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One puzzle might call for a simple romance told across two frames.
Now the next puzzle may call for heartbreak.
He cries a little.
Now introduce a mechanic for poison, add a few more frames you haveRomeo & Juliet.
Dragging and dropping characters from frames reconfigured the story in real time.
Great idea, right?
Benmergui quit his job at a traditional game developer to pursue it full-time.
My ego was the size of Jupiter, he says in the Fuckup Nights talk.
Then he hit a wall.
It was too complicated, Benmergui told me recently.
People couldnt learn the rules.
It was a terrible moment, he told me.
He started looking for a rebound.
After the quagmire ofStoryteller, he picked two small projects he planned to finish quickly.
it’s possible for you to understand why he was drawn to an event called Fuckup Nights.
The market was saturated with similarly quirky, lo-fi game titles.
But Benmergui, ever-cognizant of the power of narrative, ends that Fuckup Nights talk with a twist.
It was like a new, empty frame appearing at the end of a tragedy.
The smaller, more mechanical games had helped Benmergui build the design confidence to tackleStorytellers thornier problems.
As with any good puzzle, the solution had been hiding in plain sight.
Work picked up quickly.
I didnt really have a pitch, Benmergui laughs, crediting the years-old IGF award for the publishers interest.
But he knew after years working onStorytellerto no avail and sinking three-year chunks intoErnestoandFidel that he needed runway.
He needed to finish the game with a certain level of scale and polish to stand out.
It was either a publisher, he says, or noStoryteller.
(She misses me, he says of his mom, surprisingly wistfully.
But shes fine.)
Together, the new team solvedStorytellers long-running complexity problem, in part through good old-fashioned polish.
InStoryteller, youre following a path of illusion, Benmergui explains.
If we fuck up even slightly and throw you off the rails, the illusion goes away.
You no longer enjoy the game.
Some people are going to get stuck on puzzles and say, Its impossible to solve it.
The problem is when people think, The way this character behaved makes no sense.
When that happens, we lost that person forever.
Im a bit numb, Benmergui says of the notion of the games release.
Ive been told thats called denial.
And yet even without knowing Benmerguis development saga, the game has an uncommon richness.
Its the sort of game you recommend quickly to someone who is interested in learning what games can do.
How do I get the queen to fall in love?
How do I get the gun in the butlers hand earlier?
Benmergui was neither surprised nor distressed by this observation.
Storytelleris a giant tutorial on how to playStoryteller, he conceded.
You stop playing the game, take a look around yourself, and wonder which panel youre in.
