Why 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, and I can't wait to see what No Code does next. If you're thinking of picking it up for the holidays, it normally costs a mere $10/£7, and you'll find it for even less during the Steam sale. It's so worth it.

Every 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 [no relation] 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 help move the narrative forward," says Ron Gilbert. "A good adventure game should also be about exploring a world, and in many games you're just teleporting from location to location. Firewatch and Gone Home are about exploring a space, and more point-and-click games need to do a better job of this. Build me a world I want to live in."

He continues, "I don't know that I've played a point-and-click adventure made in the last few years that thoroughly engaged me. I'm a point-and-click snob. I think two things that have hurt the genre are illogical puzzles and puzzles that don't intertwine with the narrative. I still see these issues today. However games like Firewatch get around this by not having deep puzzles. Most adventure games are all about story. In a lot of ways they've thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and that is depressing."

Olivia White of Owl Cave Games thinks too many adventure games still fall into the archaic traps of horrible logic and self-referential humour. "All the people working in the field today who do excellent work are the ones who are actively slicing away the old, rubbish parts of the genre and improving the good parts with surgical focus," she says. "Not all adventure games use moon logic, but plenty of designers are still stuck in the past."

"This is actually one of the freer genres to work within," says Sam Barlow. "There are enough limitations that it kind of encourages people to play around the edges, and I think that's important. The adventure game fan is often of a certain type, and there's been a lot of intense, fairly academic discussion and analysis of the genre. It has a lot of fans and creators who are passionate about keeping things moving forward."

No limit

I ask Ron Gilbert if the seemingly limited framework of the adventure genre naturally limits innovation. "For pure point-and-click games, it does," he says. "But people, including me, have a very rigid definition of a point-and-click game and resist change. After building Thimbleweed Park, I do think there's a stigma attached to the genre. People are often predisposed to think they won't like them, and that these games are full of illogical puzzles and bad narrative. As a creator you have a huge hump to overcome. We felt that every day making Thimbleweed."

"There have been a lot of really innovative things done in adventure games recently," says Francisco Gonzalez. "I think the main problem is that if an adventure game tries to innovate too much, then people no longer consider it an adventure game. There's a notion that you need absurd inventory puzzles to be part of the genre, but I consider games like The Cave, which has platforming elements, and the heavily story-led Oxenfree to be great examples of modern adventures."

"What adventure games do well is tell more intimate, more focused stories," says Dave Gilbert. "You wouldn't make an adventure game about a soldier fighting in a warzone. Nor would you make a beat-'em-up about a detective trying to solve a case. So can adventure games limit you? Sure. But for telling the stories I want to tell, the sky's the limit."

So what does the future hold for adventure games? "We're going to see a lot more games that shed the point-and-click mould," says Olivia White. "I think we'll see a bunch of developers adopting the Telltale style, but I'd like to see more games doing interesting things with interactive narrative like Stories Untold and Edith Finch."

"I think things are going to continue as they have for the past 20 years," says Francisco Gonzalez. "There'll always be a market for adventure games, and new generations of gamers will get into the genre through modern narrative games or the classics. But I hope adventure games will continue to evolve and not be afraid to go beyond the traditional genre trappings, embracing the move away from illogical, archaic design."

"We're seeing more games with lighter mechanics and a greater emphasis on story and character," says Sam Barlow. "I think that's something that helps the genre, because it brings in audiences who are hungry for what makes adventure games tick, and also draws in new creators who are ready to mix things up. My vision of the future is one where the adventure game creators step into the world of streaming TV, where they figure out how to use performance and video as a way of telling stories."

"More people are making adventure games than ever," says Dave Gilbert. "So we'll continue to see a lot of new and interesting games coming out."

"If only I knew," says Ron Gilbert. 

It'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 becoming scary when you view them through the perspective of a child. The best thing about Bonbon is how it meanders back and forth across the distinction between reality and imagination in order to create its scares. The actual interactions can be clunky but there's an ambiguity built into the experience which elevates the result. 

I should confess that I can only just about handle Bonbon because horror really isn't my genre and I had to ask a horror-aficionado friend to reassure me that there wasn't much left when I was tempted to quit out. I also managed to attract attention in the office after a particular jump scare got me really badly. But overall I'd say this is an interesting horror game which I, a terrified person, managed to play and get something out of. Maybe don't make me sleep with the lights off for a week, though.—Pip Warr

SCP-087 (Stairwell)

The SCP stories are the product of a bunch of strangers on the internet trying to freak each other out. They are often disturbing, and frequently work ordinary objects or locations into nightmarish horror scenarios. Stairwell is one. You simply walk down a dark staircase for a random number of floors as weird stuff happens. It’s so simple but very effective—a perfect example of an indie horror game that focuses on one idea and nails it. The SCP Foundation is worth a visit if you want some odd horror fiction.—Tom Senior

IMSCARED

IMSCARED is a low-fi first-person horror game that describes itself describes itself as a "metahorror" experience. Its creator warns that the game "will try to deceive you as many times as it can". To say much more would spoil things, but expect the trickery to extend beyond the confines of the game. Keep an eye out for any stray files on your desktop screen, and don't say I didn't warn you.—Tom Senior

Duskers

Equal parts real time strategy, survival game, roguelike, and horror, Duskers puts you in remote control of a handful of drones as you explore a series of procedurally generated derelict spaceships. Scavenge for fuel, scrap metal, and upgrades, and try to remain calm as unseen alien entities skulk around the spooky-as-hell ships, chewing through doors and slipping through air vents in an attempt to destroy your plucky drones. With low-fi visuals and excellent sound design, Duskers overflows with tension, atmosphere, and lots of delicious oh-shit moments.—Chris Livingston

The Last Stand 2

The Last Stand 2 is a Flash game about clicking on zombies till they die. In a certain frame of mind I will tell you it is the perfect zombie game. 

The first Last Stand was a straightforward thing about standing behind barricades as the undead approached from screen left and learning when to switch to the chainsaw as they neared. Survive until dawn, and it ended. The sequel adds something to do in daylight hours: searching for survivors who will join you at the barricade, as well as more weapons and traps. (Watching a bear trap snag the legs of one of those fast zombies so you can lazily headshot them is a good time.) Any spare hours can be spent repairing the barricade.

But the real reason to search is to find supplies so you can travel to the next town. In 40 days the entire country's going to be quarantined and if you don't make it out by then, you never will. It's as simple, low-budget, and effective as the best movies about the living dead. Maybe it is the perfect zombie game. —Jody Macgregor

Inside

My favourite horror films are those that continue to defy neat explanation even as the credits roll. I'm thinking of weirdo cult stuff like Possession from the '80s, and more recently Enemy, by Denis Villeneuve, the Blade Runner sequel dude. Why mention movies? Because very few games pull off the same feat of managing to be both unsettling and satisfying, but Inside does. The spiritual sequel to Limbo leans on similarly gorgeous but bleak art and animation, but has a story that's far more interesting than its predecessor. 

Not that I'm sure I can explain it. Roughly: you're a boy on the run in some sort of dystopic otherworld, navigating puzzles, platforms, and inventively nightmarish insta-deaths. The greatest/nastiest of which has to be the underwater section. Just say to any other Inside player "How about that swimming witch?" and savour their reaction.

And then the game morphs, quite literally, into something else entirely. It's a huge, again also literally, spoiler that we've talked about at length elsewhere on the site, and which developer Playdead gave a great talk about making at GDC last year. I think I've also read them say that the game is fundamentally about totalitarianism, but all I can say for sure is that the implications of its final reel have lingered with me long after I left that moonlight dappled beach. —Tim Clark

I really don’t want to die. Someday I will, though, and it will probably suck. I worry about drowning, being burned alive, bears having me for dinner (it happens where I’m from), or tripping and bashing my head open on a gumball machine—and most popular horror games are good at turning those fears, other than the gumball one, into palpable threats. But in focusing so much on depicting the act of dying, they ignore why I’m scared of dying. 

Games are good at delivering terror. They specialize in the apprehension that precedes an awful revelation. But once you’ve died, which is the horrific revelation part, suddenly there’s no longer anything to anticipate, and therefore nothing to be terrified of. Death becomes a certainty, and in traditional try-again games, it’s making the experience far less scary than it could be. 

In my review of Outlast 2, I said that its “commitment to building such a disorienting horror simulation is as admirable as it is annoying.” Most scenes take about five deaths to figure out. Five deaths is enough to see a monster, learn its simple AI routine, and memorize your escape route as well as your walk home from work. Since you know that finishing the game requires staying alive until the end, the overarching narrative tension also loses strength. And because you can die and restart at the last checkpoint, those spooky punches lose more of their sting with each attempt. Sure, sometimes you’ll get a grisly animation, and if getting your dick split in half over and over can sustain your interest here into oblivion, great. But even Resident Evil 7, which starts off with some of the best innovations in horror game history, falls into the same shoot or hide or die death trap over time. 

Popular horror games in the same style know how to tap into fleeting dick-splitting fears and often confront deeper psychological fears in their overarching themes, but the threat of death and repetition is still the dull captain steering the tension. It’s about time they stop trying so hard to kill us.  

Death to death

Death has always been games' most popular punishment. You can fail to perform a task and in the fiction of the world, die. Bummer! Back to the last checkpoint. Threatening the player with lost time through death is an easy way to build tension, but the tension is entirely detached from the fiction. There’s no time to focus on the monsters chasing us. 

During my second playthrough of Frictional Games' SOMA, I installed a mod called “Wuss Mode” that turns off predatory enemy AI. Instead of sneaking around the monsters, I got to know them—and yeah, I know what it sounds like. I watched them lumber around each environment like blind dogs. I didn’t feel physically threatened, but in observing the creatures, I started to sympathize with them. Like Frankenstein's monster, they were only dangerous in appearance, fearsome only in their most recognizable human qualities. What were they thinking? Why were they thinking? I had time to consider SOMA’s headier themes on what it means to be alive, to be a human. I was fine the first time I played it, but without obligatory videogame baddies shoving me through the experience, I soaked it in like a good novel, pausing on moving passages at will.

I still felt scared, not because I was being bludgeoned with a biomechanical arm, but because because I was confronted with some awful, scary truths about the nature of life. There’s terror in the build up towards a horrific revelation in finding out what the monsters represent, and uninterrupted time to reflect those ideas back onto myself. Consciousness, man. What even is that stuff? Hell if I know. And that’s scary enough. Some of the best horror games are built around the same idea, of producing horror without death as a system.

But some just want to be schlocky fun, a ride through some spooks and gore and dim hallways. That’s all good and wholesome, but the issue remains: death and repetition are still a tedious, emotional dead end. If they’re a necessary part of the experience, how can games sustain interest and scares five attempts in?  

Systems make great painkillers

What games like Outlast 2 and Amnesia get wrong is often cited as their boldest design choice: putting limitations on or completely removing combat. I don’t mean to say that I want to kill every enemy in those games, but restricting players to a tiny set of interactions is also a good way to stunt their creativity. If the enemies are on full alert and I’m stuck hiding, I only have two primary options: sneak or run. Chances are I’ll die doing both, and I’ll need to make several attempts to learn patrol routes or where to sprint next to trigger a checkpoint. 

I can’t pick up an errant plank and bash a cultist over the head with it or grab a torch and light an oil drum on fire as a distraction—there’s no incentive to being clever and terror only works if you don’t know where the boogeyman is hiding. But as opposed to one right way and one wrong way to navigate an area, taking a more systems-driven approach to horror game design can give you a dozen ways to get through with style, 10 ways to barely scrape by, and countless ways to screw up and die.

In Dishonored 2, if I’m backed into a corner, I can still improvise an escape plan. Maybe I toss a bucket to distract and then swan dive into my doppleganger from six stories up. Or possess a guard, hop to a rat, and scurry away. It’s not the perfect example because it turns the player into a clever god, but still makes me wonder what a horror version of such a system-focused game would look like.

Imagine one that has the kind of player freedom that enables this astounding Dishonored 2 run, but instead of killing dozens of guards, you knock over a stack of books in the library to throw the monster off your tail. Then you sneak up and stab it with a broken broomstick, which permanently slows the monster down, giving you time to cover yourself in mud to hide your scent or build construct some combustible traps out of found objects in the workshop.  

With that kind of systemic variety, something like Resident Evil 7 could feel like an unsanctioned Home Alone sequel where the burglars want to eat your face. I’d love nothing more than to see Jack react to a barrage of swinging paint cans to the mug.

The more options a player has to evade a threat, then the more deaths can be justifiably blamed on the lack of player ingenuity rather than narrow level design or failing to do the prescribed sprint-and-stealth dance. To be clear, the kind of systems I’m suggesting should not make the player feel more powerful than their pursuer. They just need to provide more exit routes and the chance to think creatively in desperate moments. I just want to run through a few more options before going with ‘die and try again.’ I want to feel solely responsible for my survival and I want surviving to be a new process every time. 

Still, the problem of the horrific revelation remains. When the player dies and gets to try again, smart systems can make terror renewable, but what about the comedown after you see the monster? And what if it backs you into a corner, helpless? Should that be game over? If terror can be a renewable resource, then so can horror. 

Variety is the spice of death

While I don’t consider it to be the second coming of survival horror so many do, Resident Evil 7’s first few hours house some of the best ideas for dealing with death I’ve seen in popular horror games. All videogames have the death problem, convinced that as soon as a bad guy gets you, they’ll just kill you and call it a day. A villain that just murders as quickly and efficiently as possible is a boring one.

Jack Baker, the first monster you meet in Resident Evil 7, is a more complex, charismatic dude than a tag-‘em-and-bag-‘em killer looking to just clock out for the day. He’s the kind of guy who wants to take his time. He calls out your name like a schoolyard bully, compares you to a pig and summons you for dinner, grins and laughs and stares directly at you from across the room. And he never outright sprints for you, opting for a steady, brisk walk as if your end is already assured. 

When Jack does catch you, the majority of deaths end with a gruesome animation and a game over screen—the terror falls off and diminishes as we start again. But during a few specific instances, death is not the end.  

Early on, Jack can corner you in a room behind the kitchen and knock you to the floor after which he chops off your leg with a shovel. You can pick up your leg and add it to your inventory, which you’ll need to do if you want to survive. And that’s the surprise, that you can survive the whole ordeal. In any other game, I’d expect to just bleed out (and you can), but Jack crosses the room, crouches, and taunts you with a bottle of healing medicine.

If you manage to crawl over and grab the bottle, you can put your leg back in place, pour some magic medicine on it, and watch it fuse back together. You put your goddamn leg back on. And then Jack slams his shovel down, let’s you know daddy’s coming, and the chase is back on. 

These scenes, rare as they are, all teach the player that Jack is a true madman. They also inform you about the state of the world (and strange regenerative state of Ethan, the main character), as well as delivering a punchy horror scene. When I watched my leg fuse mend and then heard Jack coming for me again, I was terrified of him as a person and horrified of what he might be capable of. He was no longer strictly a walking game over state. 

Death, like horror tropes in film, can and should be subverted in order to maintain tension before and after scares take place. Players shouldn’t be able to predict what happens before or after they shake hands with a threat, be it a monster or a man or a bunny with vampire teeth. Horror games are best when they strive to stay unfamiliar, and in adopting a familiar die-and-try-again videogame death system, they’re knocking the wind out of their scares already before anyone presses start.  

For more on horror, check out list of the best horror games on PC, our list of the horror game clichés that need to stop, and our hands-on impressions of Serious Metal Detecting, which isn't a horror game but playing it is like staring into a dark mirror and feeling nothing, forever and always. 

Stories Untold is one of the most interesting games I’ve reviewed so far this year. It was developed by No Code, a small team led by Jon McKellan, whose previous development work includes designing some of the retro-futuristic visuals in Alien: Isolation. It’s a fascinating, subversive experiment in storytelling with a sinister atmosphere, satisfying puzzles, and a beautifully understated ‘80s aesthetic, but it all started with a game jam.

PC Gamer: Where did the idea for Stories Untold come from?

Jon McKellan: We put out the first prototype, The House Abandon, last year as part of Ludum Dare 36. It went viral and ended up being streamed and reviewed, which completely surprised us. So the natural thought was “Let’s do more of these!” We had some time to kill before our next big project started development, so it seemed like a good fit. We thought: the House Abandon was made in three days, so three more means we’ll be done in two weeks, right? Six months later and I nearly collapsed from exhaustion. Stories Untold is so much more than just The House Abandon times four. Lesson learned.Was it always intended to be an anthology, or did that happen organically?

It was designed that way from the start. I have a lot of ideas for stories that wouldn’t work as a full 5+ hour game, so I thought a collection of monster-of-the-week episodes would be a fun way to present these smaller ideas. What made The House Abandon special to people was the meta twist of the game-in-a-game, so we couldn’t just rehash that another three times. And that inspired us to double down on the surreality of it all.

What were the biggest influences on Stories Untold?The game’s aesthetic and tone are inspired by so many things. That’s the joy of making an anthology instead of a single game. You get to tap into so many inspirations and ideas. I’m a huge fan of mystery in all its forms, from crappy YouTube videos of UFOs to Lost and early Steven Spielberg films. In Stories Untold I’ve kind of combined those things with old science fiction, Jacob’s Ladder, and Silent Hill 2. Lots of Silent Hill 2.Episode three involves the real-world mystery of numbers stations. Do you have a particular fascination with them?

Absolutely, I find that stuff fascinating. Given our development timeline, I spent way too long listening to and researching numbers stations. I found an online shortwave tuner, and it basically consumed me for a week straight. That became the central interface for episode three. There’s a thing that happens when you get engrossed in that system, where you start staring into space, focusing all your sensory attention on picking out the slightest oddity in the noise, and I wanted to replicate that feeling in the game. I also wanted to explore the meaning of numbers stations. There are a lot of theories, and this episode is one of ours. It’s not completely opaque in the game what we’re getting at, but that’s the point. It’s a starting point for your imagination.Why do you think games that echo the 1980s are so popular now?

A nostalgia for childhood times, I think. And also maybe a frustration with the current trends of modern storytelling and game development. Things today are so heavily tutorialised, focus tested, and finely tuned to the point where even brand new IPs can feel overproduced. The 1980s were the very beginning of home gaming, when everything felt genuinely new and experimental. So I wanted to get some of that feeling back in Stories Untold.

Did you use any analogue techniques to create the game’s stylish retro aesthetic, or was it all emulated?

Most was emulated due to time constraints. We have a couple of shaders that do very specific things, and cost way more than most dev teams would let me spend. Vital stuff, though. All our microfilm documents were printed then rescanned to not only look right, but save time in production. We paid close attention to colour palettes on different devices and tried to get as close as we could, but didn’t get a chance to be too experimental. Next time!Games that use a lot of VHS/CRT distortion effects can easily go too far, to the point where it looks kind of contrived, but you seem to have avoided that in Stories Untold…

Yeah, it’s all about subtlety. I don’t know how on the mark I got it this time, but I had plenty of practice on Alien: Isolation, where recreating that effect was basically my job for four years. I was immersed in that aesthetic for a long time, and yeah, it’s very easy to overcook. And we didn’t want it to be ‘the thing’ the game did, but a layer of authenticity for those familiar with the original tech. The microfilm was probably the hardest to pull off since their screens are just overhead projectors. There’s no grain or interference to mask the assets at all, so getting the look and feel of that right was a challenge.What was the idea behind the TV-style intro sequence?

Literally every line, prop, and thing in the game was considered as part of a bigger picture, including those credits. They were designed to show you right away without realising it that these stories are all connected. Even the motion of the objects represents a very important scene in the game. Also, the way we open episode four only works out of repetition. We couldn’t pull that moment off if you had only seen it once two hours ago. You had to get used to, bored even, of seeing it. I’ve seen a few comments where people have complained about having to watch the intro every time, and it’s great! That means it’s working, that the rug-pull will be even more effective. 

Was the old tech used in the game—computers, tape recorders, etc.—based on real hardware? What did you use for reference?

Yeah, most of the objects were researched quite heavily. I have Pinterest boards full of old stuff. I find the most mundane ‘80s tech amazing. Not just because it’s old, but because it was bold. It was a time when manufacturers were just trying shit out to see what worked instead of designing by committee. TVs shaped like goldfish bowls, stuff like that. That’s why a lot of us love those objects, I think. It’s funny, when we released The House Abandon and it featured the fictional ‘Futuro’ computer (based on a ZX Spectrum), people were like “I had one of those!” But they didn’t, because we just made it up. But it’s cool that it looks and feels like something they owned.How did your collaboration with Kyle Lambert come about?

Turns out Twitter is good for some things! I had been asking around if anyone knew someone who could do a poster in a style similar to Drew Struzan and John Alvin. Those collage-style posters are a great way of showing all the different scenes in a film, but for us it was a way of bringing these four seemingly disparate episodes together. Instead of people we have computers, because our characters are the tech, and that felt like an interesting twist on the concept of those posters. I found Kyle’s work on Stranger Things and Super 8 and got in touch, and he was great. He’s so much more than just a Drew Struzan imitator. He has a really nice style that evokes the era, but still feels like its own thing. We geeked out getting him involved in Stories Untold. 

Everything about Stories Untold echoes the '80s-styled Netflix sci-fi TV programme Stranger Things, right down to its iconic era-authentic artwork. The latter is in fact designed by Kyle Lambert who designed the show's poster, however its game variation is a collection of parser-based narrative adventures that starts with The House Abandon—a one-time Ludum Dare entry and itch.io game that Tom Sykes covered in his Free Games of the Week column last year. 

Developed by Glasgow-based outfit No Code and published by Devolver Digital, Stories Untold is heading to Steam on February 27, where it aims to "scare your pants off", for £3.99/$4.99. Here's a teaser: 

And what about this Stranger Things-inspired poster?

At the time of writing, Stories Untold's non-remastered The House Abandon pilot episode is available to download over on itch.io. It's cool and free so I'd recommend doing so, however here's Tom's thoughts before you do: 

"[The House Abandon] also borrows Alien: Isolation's flickering VHS aesthetic, to tell the story of a person sitting down at an old computer to have an adventure. Rather than viewing the adventure game directly, you're given a view of an authentically modelled desk—complete with a retro computer and a CRT TV—and the atmosphere this setup conjures up is palpable."