Stories Untold 
Save
Trading Cards now live!Jun 19, 2020 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/27761411/21fc20e5c9796b399cc21810e417a7fb2c9ec73d.jpg Apologies for the delay *ahem* but we've finally added Steam Trading Cards to Stories Untold - go forth and collect! There are 5 cards, 5 emojis, 3 profile backgrounds and 5 badges (plus foil!) to get!Stories Untold follow up "Observation" wins Best British Game BAFTA Award!Apr 4, 2020 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/27761411/bf1d1e109a6d92176b4b429c354e54ce70177288.png We are absolutely thrilled to share that at a glittering (home-recorded) ceremony on Thursday night, No Code's follow up to Stories Untold, "Observation" picked up the award for Best British Game at 2020's BAFTA Game Awards. In a category full of incredible games, we are truly honored to take this award, and it represents years of hard work from a dedicated team. You can watch the full ceremony below, and don't forget to wish list the game, coming very soon on the 21st May to Steam! Wishlist Observation here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/906100/Observation/ Watch the BAFTA Games Awards 2002 here: Stories Untold turns the page on Nintendo Switch next weekJan 10, 2020 - EurogamerNarrative adventure anthology Stories Untold drops onto Nintendo Switch next week, publisher Devolver Digital has announced. You'll be able to download it from the eShop next Thursday, 16th January. A retro-fuelled mix of genres with a Stranger Things-esque aesthetic, Stories Untold earned plenty of praise went it first emerged on PC and Mac back in 2017. This is the first time the game has been available on a console platform. Read more "Observation" now available to wishlist on Steam!Dec 14, 2019 - Community AnnouncementsWe're very pleased to announce that our follow up to Stories Untold "Observation" is now available to wishlist on Steam! The game will be arriving May 21st 2020, so be sure to wishlist and receive updates as we get closer to release. If you enjoyed Stories Untold, we think you'll love Observation. A dark and immersive sci-fi thriller, players take the role of S.A.M. - an AI on board a space station just a few short years from now. The game begins with SAM's 'awakening' just as you, the player, take over and provide this new consciousness. Your curiosity, insight and human nature will play a part in the story, as the crew notice your new behaviour... Work with Dr. Emma Fisher, a lone astronaut seemingly stranded aboard the station, and help uncover the mysteries of missing crew, what has happened, and most importantly, why. View the world from the embedded CCTV cameras around the station, take control of systems and crew laptops, and pilot SPHERE-Drones around a gorgeous and detailed environment. A full length adventure game with gripping narrative, atmospheric exploration, story-led puzzles and more, that takes the player on a journey inspired by the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a dose of existential horror, and of course, the now trademark No Code-style experimental game design of Stories Untold. This critically acclaimed adventure finally lands on Steam in 2020, and we can't wait for you to get your hands on it! https://store.steampowered.com/app/906100/Observation/Epic Games Store starts its first big sale with a Stories Untold giveawayMay 16, 2019 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunIt’s a busy day over on the Epic Games Store. On top of the expected fortnightly giveaway – this time the excellent horror-adventure Stories Untold – they’ve launched their first big sale. You can snag Stories Untold here for free, and I highly recommend it even if point & click (or even parser-based) adventures aren’t usually your thing. Developers No Code’s upcoming followup, the space-disaster AI thriller Observation, isn’t out until May 21st but pre-orders are down from 20 to a surprising 7.99/ 8.89/$12.49 in this sale. Many games are similarly discounted until June 13th. (more…) Pekken = Tekken with pigeonsJan 29, 2019 - Rock, Paper, Shotgun “Get this tweet to 10k RTs and we will make Pekken” says Jon McKellan of No Code, the studio behind the lovely Stories Untold and upcoming Observation. Pekken is a two-player fighting game starring violent pigeons, in the Tekken paradigm. A short video of a prototype build delighted the hearts and minds of the internet yesterday, because PS1-styled pigeon brawlers is an inherently wonderful concept. I… I don’t really want it to happen. Am I a bad man? (more…) Some video games that are like Bandersnatch, but betterJan 9, 2019 - Rock, Paper, Shotgun If you ve choosed-and-adventured through Bandersnatch, the recent Black Mirror thing on Netflix, and aren t already a fan of experimental interactive fiction: I envy you. It means you re able to play actually good examples of interactive fiction for the first time. Sure, Bandersnatch has funny lines, surprises and scene stealing performances from Will Poulter doing a pretty much exactly how I, the writer, talk in real life voice. But as a whole, video games have been iterating deeper on the main themes of control, authenticity, forced choice, meta-recursion and non-linearity for years, without also including an unhelpful portrayal of paranoid schizophrenia. When you love enough people who hear voices and suffer from castigatory delusions, maybe you become less enthused about media which depicts sufferers committing murders or throwing themselves off buildings. Fix it, Brooker. The same plotpoint was in White Christmas and it was shit back then. (more…) Announcing Sci-Fi Thriller 'Observation'Oct 8, 2018 - Community Announcementshttps://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27761411/a7d4d7ddc5709cf28d9c53a56cee0ceb944d97bc.jpg Stories Untold developer No Code have revealed their new sci-fi thriller Observation. Details and trailer below! Observation is a sci-fi thriller uncovering what happened to Dr. Emma Fisher, and the crew of her mission, through the lens of the station’s artificial intelligence S.A.M. Players assume the role of S.A.M. by operating the station’s control systems, cameras, and tools to assist Emma in discovering what is happening to the station, the vanished crew, and S.A.M. himself. https://youtu.be/9RHVJLbrWW8 https://store.steampowered.com/app/906100/Observation/Observation is a sci-fi thriller from the makers of Stories UntoldOct 8, 2018 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunWhat would you do in HAL 9000’s position? Beyond venting everyone into space, I mean – that’s the question that Observation looks to be posing. Announced today and due out early next year, it’s a sci-fi thriller from No Code, creators of the excellent Stories Untold. Similar to their previous game, it’s an adventure where you’re cleverly limited in your interaction with the world. In Stories Untold it was because you were using mechanical and computer interfaces – in Observation, it’s because you’re a space station AI. Check out the debut trailer below, hosted by IGN. (more…) Daily Deal - Stories Untold, 75% OffOct 8, 2018 - AnnouncementToday's Deal: Save 75% on Stories Untold!* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Wednesday at 10AM Pacific Time Video: Great adventures for the time poorJul 5, 2018 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunI ve been playing the endless Assassin’s Creed Origins, a game so gargantuan that the time on my save file lasts longer than Ancient Egyptian civilization did. This is a revenge mission stripped of all urgency by the simple fact of being five million hours long. Whatever big bad awaits at the end can rest easy knowing there are 800 fortresses to clear out before I reach him. Fearing a loss of sanity, I needed to remind myself of what progress actually felt like, so here are ten games you can see from start to finish in a more reasonable three hours. (more…) Four developers of scary games explain how to make scary games very scary indeedJun 21, 2018 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunThe inspiration for Alien: Isolation came from a simple thought experiment: what if somebody let a lion loose in developer Creative Assembly s office? I d get behind my desk and make sure it wouldn t see me, says the game s creative director Alistair Hope. Then, you d need to get to the fire escape. Maybe I d move desk to desk and distract it. If you are confronted by it, what do you do? What do you know about it? What do you know about what it knows about you? That felt pretty cool, and it wasn t relying on scripted events. Most of us know the feelings of dread that accompany playing a horror game. But how do developers create those feelings from scratch? What are the tricks that developers use to scare us, and create a sense of atmosphere? How do they go from imagining a lion in a studio, or an empty bathroom, to moments that will scare the pants off us? I spoke to four of the top minds in the industry to find out. (more…) Stories Untold shows we need more anthology series in gamesDec 16, 2017 - PC GamerWhy aren't there more anthologies in games? When I watch an episode of Black Mirror, or HBO's Room 104, or a classic installment of The Twilight Zone, it's like opening a present. You might get a brilliant, unsettling parable that stays with you for years, or you could get a tedious saga about robot bees that kill arseholes on Twitter. I'd love more of the unexpected in games, and that's what Stories Untold did for me this year. Each episode, framed as part of a TV anthology within the game, showed me something I didn't see coming. I knew what episode one was about before going into the game. In The House Abandon, you play a text adventure inside the game where you explore a house. It soon becomes clear your actions in the text adventure affect the environment around your character in the game, and every flicker of the desk lamp shits you up. Then the next episode is completely different. And so's the next one, which makes you move around the environment for the first time, at a moment where you want to do anything but leave the spot you're sitting in. Stories Untold makes you perform repetitive tasks, tuning a radio frequency, or working out which text commands will help you progress. There's a bit of trial-and-error and a lot of double-checking. The whole time, you're waiting for something awful to happen, until the tension becomes a bit much. You're also left to ponder what connects its settings beyond front-and-centre use of '80s technology: the house with the computer, the lab, the arctic station, and the strange happenings that occur across each one. There are clues throughout, and you'll likely guess some part of the conclusion you're drifting towards, but the journey is unsettling and exciting. I won't say any more than that about each episode. Like I said, you're opening a present each time—and the surprise should be preserved. Stories Untold comes from indie developer No Code, featuring Alien Isolation's lead UI artist Jon McKellan, and anyone who's played both games will see some of the same strengths carry over. The way antiquated technology can be used to evoke a particular feeling comes to mind, as does the use of sound design. I hope it inspires other developers to create anthology series. As the format's popularity is spiking again in TV, Stories Untold shows how much potential there is in changing game styles between episodes while retaining a consistent atmosphere. What if the next BioShock was five different episodes set before the fall of Rapture, maybe made by different developers each time? Could BioWare make a Mass Effect that shows multiple playable characters affected by the same event? Even Battlefield 1's War Stories show that big publishers are willing to think about the potential of the format. Stories Untold is the game I've recommended the most to relatively new PC players this year...Podcast: The most overlooked games of 2017Dec 7, 2017 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunLet us podcast, lest we forget. The squad of the Electronic Wireless Show chat about some of the most overlooked and underappreciated games of this year. Katharine thinks head-in-a-sack trip to the underworld Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice might qualify, while Adam praises the unsettling tales of Stories Untold. Brendan just wants more people to slap in skinny-person biffing game Absolver. But we’ve also been playing some other good ‘uns, including the magical realist family chronicle What Remains of Edith Finch and naval tactical battler Mare Nostrvm. (more…) The future of adventure gamesNov 23, 2017 - PC GamerEvery few years, someone claims that adventure games are dead. But adventure games never died: they just changed. "I think what they really mean is the death of point-and-click adventure games," says Ron Gilbert, creator of Monkey Island and, more recently, Thimbleweed Park. "Games like Gone Home, Firewatch, and everything Telltale makes are adventure games, and they can sell millions of copies. But if we limit the description to point-and-click games, I don't know that I fully disagree. These games are a niche market now, but if you make them cheaply and efficiently, they can still do well. Dave Gilbert has carved out a nice fanbase." "What's interesting is that those articles usually come out after a high-profile adventure game is released that's less than stellar," says Dave Gilbert, founder of point-and-click revivalist Wadjet Eye. "Suddenly a game speaks for all adventure games, and the whole genre is dead. This is a narrative that only seems to apply to adventure games. Roguelikes 'died' then came back. So did the platformer and the RTS. But people love talking about how adventure games died, or are dying. Even developers themselves! But I've been making them for 11 years and they continue to sell and support my family, so it's hard to take that kind of thing seriously." "When people declare things dead in the moment, the odds of them turning out to be wrong are usually close to 100%, so it's easy to brush this kind of thing off," says Sam Barlow, creator of experimental mystery game Her Story. "I think part of it comes from a certain self-consciousness and a certain desire for the medium to hurry up and grow up. Adventure games often feel like an awkward middle ground between the proper narrative games we aspire to and our cruder earlier attempts." Barlow explains that one of the adventure genre's greatest struggles is the idea of the player controlling the story's protagonist. "They become stuck in the weeds of the plot," he says. "I kinda like the fact that a lot of modern games have reduced the emphasis on the specifics of the actions, and focused more on dialogue and higher-level character choice. I'm interested in finding ways for players to be a part of the experience of a story without having to throw them into the busywork of 'being' a character." Francisco Gonzalez, founder of indie adventure studio Grundislav, thinks that adventure game designers often stubbornly cling to older design tropes. Mazes, illogical puzzles, excessive in-jokes and too much fourth wall-breaking are just a few of the elements that bother him. "If your game absolutely needs a maze, keep it brief," he says. "Add some sort of puzzle element that allows you to navigate it without having to map it yourself." "So many point-and-click games these days seem to have random puzzles that don't ...The 25 Best Horror Games On PCOct 31, 2017 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunTo compile a list of the 25 best horror games on PC is to look into the void for so long that the void not only starts to look back, but shakes you by the hand and takes you out for coffee. It is to fight with monsters until you become a monster and then go on a European railtrip with the other monsters, and really bond over cocktails in Saint-Tropez. It is also a great way to explore the wide range of possible experiences within horror fiction. Here, there is something for everyone, even the squeamish and the easily-startled. Yes, there are jumpscares, but there are also slow-burn psychological dramas and tongue-in-cheek splatterfests. There are uncanny things and real terrors, but there are smiles and smirks among the shocks. (more…) 10 great indie horror gamesOct 31, 2017 - PC GamerIt's Halloween, so you're more likely to be looking for something scary to play than at any other time of year (it's also possible you're just finishing Wolfenstein 2, which is fine too). While you can find our long list of the best horror games elsewhere, in this feature we wanted to focus exclusively on some of our favourite indie horror titles, where the subject matter tends to be more specific than you'd get in a blockbuster game. Hopefully you'll find something in these picks that you haven't played before. Lone Survivor This neat Silent Hill-infused sidescrolling adventure sees you trying to escape a disease-ridden city, and what transpires is shaped by how you play—how many pills you take, how much you've slept and so on. It has flashes of Lynchian surrealism, and its grimy corridors are chilly spaces to explore. The director's cut, available on Steam, features new areas and two new endings, among other extras. Since developer Jasper Byrne is also a musician (his work is featured in both Hotline Miami games), the soundtrack is fantastic, and again feels like it takes some influence from Konami's seminal horror series. I'm not sure what happened to Byrne's non-horror follow-up, New Game Plus, but it sure looked cool.—Samuel Roberts Detention Inspired by Chinese mythology and Taiwanese culture, this atmospheric, subtly creepy game is part point-and-click adventure, part survival horror. Set in the 1960s, two students are trapped in a school haunted by bizarre creatures and must find a way out. The hand-painted art is stunning, and the tone and puzzles are reminiscent of the original Silent Hill. An overlooked game and one of the best modern horrors on PC.—Andy Kelly Anatomy I don’t want to say too much about Anatomy other than you explore a house looking for VHS tapes. Things change. Considerably. This isn’t your typical haunted house story either. If Resident Evil 7 is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre then Anatomy is Kill List or Jacob’s Ladder or Under the Skin. It’s a short, slow game that refuses to use closets for monsters, positing the house itself, the medium, the geometry as what you should actually be afraid of. —James Davenport Stories Untold This horror anthology features four connected stories of spooky happenings. Episode one, which you can play for free on Steam , sees you exploring an abandoned house in an ancient text adventure within the game, while sat at a desk. The environment around you starts to change in accordance with your actions in the game, and it becomes scary as hell. And that's just one episode—the others are based around a very different idea, each of which involve deliberately repetitive interactions and escalating spookiness.—Samuel Roberts Bonbon This tiny, unsettling slice of horror marries toddler-in-the-eighties-in-the-UK nostalgia with that sense of mundane things ...Stories Untold, now available on Mac OSXOct 6, 2017 - Community Announcementshttp://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27761411/15970b5021c3b43d23b122f4d1d8f50cdb0c4a53.png That's right! Out now, and at a massively discounted price for day one! We highly recommend a dedicated graphics card set up to play on high quality settings, and for the best experience. This is not your average text adventure, so a decent machine is required! Enjoy!Stories Untold, now available on Mac OSXOct 6, 2017 - Community Announcementshttp://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27761411/15970b5021c3b43d23b122f4d1d8f50cdb0c4a53.png That's right! Out now, and at a massively discounted price for day one! We highly recommend a dedicated graphics card set up to play on high quality settings, and for the best experience. This is not your average text adventure, so a decent machine is required! Enjoy!Daily Deal - Stories Untold, 66% OffOct 6, 2017 - AnnouncementToday's Deal: Save 66% on Stories Untold!* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Sunday at 10AM Pacific Time
Show Comments
