External Links


Story file
Requires a Glulx interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
Walkthrough and map
by David Welbourn

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Playlists and Wishlists

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page

The Untold Story

by Michael Pavano

Fantasy
2019

(based on 5 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

After spending months alone in your Cabin after the sudden loss of your brother, you find yourself on an unusual journey through the home you once thought you knew in a desperate search to retrieve what you have lost. As you explore the old forest helping its inhabitants and hunting for your possessions, you may find something you never realized you lost...


Game Details


Awards

73rd Place - 25th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2019)

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)
Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.

Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Member Reviews

5 star:
(0)
4 star:
(0)
3 star:
(0)
2 star:
(3)
1 star:
(2)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 2
Write a review


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A tale of brother's love in a mysterious forest, October 10, 2019
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 2 hours

I rated this game on the following criteria, one star for each:

Descriptiveness: This game is descriptive. You play a man mourning his brothers death. A bizarre occurrence happens, and you must recover your five chess pieces from a forest full of wizards, dwarves, beasts, and magic.

Polish: This game is not polished. Many synonyms are not implemented and the game doesn't recognize reasonable solutions. I even received the extremely rare 'something dramatic has happened' inform library message (not necessarily a bug, but requires a bizarre combination of circumstances).

Emotional impact: The frequent praying was interesting, but praying for points seems kind of hypocritical. The dwarf seemed kind of like a bad caricature of a dumb Scottish person. Big, emotional moments were compressed over too short a time span (a problem I had in my first published game).

Interactivity: So many commands just didn't work. There were multiple devices that 'revealed' things, and it was very frustrating trying to figure out if, when one failed, it was a bug or intentional. I didn't even know I could reenter my cabin until I read a transcript. Very buggy.

Would I play again?: I would not. Parts of this game were charming, but I believe it's too buggy right now.

(Thanks to stian on intfiction for posting a transcript! Extremely helpful!)

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Moral mishmash, December 27, 2019
by Stian
Related reviews: IFComp 2019

The Untold Story is somewhat peculiar. With a touch of nature, some wizardry, a bit of classic symbolism and a protagonist dealing with loss, it builds on several familiar tropes, some of which they don’t feel like they belong together at all, not in the way they are mixed here. On top of that, the protagonist is extremely religious (which doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the story as a whole) and several actions are assessed morally out of the blue.

The main problem, however, is that the game is severely underimplemented and quite bug-ridden. It is functional enough to finish, but I had to resort to parser-aware methods (such as dropping an item in one place in order to pick up another item in another place) to progress, and repeatedly got stuck trying to perform an action that was hinted at being possible but the parser wouldn’t allow.

As a light puzzle driven IF, The Untold Story has it’s good parts too. The setting was rather nice, and many of the descriptions were good. In general I would regard it as a very easy game, as the solutions to most puzzles were rather obviously hinted at. If the game receives a significant update that fixes the implementation issues, I would recommend that the hinting be toned down a bit as well. I’m sure it can be turned into a decent game, but it’s just not there yet.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

The Untold Story on IFDB

Recommended Lists

The Untold Story appears in the following Recommended Lists:

My new walkthroughs for March 2021 by David Welbourn
On Friday March 26, 2021, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of...




This is version 4 of this page, edited by David Welbourn on 26 March 2021 at 5:50pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page