Video Game / Storyteller

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Storyteller is a Puzzle Game developed by Daniel Benmergui and published by Annapurna Interactive. The player is presented with a series of plotline prompts (such as "Heartbroken Spouses are Reunited") and must arrange the provided scenes and characters into comic panels in order to complete that prompt.

The key part of the puzzle is that each character's state is altered by the events that came before. If a character experiences an emotion (anger, jealousy, heartbreak), that emotion persists until something replaces it. If two characters are married, they'll refuse to marry again so long as their spouse is alive. Dead characters become ghosts and can still influence the living world. The comic panels are mostly wordless, with the story told through Pictorial Speech Bubbles, actions, and body language.

Although it can be amusing to change around the panels to see the characters' reactions, the goal is still to correctly fulfill each prompt. Given the game's emphasis on classic stories, most of the stories involve Overdosed Tropes.

The game's official website can be found here.

This video game provides examples of:

• Abhorrent Admirer:
  • The dwarves and the witch in her old hag form will cause the prince or Snowy to react to their advances with visible repulsion.
  • Snowy is repulsed by Tiny if she's not trying to be kissed to return from being a frog.
• Adaptation Amalgamation: The Snow White-related chapters combine elements of the latter fairy tale with The Frog Prince.
• Anachronism Stew: Downplayed; for the most part, the game appears to be set in a medieval fantasy setting. However...
  • There are a few stories where characters from such a setting need to interact with a Sherlock Holmes-style detective, or to use a gun.
  • There's one story where a Friedrich Nietzsche Expy is in the Garden of Eden, then somehow enters a mansion, grabs a gun, and shoots God with it.
  • The Devil is perfectly happy to use a spray paint or sunglasses regardless of what time period he's in.
• Arrange Mode: The demo had jester hats, which were alternate goals for existing levels. As of the September 2023 update, completing the game will award you a set of Devil Levels, which introduce a Devil character who meddles in existing stories to achieve completely different goals.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Some of the stories require you to arrange for a villainous character like the baron or the Devil to triumph.
• Back from the Dead: The Revive scene brings any dead character back to life.
• Bewitched Amphibians: As first demonstrated in "Curse", the Witch can turn other characters into frogs, who can be returned to normal form with a kiss. For the record, any kiss will do, not just a true love's kiss.
• Breath Weapon: In the post-game, the Devil can corrupt the poison to turn it into a potion that causes whoever drinks it to not die, but instead belch out a fireball in their next scene, incinerating whoever else is present.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Most characters need a reason to murder someone. The Baron will happily kill anyone at any time.
• A Deadly Affair: Generally speaking, if a character witnesses their partner having an affair with someone else, it probably won't end well for the cheating partner and/or their fling. Even a relative can invoke this, as in the alternate solution to "Salome", where Hatey murders his daughter's boyfriend for cheating on her, which gets him killed by her after a seance.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • The goal of the final Devil Level is to finally make the Knight angry at the Queen.
  • A more literal example exists in an earlier level that has a dog returning from the dead to take revenge on their killer.
• Dramatic Irony: Characters tend to not have information unless they explicitly participated in it, witnessed it, or were otherwise informed (such as by seance). This results in several marriages where one spouse has secretly murdered the other's previous lover. "Love Revolution" takes the logical next step by having the Knight and Maid become lovers after both have secretly murdered their partner's previous lover.
• Driven to Suicide: Characters experiencing guilt or heartbreak are willing to drink poison to kill themselves.
• Drowning My Sorrows: While no character needs an excuse to drink wine, heartbroken characters will drink with a sad expression while thinking of heartbreak.
• Easter Egg: Certain arrangements not even close to fulfilling the prompt will result in some unique outcomes. Some of them were made into achievements at launch, while the September 2023 update added a "Secret Stamps" system that encourages finding as many as you can. A few examples include:
  • In any story involving wine, you can have Edgar, Lenora, or Isobel just repeatedly drink wine. In the last panel they'll start drinking straight from the bottle, and in Lenora's case, pass out drunk.
  • In "Deceit", you can get two bewitched frogs to kiss each other.
  • In most stories involving the Butler, you can have him just attempt to serve drinks, but the recipient keeps asking for a different drink. If the recipient has witnessed the Butler flaunting a gun (and he put it back), then they'll accept the drink, terrified that they'll be shot if they refuse.
  • Adam and Eve can both get indigestion if they repeatedly eat the apple.
  • Friedrich is savvy enough to resist Temptation, and even goes so far as to shoot the apple if he has a gun on hand.
  • "Vindictive Wife" can be rearranged so that the Witch turns her husband into a frog, but then undoes the curse by kissing him. (This is turned into it's own level in the Special Edition.)
• Everyone Is Bi: Only the King, the Witch, and Snowy are explicitly heterosexual; the King speaks a female symbol if you try to hook him up with another man while the Witch and Snowy speak a male symbol if you try to get them with another woman. While some other characters happen to have only heterosexual pairings available, their reasons are more specific. For example, the Baron is only interested in marrying royalty; if paired with the King, the King rejects him due to incompatibility and the Baron is angry, indicating he was willing to marry the King and is reacting to being spurned. Nobody else objects to a same-sex pairing for the same reason as the King, and funnily enough, you actually get a secret stamp from making the Baron marry the Knight if the latter takes the crown from the dead Queen.
• Evil Versus Evil: While there are many instances of malicious or, at the very least, morally dubious characters getting into conflict (with the Devil being the most prevalent, though mostly doing it secretly), a more straightfoward example comes from the properly named "Villain Match" level in Chapter 18. There, the Witch messes with none other than Isobel out of envy of her marrying Edgar before her, so she uses her usual frog-cursing method while in old lady form. Little does she know, Isobel uses her usual method on her cauldron once her curse is broken.
• Gay Option: While all the stories with love in the base game have heterosexual pairings, the game almost never stops you from making a homosexual couple if one is available. There's even a semi-popular challenge that involves playing through the game while trying to make as many gay couples as possible.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Most of the stories aren't too hard to figure out, but the final one is very thorny, requiring the knight and maid to hook up with the monarchs, murder them, and then hook up with each other. The knight is completely pacifistic and the queen normally rejects him even if she has no other romantic options. Figuring out how to completely change their personalities while pulling off everything else required is quite a challenge.
  • Last Straw, the final Devil Level, requires the knight to finally be angry at the Queen and imprison her. Getting him angry at her, which he hadn't done in any story beforehand, is a challenge.
• Karma Houdini: Aside from the villainous characters in the aformentioned The Bad Guy Wins example, the King gets away from commiting adultery to his wife and even executes her in the "Rags to Royalty" level. Isobel can also be this in some levels.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: If you have extra panels you can potentially tell a story where you complete the goal of The Bad Guy Wins, but then have something afterward that invokes this. For example; the Baron poisons someone to get their lover? Put the now dead character back in after he gets married, now the Baron looks on in horror as he now has an angry ghost on his hands. Same goes for the Devil himself if you make a character shoot the painting he's possesing in the "Revenge" level in Chapter 8, put him next to God in the "Genesis" chapter, or achieve the "Frustration" stamp. Even God Himself gets His comeuppance, at least for His mistreatement of Eve, in the "Revenge" chapter by Friedrich, and the latter can even make the Serpent pay as well in the "William Tell" achievement.
• Kissing Cousins: The "Family Bonds" stamp gets achieved if you make two people fall in love with one another before The Reveal of them being cousins. Unlike the "Oedipus" level, the couple seem to be fine with it even after said reveal.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The Amnesia scene results in a character forgetting anything else that happened before in the story.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: The "Family" scene lets a character tell another he or she is their parent. This can be used at the beginning of a story to establish relations, but can also be sprung as a surprise at the end, causing an appropriate reaction if it reveals Surprise Incest.
• Murder the Hypotenuse: Certain characters are naturally vindictive and will become angry when spurned by a potential love interest. This is enough to spur them to murder the competitor.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Any character put in a remorse panel or having it accidentally hurting their loved ones results in this reaction.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Played for Laughs. The Dragon is really just the Baron wearing a cheap dragon suit that somehow manages to fool everyone. In the Special Edition, though, an actual dragon does appear, which takes the form of an amphiptere.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Any dead character can still participate in future panels as a ghost. In most cases, this is not useful as they only provoke a fear reaction. However, they can reveal their murderer in the Seance scene, and they can also commit murder in the Cliff scene by scaring someone into taking a long fall (if they have a reason to do so; a ghost won't intentionally scare someone they have no grudge against).
• Pictorial Speech-Bubble: With the sole exception of "I am your [family member]", all speech is rendered with pictorial speech bubbles. Combined with the body language, the speech bubbles often include a character's face, object, or emotion, such that the context is easily guessed as something like "I love Edgar", "I want the crown", or "I saw the Butler holding a gun".
• Plot-Inciting Infidelity: Some stories, such as "Spite", are kicked off by the Affair scene, where a third party can secretly witness two other characters romancing.
• Portrait Painting Peephole: The Witness scene allows a character to secretly spy on what happens in the Ballroom.
• Programming Game: Downplayed in that you get to see the results in real time, but most puzzles do involve laying out a specific sequence of instructions, some of which can dramatically alter a character's preexisting functions.
• Rescue Romance: The Knight is besotted with the Queen, but she normally has no interest in him (loving either the King or herself). This will change if you have her kidnapped and let him rescue her. The Baron also disguises himself and kidnaps her so he can "rescue" her to win her hand.
• Revenge: A recurring motive for murder, even for the characters not predisposed to murder for petty reasons. e.g. The Dog is loving except for when Isobel kills him, whereupon he will scare her off a cliff.
• Satan: After finishing the game, certain chapters will be altered to add the Devil as a character. He's an extreme Troll whose presence adds new objectives where he messes with the characters and corrupts the story into a Downer Ending.
• Shout-Out: Using “time” six panels in a row will show the hourglass broken at the bottom, where the sand is leaking out and forming a sandcastle, just like on the cover art of Braid. Braid creator Jonathan Blow is listed in the “Special Thanks” in the credits.
• Skewed Priorities: Can be invoked in any scene with a character angry at multiple parties, but for different reasons. For instance, "Matriarch" involves the Queen executing both the Baron and the Knight (the former for kidnapping her and the latter for taking the throne in her absence), but is mum on which she kills first; thus, she can prioritize the Knight who is doing his duty over the Baron who kidnapped her.
• Spooky Séance: The Seance scene allows a character to speak with a ghost, typically so the ghost can reveal the identity of their murderer.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Angry characters are willing to use poison on wine in an attempt to kill the subject of their anger. Anyone who drinks the wine afterward will die.
• Together in Death: The prompt for "Reunion" is Heartbroken Spouses are Reunited, ending with the two ghost characters reunited in love, after both having been married and seeing each other die in life (with some Back from the Dead shenanigans in between).
• Troll: The Devil takes enjoyment in corrupting the scenes he's present in, bringing mischief and chaos to the stories. He can create fake gravestones to make characters think their lover has died, possess a painting to scare the Duke and Duchess, drill a hole in the boat so it sinks during the kiss, or sabotage the guillotine so the Knight survives his execution by the Queen, just to name a few examples.
• Tunnel of Love: In the kiss panel, characters can be placed on a boat in a tunnel where they will kiss. This can be used for characters that haved been turned into a frog to return back to normal.
• Villain Protagonist: Some of the stories have a villain as the primary character and the goal is to help them win.
• Wingding Eyes: Dead characters have an X for their visible eye.