Storyteller, like a lot of indie games, simulates to us the dormant expressive power of the video game. It only takes about 15 seconds of playing this small flash app to deeply appreciate it, though you might find yourself messing with it for much longer.
The staff at playthisthing.com, as always, does a professional job at describing what Storyteller about:
"Taking more pages from Braid than Storytron, Benmergui's Storyteller takes a vertical slice of causality and serves it up for ready manipulation. Instead of pushing a story forward from the perspective of a protagonist, acting in a linear, causal manner and then adapting to the changing flow, you play director and reader all in one. Simple click and drag a character to change their situation and relationships with the other characters. The combinations are quite interesting, and the play feels less like acting out a role and more like puzzling through quantum physics."
This game brings to a light the relationship between narrative and simulation. While interpreting Storyteller as a deconstruction of the fairy tale, just think of what it would have taken to narrate this idea.
The emergence of meaning in this game is what's profound here. While some of the gameplay still means something violent, the gameplay as a whole gives us a small glimpse into the future of a medium capable of being about what stories are about.
