![]() In The Station Process, you’re monitoring activity from a snowy research base, tuning your equipment to pick up increasingly panicked radio broadcasts from the other facilities. The actions the game requires of you can be quite mundane and a tad repetitive, but the outcomes, and ever-increasing strangeness of your situation, imbue actions as simple as turning a dial with real tension. Eventually the episode twists in a brilliantly odd direction, throwing lots of concepts your way at once and asking you to try and digest a sudden influx of knowledge. You follow instructions from a bored voice over a PA, flitting between the equipment provided and the instruction manual, which is stored on a creaky old black-and-green monitor. It’s a strange set-up that retains its mystique over the episode’s hour-long playtime. In The Lab Conduit, you’re operating on a mysterious heart that pulsates from within the box it’s held in. The Lab Conduit starts strange and does not let up. They’re entirely focused on flicking switches and twisting knobs, on recreating often awkward physical interactions with digital artefacts, conducting mundane actions that ultimately bring about horrifying results. Both involve manipulating various apparatuses with the mouse, while reading in-game manuals that give you instructions for different operations. The House Abandon is the scariest part of the package, but the second and third episodes-The Lab Conduct and The Station Process-are both more engaging and difficult. In this way, Stories Untold is an introspective game, one that seems keen to examine the horror genre just as much as it wants to exist within it. Finishing each episode means pushing forward well beyond the point where it makes sense to do so, but that’s not a bad thing-the tension ramps right up when you start to feel yourself heading in a bad direction. One of the major themes running through the anthology as a whole is that the horrors visited upon the player are avoidable, and that you’re bringing them upon yourself through your actions. ![]() Taken as a whole, these episodes elegantly explore the central tension of many horror games-that the player is the driving force, and able to stop playing and put an end to their fears at any point. There’s a strong sense of being trapped, of your fate being inevitable and tied to these old, dying pieces of technology, that Stories Untold feeds off of. Most of the time you have access to only one or two areas, which you can flit between with the tab key, and your actions are limited to clicking and pulling at objects with the mouse or typing commands. The episodes move between different settings, but the setup is always the same - you’re sitting in front of various pieces of technology, and you need to figure out how to interact with them to move forward. ![]() It’s a great introduction for the collection, where all four episodes focus on the aesthetics and potent strangeness of older technologies. ![]() To say too much more, or to talk about how much the game manages to do with its one static fixed camera angle, would detract from its effect. Things take a turn when you find your old computer in-game, and load up the game inside of it, and The House Abandon goes a bit Inception on you – you’re playing a game within a game within a game, but your actions start to reverberate right back to the first layer. ![]() For the first half of The House Abandon you mentally map out your character’s family home, where he has returned for what seems like a much-needed holiday. Straightforward, simple instructions (‘move to hallway’, ‘check note’) are typically all you need, although it requires you to be quite precise with your wording, sometimes irritatingly so. It’s the simplest episode in the package, tasking you with typing in commands that will be familiar to anyone who has ever typed ‘use key on door’. It wields the aesthetics of an old text adventure-right down to the computer itself, which is positioned on a wooden desk next to family photos, giving you a ‘game within a game’ perspective-and twists them into something horrifying.Īn updated version of The House Abandon headlines Stories Untold, a four-part horror anthology about poking around with old technology until that technology pokes you back. The free release of The House Abandon on itch.io last August caught on slowly among horror enthusiasts, eventually developing a solid following. ![]()
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