Scrapbooking. It’s something I appreciate the appeal of even if I don’t do it myself. My mum didn’t scrapbook, but she has created a handwritten family album that documents the last 150 years of our heritage and I always enjoy leafing through it to see old photo scans and nuggets of information. That passing of family knowledge from generation to generation is at the heart of Tell Me Your Story. Grandma Rose sits down with her scrapbook and shares stories of her life with her granddaughter Amelia. As her stories come to life, the game begins.
Tell Me Your Story is a colourful and vibrant game. It has a fuzzy, warm feeling across the user interface, the graphics, and the twee soundtrack. I call out the user interface as a big part of the game because despite this being a story, not a single word is used. Instead, visual cues and prompts try to guide the player to understand what they need to do with each individual puzzle or situation. The game is split up into three main chapters, with plenty of puzzles hidden inside each one. They are largely quite traditional like pairs, colouring in, spotting patterns or odd ones out. There are quite a few stacking games and some light point-and-click adventuring to move objects around the screen to uncover hidden memories. You won’t find anything too leftfield and whilst the visuals look lovely, these are the kinds of puzzles you’d expect to see in a high-end hidden object game to break up the hidden object areas.
There is a rule that game design needs to follow when all words are removed from the experience – make the next step obvious. That can be through careful lighting, visual cues, a lockdown of options, or some other design element. Without the ability to read something and gain more context about it, you are relying heavily on the visuals to convey instant understanding. This is where my experience with Tell Me Your Story fell over. Some puzzles do not give a clear indication of what the player is expected to do or solve. This is particularly a problem in the second and third chapters where lots of pattern recognition puzzles are placed. You aren’t sure if you are matching things or calling oddities out. The game provides a single hint which sometimes points arrows at things the player needs to be aware of but again it’s not always clear what that means. I’m sure one puzzle where you are meant to line up blobs under a microscope has an incorrect hint but I shouldn’t have to fall through several layers of visual design cues to still get something wrong. On three separate occasions, I ground to a halt and was unable to progress and it seems other players have hit similar issues on the same puzzles.
Whilst that doesn’t sound like a game breaker, some puzzles seem to solve themselves too. Just by clicking on a part of the screen, I’d somehow move the story forward, or find an object without actually clicking on it. Elsewhere some scenes look like puzzles but are actually freeze-frame cutscenes. It all comes back to being really clear about the visual design of something and being consistent. That’s difficult to do when a game is attempting lots of different puzzles. The lack of words and the need to unpick what you are meant to do also keeps the player at arm’s length from the story too. Whilst it is cute and wholesome, I didn’t feel emotionally connected to any of it and I should do as I lost my dad last year. This game was ripe for making me ugly cry but instead, I came away from it mildly frustrated. Despite those three stoppages, I completed the game in under 2 hours which felt a little shorter than expected too.
My main takeaway from Tell Me Your Story is one of visual design. When a game removes words, it also removes context, so each action needs to be very clear, clean and specific. This is something Tell Me Your Story didn’t quite manage and it is not quite as fun, nor as engaging, as it could ultimately have been.
Higher Plain Games is part of the Higher Plain Network. If you like what I do, please consider supporting me via Patreon for as little as $1/£1 a month. There are additional perks for supporting me, such as behind-the-scenes content and downloads. You can also share the website or use the affiliate buy now links on reviews. Buying credit from CD Keys using my affiliate link means I get a couple of pence per sale. All your support will enable me to produce better content, more often. Thank you.
