Can you be gay in Storyteller?
Annapurna Interactive’s Storyteller has been a major brain teaser since its release, one that we didn’t want to put down. It helps that there may even be something a (spoilers!) little gay about it.
The premise of Storyteller is a simple one. You, the illustrious storyteller that you are, have cracked open the book and must go through paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, detailing the events that occur. It’s a lot of fun, and great for writers and gamers who love a good story.
Each chapter has a specific title card or genre in mind, such as ‘Two Weddings and One Death,’ which gives you an idea of what narrative tale you’ll be telling. You’ll then be given characters and background settings, the building blocks necessary for curating your tale.
With all this in mind, there is one specific question that has yet to be answered: can you be gay in Storyteller, and if the answer is yes, in what way does it matter?
Can you be gay in Storyteller?
Despite Storyteller having many chapters relating to age-old classic tropes and stories, such as Romeo and Juliet and Dracula, it is still very much possible to play it gay.
As mentioned above, you’ll always get given a title card and building blocks to meet the criteria set with each chapter. This can be as something as small as ‘Happily Ever After,’ where you can pair two women or two men together, or a complex but fulfilling title card like ‘Love After Death,’ where you can have a man and a woman marry, only for the woman to die. Then the man finds love with another man instead. This is just one example, but there are many chapters where you can tell a love story between two men and two women.
However, there are some harmful stereotypes involved in one instance. For example, there is a chapter that conveys a dwarf character being turned into a frog alongside his friend, a princess. Both of these characters are established as being friends of the prince, another character that is part of the tale. While none of this is problematic in itself, you are supposed to trick the prince into kissing the dwarf by convincing him he’s saving the princess instead. It’s messy.
You also can’t transform classic literature into much more queer-inclusive tales as we previously thought, which is a bummer but understandable.
Overall there is something to be found and even enjoyed by queer gamers in Storyteller, but ultimately the game is much more rewarding for those who go in there to have fun and enjoy puzzles.
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