It is, as I write this, one year to the day since I and two fellow, newly-orphaned siblings finished the process of auditing, packing, and clearing out our childhood home. The final task: enduring the fearsome rattling and suspect braking of our dad’s neglected Renault Megane, just long enough for it to sputter to someone mad enough to buy it off us. The irony, that this clanking full-stop on the end our bereavement’s lengthy administrative aspect could so feasibly kill me, was not lost.
That process, from the last beep of hospital machinery to the unhaggled exchange of French scrap metal, took 11 months, so it’s good that A Storied Life: Tabitha condenses its own house clearance to just a couple of hours. Posthumously asked by an elderly friend to give her cottage a tidy, you spend half your time in A Storied Life rummaging through her things in a kind of reverse Unpacking, selecting which bric-a-brac to throw away, which to keep, and which – with her blessings – to auction off for cash. The other half is spent taking inspiration from the objects you’ve kept to rewrite her water-damaged memoirs, a bittersweet series of word puzzles that still achieves a certain warmth – provided you can come to terms with the peculiar writing style.
At the very least, I enjoyed this a lot more than the early demo I played last year. That laid the logical issues of A Storied Life’s junk-into-words concept very bare indeed: there was no way of predicting the memoir material you’d get from any given object, even the ones with seemingly the most sentimental value, so progressing to the next room often meant being forced to write contradictory, sometimes grammatically criminal nonsense. She always LOVED her husband, did old Ms. Kettlewell. He was NEVER around for the childrens’ LABRATORY.
The finished game can still slip into this, to its detriment – in most contexts the Fridge Poetry gibberish might raise a laugh, but this is putting words in the mouth of the recently deceased. At the same time, ending up with a legible page-turner does feel a lot more doable than in that demo, with running out of ‘good’ words a rarer event. And, while this is achieved through further gameifying the process of item-packing, an approach I previously found uncomfortable in the narrow confines of a vertical slice, the addition of capital-M Mechanics is unexpectedly fitting in the full game.
It helps that you can simply replay each room you’ve cleared, so improving a duff chapter is just a case of rewinding and choosing to save different items. But the game also drops hints, without getting outright prescriptive, about which item combinations would make for a coherent story. Matching dot patterns on your cardboard box to the patterns on each item secures at least a broadly usable selection of nouns and adverbs, and finding multiple items with a matching theme – gardening gear, say, or keepsakes from a lost husband – will produce more sensible-sounding word combos.
I accept that this is the exact kind of right choice/wrong choice gameyness I needled the preview for. Again, though, it makes more sense here, particularly as the game’s replay-happy structure encourages a mental recalibration. I’d previously assumed that A Storied Life’s dearly departed pensioner was a fixed character, one whose memory I’d betray with every goofy word jumble; it’s more accurate to say that her personality and history are player-defined on the fly, such is the breadth of tales that can be told through her eclectic trinkets. She can be a loving wife and a doting grandmother. She can be a careerist horticultural genius. She can be an aspiring witch. She can be a fraudster who may have bashed a blackmailer’s head in with a hammer. All are canon, and none are, and as much as it stings to knowingly, reluctantly scribble in a grammatical error, it’s not betraying a memory. It’s just that this memory might be different to the one you invent on the next playthrough.
This open-endedness wouldn’t be possible if A Storied Life didn’t fill its house with interesting bits. Much of the interactables are just junk – filler items that will end up in the recycling box even on a fourth or fifth playthrough – but there’s plenty that will tickle the imagination, from occultish wall hangings to old medals to a photo with a scratched-out face. Since this is ultimately about spinning your own stories, you’re never fed clarity on the more curious possessions, though this does avoid being overly insistent on your subject’s life in ways that could undermine the characterisation you’re following. Maybe the dry red matter on the hammer really is just rust.
It’s also easygoing as a puzzler. The only waft of challenge comes when your desire to save as many mementos as possible bumps into the paltry capacity of your sole box, cramming wooden ducks and chess boards into the tiny grid layout like you’re stuffing JC Denton’s pockets. Once victorious at Cardboard Tetris, you still need to make sure any breakables are bubble wrapped – lest they smash and fill your memoir screen with undesirable words – and that an especially heavy box is reinforced, both of which deplete your pile of packing supplies. Running out, however, never feels like a serious concern. Tape and bubble wrap are replenished from Ms. Kettlewell’s own cupboards, and you’ll soon gain a ‘budget’ that can easily and instantly cover most unmet supply needs. Auctioning, meanwhile, almost runs itself. Drop a vaguely valuable-looking item into the selling box for each room and the dosh rolls in passively.
It’s not dull, though. Also like Unpacking, A Storied Life trades in intimate, well-realised spaces where poking around brings gratification in itself, and not just because of the stories that its population of thingamajigs can tell. The nicely hand-drawn, SFX-heavy presentation does particularly well to balance the comforting familiarity of this largely unremarkable British abode – the pokiness of the kitchen, the soft creaks of cupboard doors, the low rustle of unfolding jumpers – with the melancholy of it outlasting the person who lived there. I’ll admit to hanging on the view of a few emptied rooms, quietly regarding the bookless shelves and the patches of discoloured wallpaper where a frame once hung, just as I once did for my own family home.
For this, it has my respect, and I don’t regret giving it my time. It just bears remembering, amid the dust, the quietness, and the boxes of unreliable memories, that the bookwriting values flexibility above the pursuit of a single, perfectly scribed chronicle.
