REVIEW · 2023-03-23
Storyteller
Reading a review pool split over brevity
Introduction
You are given a title and a few empty comic panels. To fit a one-line prompt like 'the king dies and the queen mourns,' you drag icons of characters and scenes into the panels. That is Storyteller, a comic-panel narrative puzzle made by Argentine developer Daniel Benmergui and published by Annapurna Interactive in 2023.
I write this not as a report of my own playthrough but from the Steam review pool. The English reviews sit at 86% positive across 3,888 entries; the all-language total is over 7,500, labelled 'Very Positive' (snapshot 2026-06-17). On the number alone it is a solid little game. Read the bodies, though, and that 86% is plainly not one block.
Reading the helpful positives and negatives, plus the recent sort, the verdicts converge on a single point: length. The same brevity is called 'clean and confident' by one side and 'too little' by the other. I will read that fault line as a design question, without stoking the quarrel.
Storyteller key art — Steam store
First Impressions
Open the positive reviews and the first word is not about gameplay but 'cute,' 'charming.' Hand-drawn panels, comically animated figures, a small flourish when a prompt resolves. Many reviewers describe the same tactile pleasure they feel in the first few minutes, in nearly identical words.
Next most frequent is surprise: 'I have not seen this before.' Building a story by arranging panels rather than writing sentences is what the positive side calls 'original.' In my vocabulary, that is a reaction not to learning a new verb but to a grammar that is itself new.
The negative side, too, forms a complaint at first sight: a hunch that it will end quickly. With few panels and gentle prompts, some reviewers brace early, wondering whether this is all there is. The later split has already begun at first impression.
A prompt arrives over a few empty panels — Steam store
Putting the Mechanics into Words
Reconstructing the mechanic from the reviews: the player holds roughly one verb — place a character or scene into a panel. Each placed element reacts automatically to its neighbours: drink poison and you die, witness a death and you grieve, grieve and you may be paired with another. You never write the outcome; you only arrange the causes.
The positive refrain that it is 'simple yet deep' is, in my terms, verb subtraction. Having narrowed the verb to one, Storyteller hands its complexity to a grammar — the order of panels. You manipulate word order, and the game grades whether the story that order produces matches the one-line prompt. Solving a puzzle through grammar puts it on the same continuum as the language work in Chants of Sennaar and the panel-telling of Gorogoa.
The negative side calls the same system 'sloppy, with hidden variables.' Who saw what, which emotion overwrites which and in what order — none of it appears as numbers on screen. That is low observation resolution. Yet I do not read it as a flaw. By subtracting the state display, the game forces you to read outcomes as a story rather than a board. Removing the UI is the game's actual subject.
Place a figure and the next panel reacts — Steam store
The Feel of the Story
It is called a narrative puzzle, but here story is material, not spectacle. Prompts come in classic shapes — revenge, betrayal, the death of a king — and you search for an arrangement that satisfies the shape. The thing the top helpful positives agree on is the joy that one prompt has several solutions: the correct story is not single, and a different cast placement can meet the same conditions.
Unexpected plots rising from few elements is the gentlest form of combinatorial explosion. A handful of characters, a few scenes — and still, reviewers say, you cannot stop testing 'what if I place this one here.' The core of the trick Benmergui nursed for years lies not in quantity but in the density with which a small set reacts to itself.
Still, the negative note that it is 'thin as a story' is accurate. Each plot reads less like something to feel than a worked logic example. I do not read this as a contradiction. The story is minimised to be solved, not savoured; its feel lives in the author's sense of having built the plot yourself, not in narrative depth.
Classic story shapes become the prompts — Steam store
Pacing
Now the heart of the split: length. The line repeated most on the negative side is 'over in two hours.' In one official discussion, the disappointment was less about brevity itself than about ending 'right as it gets good.' Median clear time is about two hours; the list price is around fifteen dollars. Setting price beside length is a natural reaction.
The positive side defends that same length. The comparison 'like a film or a book — two hours is fine if the experience earns it' shows up across reviews. Sharper still are the voices that point to play style: an experimental player who tries every placement finds it long, a goal-oriented player who solves the shortest path finds it instant. The same game is two different lengths depending on how you face it. That is not difficulty; it is the reach of the design.
The recent sort adds a postscript. In September 2023 the developer is reported to have added, in a free update, a new chapter 'Genesis,' a new character, more than twenty extra levels, and a collection feature. The last-30-days reviews running higher at 92% likely include players who arrived at this enlarged length — a rare case of an author answering the chief complaint with more of the thing itself.
A free update added chapters and levels — Steam store
Sources
This article was written by reading the Steam store-page user reviews and public information as of 2026-06-17. It reconstructs typical claims rather than quoting review text.
・Steam: Storyteller (86% positive in English across 3,888 reviews; 7,500+ all-language total; 'Very Positive' label; last 30 days 92% of 70).
・Read via WebFetch: the helpful positive/negative reviews, the recent sort, and the official discussion thread 'Meh reviews, 2 hours long.' Confirmed the price-versus-length debate and the play-style difference in perceived runtime.
・(Reference) critic reviews on Metacritic / OpenCritic and reporting on the September 2023 free content update (Nintendo Life and others). The press is harsher on brevity, while users score higher on the strength of charm.
Closing
Steam's overall is 'Very Positive,' 86% in English. Against that I give it 7.5 as design criticism. The gap has a clear cause: I rate the invention of this grammar highly, but read the number of boards on which the grammar plays out as falling short of the invention's size. The verb is beautiful; there is too little ground on which to wield it.
So who it suits is decided by posture, not length. For the player who would rather test 'what happens with this arrangement?' than rush the shortest answer, and who enjoys reading the board as a story without leaning on a UI, two hours is dense enough. Those who want sturdier difficulty or a longer grip should look at another shelf — a grammar game like Baba Is You, say.
Brevity is not a defect but a reach the author chose. The fault line in the reviews marks not a flaw in the game but the border of who it was made for. I consider that border more useful information than the number 7.5.
The grammar is beautiful; the ground is small — Steam store
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