The StoryTale Reviews

It's such a sweet and kind game. Graphics and animations are really good, you can see it for yourself. Player movement is very well made, the narrative is interesting. The core game mechanic is... changing mechanics all the time! Very cool idea (and I'm a big fan of unusual ideas in gameplay). For example, you can be invincible, or slow down time. You don't have a direct control to switch mechanic, you have to work with what designers gave you. The game is still in Early Access, and I accidentally broke my keyboard layout, developer helped me to solve my problems. I'm sure such small problems will be fixed upon release.

Good so far. Lovely retro platformer with a twist - different abilities of prince and princess.

The narrative and art style are good, but the camera is the worst I ever encountered. It's so zoomed in, combine it with twitchy, high-speed gameplay and high jumps, and you have a lot of situations where the camera is your main enemy. I have a feeling, that the Prince levels don't actually teach you about new mechanics. Instead, they simply serve as relaxing time when you are invincible and bash through enemies; considering this, wouldn't it be better if they were designed to be more fun rather than just easy? Also the difficulty curve for the Princess levels is kinda unpleasant. There are leves with save points next to each other and sometimes you have to overcome a lot of enemies and spikes to get to the next save. I found 10 and 14 especially hard, considering these levels are at the very beginning of the game. Currently I am stuck at 28, which features gameplay that involves falling down 1-2 screens onto pit, filled by enemies, while being blindfolded by the camera. Like there's no skill involved, only luck or memorizing that very pixel you must land onto. That's just unfair in my opinion. Of course, there is a bright side. I liked the mini-quests and the consequences of completing them. Never encountered anything like this. Although you can skip them by accident and won't be able to return. As for now I find the game somewhat pleasant, but too frustrating for me to play. I'm not a Super Meatboy master, I enjoy N++ more. Nevertheless, I want to play this game and learn how to navigate and how to overcome dangers, but at this point (level 28) it just f*cks me up instead of teaching. I feel the fun is somewhere there, all these weapons and spells, but I just can't get there. Normally I'm not leaving a thumbs up in cases like this, but I do now in hope you can fix everything that needs to be fixed. I'll check this game once again on release and give a final review, positive or negative, based on the state the game.

I bought this game mainly for the art style, and I wanted something calming and fun to play after the rage inducing game I played before it. And let me tell you, THIS GAME IS INCREDIBLE! It's so much fun, the story is fun, and with how simple the play style it, it actually makes it really challenging. But that kind of challenging where when you beat the level, you feel amazing. I 100% recommend this game, and give it 11/10. Can't wait for more games from this company, I will gladly purchase more.

This game is actually pretty good. Albeit amateurishly designed and clunky in a lot of small, weird ways. For starters, the game starts up in full Russian. The devs apparently didn't read [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/localization]this[/url]. Yeah, you can grab the user's region via Steam. Automagically. Anyways, I had to manually change the language to English. That's not good UX because you can't reasonably expect a non-speaker of Russian to know that the word for "Russian" in Russian is "русский". The menu is passable, the narration is decent, the art and sound design are good. I'm not sure if there are supposed to be more difficulties than just "very easy" and "normal", but the latter is the hardest difficulty the game would let me select, and it's still easy. The gameplay is where it gets especially weird. So, the platforming aspect is polished and clearly had a lot of work put into it. I never felt like the game was being cheap or broken. It's not as tight as Celeste, but it [i]is[/i] tight. The weird part is in the game [i]mechanics[/i], which constantly, disorientingly change on you. In one level, time will freeze while you're not moving. It'll tell you that you can reverse time by holding the triggers or action button, but nothing of the sort happens when you do so. Time just moves without you moving. I assume this was a mistranslation. Anyways, you have that, and then in the next level, you're playing as a character who can't die. Then you're playing as a giant, then you're back to normal. Chests will open with one key, but then suddenly take multiple keys. It keeps on adding these game mechanics that it forgets about immediately. The mechanics are at least interesting, though, and it looks like they do come back eventually. I also think the chest mechanic is just lazy level design. They're literally hiding the key to the end of the level behind a lock, that requires another key, which itself is hidden behind a lock, and this is copy/pasted three times per level. The levels aren't interesting enough to warrant this kind of backtracking, and even if they were, you can surely come up with something less contrived than "get a key to unlock a chest to get a key to unlock a chest to get a key...". I used to design levels like that when I was playing Üz 3.0 when I was less than 10 years old. Surely you can design better levels than a child. Anyways, there are some irritating aspects to this game, but I still think it's worth playing. Get it on sale. Edit: after playing more, I've sort of changed my mind about this game. I strongly dislike it now. I still think it's worth playing, [b]but only the first 30 or so levels[/b]*. This game is extremely repetitive, and the further you go, the worse it gets. The level design makes no sense and all the little problems mentioned earlier compound on themselves [i]really[/i] fast once the level design really starts trying to be "difficult". Problem with that is that it's not difficult--it's just tedious, boring and un-fun. I thought these things would improve as you go through the game, but nope. I'll still keep the recommended rating, because if you [i]really really[/i] like the first 20 levels of the game, then you'll probably like the other 50 despite how repetitive they are. But as for me, I'm never touching this game again. [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1873612739]Forcing achievements[/url] and hiding from my account.

Cute and stylish fast-paced platformer, a lot of interesting (but somewhat unpolished) mechanics mixed together, but I'll wait till full release to see how well they are gonna be stiched together (with some actual story maybe). Right now it's a good timekiller though

Fun friendly game for casual players, especially kid friendly so even kids can play them. But has a mode that makes it remotely unfair for people that wanted a challenge like myself. I love challenges, but dont like the idea to place monsters in places where its near impossible to get through. Please set the monsters right so players can actually get by. Some of them even blocks the way and the powers you have are sometimes unreliable in some cases. I tried to tolerate all the way to level 50 and finally decide to say "Enough is enough". Great game overall though, just dont try the challenge mode, pick the easy mode so all monsters would be removed so it wont get in a way of your fun time with the story. Recommend this for casuals, I dont really recommend this to challengers unless you are a masochist or dangerously skillful, then go right ahead.

Quite hard to enjoy. Some things happen you wonder if its feature or bug. Overall its very unpolished. It's cheap enough that you can throw your money into the ocean and try it out. I admit the pixel graphics is appealing, but it didn't grasp me the same way with its gameplay. Though for the price it's expected...

What can I say about this platformer? It's not bad in it's current state and has potential to become even better after the early access. Pros: - cute pixel art - adorable characters - Ukrainian localization Cons: - characters slip off the edges - some quests are not obvious enough

Family friendly pixel game, delivering family friendly pixel suffering to you. Super meatboy style, but without any blood. Like it? Jump right into. Got some really fancy ideas in it. Like enemies can get tired of you dying on them and fall to sleep, start eating or do other goblin stuff, that will help you a bit. I once stopped time with an arrow just pixel close to my face, and that princess lady kicked it away herself after a second :) Or like if you do some side quest (like deliver some stuff to a local npc) some enemies on the level will become friendly. And i saw a goblin getting too close to an exit portal and it was dragged in :) Oh wait, yeah - this game is as family friendly as one can get, but after about 15 levels it becomes clear that some really dark fantasy stuff is going on.