Intro
Annie here!
This one is a sweet one. A Storied Life is a great game for folks who miss Unpacking, but it's got a little extra something up its sleeve.
Review
A Storied Life is a casual game in which you put in charge of cleaning out a loved one's home after their death. Your job is to keep, sell, and recycle items according to your judgement; but every item has the potential to change the way the story unfolds.
This game adds a couple extra mechanics to up the stakes and the player's impact on the story. One of these is the memoir. Throughout the game, levels are interspersed with memoir puzzles in which you must fill in the blanks (Mad Libs-style) of Ms. Kettlebell's memoir using words chosen based on the items you kept. This means that, based on your choices, her legacy might be that she deeply loved a walk with her husband, (if you kept a family photo) or it might be that she plotted a curse with her spellbook. (if you kept a mysterious talisman) A lot can change, huh?
I also enjoyed the gameplay mechanic of auctioning items. It was a fun challenge to try and guess which items were valuable, and it has real bearing on the game as well, because you can use some of the profits to buy packing supplies.
Final Thoughts
If you like games like Unpacking that tell a story through gameplay, and you also like fun, casual mechanics that provide just a bit of challenge, and you also like stories that branch off in interesting ways, I think you'll like this game!
It does have a weird system where hovering over items for a time selects them (like on the Kinect, if you can remember that) which I don't love, but the game came out yesterday as of writing this so who knows what might change!
I played the demo, which I'd recommend, but I already know that the full game is worth $17.54 in my eyes.
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