels and 18 objects to spice up each scenario, clocking in at around an hour's worth of content. The plan, however, is to continue development until late next year, so there will probably be a fair deal more before it's all said and done.
I'm quite interested to see how it'll all come together, though. Benmergui claims that solutions aren't predefined, so you can take all sorts of bizarre routes to meet the conditions each level presents. Moreover, I can see things getting amusingly convoluted, given that he's touting "classic soap opera complications like amnesia, dark secrets and returns from death."
Shame, then, that Storyteller's still such a long ways off. Oh well, though. There are clearly loads of moving pieces at work here. The idea may be simple, but bringing it to life is probably anything but.