Devolver Digital and No Code’s atmospheric horror game, Stories Untold, was a sleeper-hit when it released back in 2017 on PC, mostly thanks to it being a honey pot for the big Let’s Play YouTubers. Fast forward to 2020 and Devolver Digital and No Code decided to port over Stories Untold to the Nintendo Switch. The game, featuring four different slow-burn episodes of horror, will be available on the little Switch that could starting January 16th.

The game is a new-school throwback to old text-typing horror titles of old. Each episode hearkens back to a style of play on PC games from the 1980s, including an old horror-house story that requires manually investigating every room and every corner of the house by typing out the commands, very much like the old Zork or Hugo’s House of Horror titles.

A lot of the gameplay mechanics remind me of the Five Nights At Freddy’s titles, where you’re trapped in a single location and your task is to figure out what’s going on and how to solve what’s happening.

In another one of the episodes you have to follow the esoteric instructions to start up experimental equipment to run tests on an SCP-tier entity.

The four episodes contained within Stories Untold require time, patience, and some serious investment from the player.

Since the whole text-typing aspect would be a serious hurdle for Switch owners to overcome, they replaced the requirement to type out commands by having players select from a predefined number of options. I don’t know how well that’s going to work for one of the game’s selling points: the appeal to discovery.

When the options are laid out for you then it kind of diminishes any need for players to fiddle and fumble around with typing out different possibilities. Then again, maybe for people who don’t like that kind of emergent gameplay having the ability to select from predefined options might make the experience more enjoyable.

Anyway, you can look to get your hands on Stories Untold starting January 16th.