A Twisted Tale is a point-and-click adventure game developed by solo developer Voodoo Bembel and released on Steam on 7 March 2024. The game has been launched in a Kickstarter campaign.
This is the first of 7 chapters in which Vio, the main character, will embark on a journey through different realms.
Our adventure in A Twisted Tale begins with Vio, a young woman who, after using a cube similar to Rubik’s, has been swallowed by a portal to another dimension. The new place where Vio has landed is made up of small islands floating in the sky. Here she meets some strange characters such as a grumpy fisherman trying to catch a bird, a tattoo artist terrified of needles and a cranky antique dealer.
Our goal is to use the cube to re-open the portal to our home, but the cube has been taken by the antique dealer, and now belongs to him. Without money, we must barter with the dealer to get the cube and get back home.
In A Twisted Tale we explore a small area, but there are still a lot of things to look for and the puzzles are not that easy, in fact the game takes about 5-7 hours to complete. There is no moon logic in the puzzles, but they are really tricky and sometimes difficult. Each line of dialogue can contain a hint to solve a puzzle, so you have to be very careful when Vio talks to a stranger or interacts with an object.
You can interact with a single click to see, grab or talk. There’s no hotspot view of interactable items, nor are there any hints. Just like old point and click adventures.
Decisions made during the game will affect the ending, and there will even be alternative endings. This feature will be revealed in the next chapters. Each chapter will be different, with a unique setting and characters.
A Twisted Tale is entirely hand-drawn, with full voice-over. The graphic design is good and polished. The animations have few frames, which makes them not so smooth. However, this doesn’t ruin the gameplay experience.
The sound has a trouble with the volume of the voices – some voices are louder than others. We hope that the developer will be able to fix this soon.
This first chapter stimulates our interest in the overall plot of the entire series. However, there is not much of a plot in this chapter, and there is a lack of strong characterisation of the protagonist. We know nothing about the protagonist’s past and not much about her traits emerges during the adventure.
We hope that in the next chapters there will be some interesting developments in Vio’s personality that will make us care not only about the puzzles, but also about the plot and the character.
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