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Stories Untold's dev explains why the game's text mechanic was completely changed for the Switch port

Eschewing the clunky
by rawmeatcowboy
11 March 2020
GN Version 5.0

When Stories Untold launched on PC, it was a classic text adventure. The background visuals were there, but the player had to type in verb/noun pairings to progress through the game. When the game jumped to Switch, the text input was changed to pretermined text boxes with verbs/nouns to choose from. In an interview with Gamasutra, developer John McKellan explains why the change was made.

“I had played with some on-screen keyboard designs but it felt even worse. It's no fun typing out a command, letter by letter, slowly, and finding out you spelled ‘look’ wrong or something.

Getting something wrong in text adventures is an authentic part of the experience, to be honest, trial and error. But that's awful when the action of inputting is garbage. The other factor was that on screen keyboards tend to take up a lot of space on screen, and it's important to remember that Stories is a 3D environment game with stuff going on, clues to be seen, atmosphere to build. Covering the screen with UI every 30 seconds just demolished the experience… The solution had to be something compact that could be kept out of the way of the world around it and only brought up when it mattered. That's why it's not on the screen all the time either. If we left it on screen for the duration of the text sections, you would assume that the only real gameplay is happening in that box, when that isn't really the case--you are looking at the room for answers too.”

[Link]