"Some horror compilation. Trash."
Oh, man. I said in my earlier review for Observation that I thought No Code had a serious shot at making a good Silent Hill game, and I meant it. After playing Stories Untold, I'm not so confident. The only saving grace here is that this is the older of the two works — Observation came out three years after Stories Untold, and it remains the most recent title they have out — but this is really bad. This is the psychological horror equivalent of when someone tries to guess what you're about to say before you've finished saying it, and they guess wrong. And that first wrong guess doesn't shame them enough for them to shut the fuck up, so they keep interrupting you with more guesses, and they keep getting it wrong. They don't have a clue what they're doing, like human autocomplete. The protagonist's repressed guilt over the murder of a loved one causes them to spiral deep into torment, going through a series of nightmarish trials where they — hold on a second, what did you say the protagonist's name was? James? Oh, No Code, Silent Hill 2 already handed me this assignment back in 2001. You copied off of Team Silent's homework, didn't you? No wonder Konami gave you the license; who better to hire for their long-running franchise than fangame developers?
It's not especially clear until you've got the benefit of hindsight from the following chapters, but the first act of the game started out as a standalone piece. It was not original to this, nor was it intended to be the start of the compilation; it was made for a Ludum Dare as its own self-contained work, and then forced into this as act one of the compilation. It's...not great, mechanically, but it spends most of its time setting up a story that promises to be interesting. The entire sequence is done as a text adventure, where the actual "text adventure" part is happening through an in-universe computer. The text parser is kind of shit. This section — the whole game, with its obvious Stranger Things trappings — is going for this late-80s style, yet the parser itself is dumber than anything that was coming out around that time. Forcing you to type "look around" rather than just "look" to get the layout of an area is a fairly obvious misfire, as is the obscenely slow crawling text that you have to re-read every single time you visit a room you've already been to. It's got a pretty limp ending, but everything up until then is at least neat. The lights flickering when you turn on the generator in the text adventure, the alarm clock blaring, the door swinging open; it's all very neat.
Act two kicks off with something that almost always engages me — fiddling around with unfamiliar machines — but every function of every device is given to you from the outset, along with their exact positions in the stack. You don't need to find anything nor experiment at all because it's all very clearly labeled and set out, and you're just following instructions as written. Turn the dial to 10, punch in a few numbers on this keypad, flip this switch. It all plays itself, which is an exceptionally boring way to handle a gameplay concept that I usually enjoy. I've played this exact game but better in Nauticrawl, in Unsorted Horror — this is just boring. It isn't long before the object you're experimenting on breaks free and starts strobing a red light in your face that you have to keep looking at to solve the final puzzle of the section. You just stare at it and it strobes a light at you with symbols in it and you reenter the symbols into a computer. I don't have epilepsy, but this seriously fucking hurt my eyes; I think anyone with photosensitivity might actually have a seizure off the back of this. It's ridiculous.
The third section is where things really take a headfirst dive into an empty swimming pool. What you're meant to be doing is simple — turn in to a radio frequency, get a code, cite the manual to find out what you do with that code — but the manual itself is provided on microfilm. Not an inherent issue, but Stories Untold refuses to ever give you a straight look at any of the computer monitors in the game, which means the monitor with the microfilm on it only takes up about a third of the screen. You can manually look closer in by holding down right mouse, but this doesn't help much. You can get the monitor to (mostly) fill the screen, but the actual important text is written in an incredibly tiny, smudgy font that makes it near impossible to tell what the fuck the actual instruction is. If you manage to accidentally stumble into the microfilm monitor's additional zoom function, your reward is that you can now tell what you're meant to be typing into the terminal without needing to squint at your screen. The tiny text serves as the only barrier for execution, and what's left serves instead to be pure, rote copying; punch in the not-Unix commands as written and hit enter. Repeat until credits. You're doing data entry while poorly-acted characters fake-shout in your ear about how confused they are in a tone like they're afraid they might wake their parents in the next room. This isn't tense. This is a day at the office. Actually, a day at the office is more tense, because it has stakes and isn't all just a coma dream.
Of course the final act reveal is that it was all a fucking dream. Jesus. What else could it be? What more were you expecting? James was in a coma all along because he got drunk, crashed his car, killed his sister, and then planted a whiskey bottle on the cop he crashed into. It's one of those reveals where they walk you back through every single hint they ever gave, and yeah, I suppose it makes sense, but that doesn't make it a satisfying conclusion. You know what I like in my horror stories? When they're all completely rational, completely based in reality, and completely justified to the audience before they end. I've long been an advocate for films inserting a ten-minute ENDING EXPLAINED video between the last shot of the movie and the credits, so I'm glad that No Code decided to oblige me and adopt this framework for their game.
When the credits roll, the "this is a work of fiction" disclaimer refers to this game as a "motion picture" rather than a game. I thought this was playing into the reveal that Stories Untold is meant to be a TV show in-universe, but the final credits of the game after our protagonist comes back to reality still call this a motion picture. It's literally the final paragraph of text before you're kicked back to the main menu. Mr. Cage is on the phone, and he's fucking pissed. He says someone's trying to tread on his territory.
The only real redeeming factor of this project is that it isn't the newest thing they've done. If I had played this before Observation, there isn't a chance I would have ever played that game. Let's just hope this is a single misstep in what's otherwise going to be a fruitful company history from here on out; if Observation was just a lucky fluke, Silent Hill Townfall will be an especially brutal failure.
Shooting for the Stranger Things aesthetic made this dated from the exact second it dropped.
Oh, man. I said in my earlier review for Observation that I thought No Code had a serious shot at making a good Silent Hill game, and I meant it. After playing Stories Untold, I'm not so confident. The only saving grace here is that this is the older of the two works — Observation came out three years after Stories Untold, and it remains the most recent title they have out — but this is really bad. This is the psychological horror equivalent of when someone tries to guess what you're about to say before you've finished saying it, and they guess wrong. And that first wrong guess doesn't shame them enough for them to shut the fuck up, so they keep interrupting you with more guesses, and they keep getting it wrong. They don't have a clue what they're doing, like human autocomplete. The protagonist's repressed guilt over the murder of a loved one causes them to spiral deep into torment, going through a series of nightmarish trials where they — hold on a second, what did you say the protagonist's name was? James? Oh, No Code, Silent Hill 2 already handed me this assignment back in 2001. You copied off of Team Silent's homework, didn't you? No wonder Konami gave you the license; who better to hire for their long-running franchise than fangame developers?
It's not especially clear until you've got the benefit of hindsight from the following chapters, but the first act of the game started out as a standalone piece. It was not original to this, nor was it intended to be the start of the compilation; it was made for a Ludum Dare as its own self-contained work, and then forced into this as act one of the compilation. It's...not great, mechanically, but it spends most of its time setting up a story that promises to be interesting. The entire sequence is done as a text adventure, where the actual "text adventure" part is happening through an in-universe computer. The text parser is kind of shit. This section — the whole game, with its obvious Stranger Things trappings — is going for this late-80s style, yet the parser itself is dumber than anything that was coming out around that time. Forcing you to type "look around" rather than just "look" to get the layout of an area is a fairly obvious misfire, as is the obscenely slow crawling text that you have to re-read every single time you visit a room you've already been to. It's got a pretty limp ending, but everything up until then is at least neat. The lights flickering when you turn on the generator in the text adventure, the alarm clock blaring, the door swinging open; it's all very neat.
Act two kicks off with something that almost always engages me — fiddling around with unfamiliar machines — but every function of every device is given to you from the outset, along with their exact positions in the stack. You don't need to find anything nor experiment at all because it's all very clearly labeled and set out, and you're just following instructions as written. Turn the dial to 10, punch in a few numbers on this keypad, flip this switch. It all plays itself, which is an exceptionally boring way to handle a gameplay concept that I usually enjoy. I've played this exact game but better in Nauticrawl, in Unsorted Horror — this is just boring. It isn't long before the object you're experimenting on breaks free and starts strobing a red light in your face that you have to keep looking at to solve the final puzzle of the section. You just stare at it and it strobes a light at you with symbols in it and you reenter the symbols into a computer. I don't have epilepsy, but this seriously fucking hurt my eyes; I think anyone with photosensitivity might actually have a seizure off the back of this. It's ridiculous.
The third section is where things really take a headfirst dive into an empty swimming pool. What you're meant to be doing is simple — turn in to a radio frequency, get a code, cite the manual to find out what you do with that code — but the manual itself is provided on microfilm. Not an inherent issue, but Stories Untold refuses to ever give you a straight look at any of the computer monitors in the game, which means the monitor with the microfilm on it only takes up about a third of the screen. You can manually look closer in by holding down right mouse, but this doesn't help much. You can get the monitor to (mostly) fill the screen, but the actual important text is written in an incredibly tiny, smudgy font that makes it near impossible to tell what the fuck the actual instruction is. If you manage to accidentally stumble into the microfilm monitor's additional zoom function, your reward is that you can now tell what you're meant to be typing into the terminal without needing to squint at your screen. The tiny text serves as the only barrier for execution, and what's left serves instead to be pure, rote copying; punch in the not-Unix commands as written and hit enter. Repeat until credits. You're doing data entry while poorly-acted characters fake-shout in your ear about how confused they are in a tone like they're afraid they might wake their parents in the next room. This isn't tense. This is a day at the office. Actually, a day at the office is more tense, because it has stakes and isn't all just a coma dream.
Of course the final act reveal is that it was all a fucking dream. Jesus. What else could it be? What more were you expecting? James was in a coma all along because he got drunk, crashed his car, killed his sister, and then planted a whiskey bottle on the cop he crashed into. It's one of those reveals where they walk you back through every single hint they ever gave, and yeah, I suppose it makes sense, but that doesn't make it a satisfying conclusion. You know what I like in my horror stories? When they're all completely rational, completely based in reality, and completely justified to the audience before they end. I've long been an advocate for films inserting a ten-minute ENDING EXPLAINED video between the last shot of the movie and the credits, so I'm glad that No Code decided to oblige me and adopt this framework for their game.
When the credits roll, the "this is a work of fiction" disclaimer refers to this game as a "motion picture" rather than a game. I thought this was playing into the reveal that Stories Untold is meant to be a TV show in-universe, but the final credits of the game after our protagonist comes back to reality still call this a motion picture. It's literally the final paragraph of text before you're kicked back to the main menu. Mr. Cage is on the phone, and he's fucking pissed. He says someone's trying to tread on his territory.
The only real redeeming factor of this project is that it isn't the newest thing they've done. If I had played this before Observation, there isn't a chance I would have ever played that game. Let's just hope this is a single misstep in what's otherwise going to be a fruitful company history from here on out; if Observation was just a lucky fluke, Silent Hill Townfall will be an especially brutal failure.
Shooting for the Stranger Things aesthetic made this dated from the exact second it dropped.
3 Comments
no problem, thanks for giving a heads up on the reveal so I know I can safely skip this
curse
12 days ago
just a quick note: no code's making silent hill townfall and f's a different project by neobards/ryukishi07