Creepy Tale Review (PC Game, 2020)
Creepy Tale is a short horror adventure game with a vintage storybook aesthetic. You are out with your brother foraging mushrooms. You discover a a lovely cottage in the middle of the woods. Your brother decides to investigate and gets kidnapped by a giant monster with huge glowing eyes. Now you need to save your brother from the dark secrets of the woods.
Creepy Tale is a throwback adventure game in three chapters. Each chapter consists of two or three episodes with their own intricate puzzles to solve and mysteries to uncover. You might need to find a button from your brother’s coat hidden in a pile of leaves before you can deal with a ritualistic sacrifice in front of an impenetrable stone wall, or find just the right dream through a rotating clotheslines of dreamcatchers in an otherwise abandoned cottage. There’s a logic to the puzzles, but nothing is ever quite as it seems.
The big strength of Creepy Tale is the aesthetic. This game looks like the inky woodcuts of a Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale collection brought to life. The world is cast in shades of greys and browns, only disrupted by the encroaching influence of almost neon lights representing magic. The world does not yield easily to your touch, but it does eventually open up its sublime and terrifying secrets to you.
The puzzles in the game can be quite hard. Everything is laid out for you to figure out, but there are very few obvious clues of what to do. The biggest advice I can give is look at and touch everything you can. The clue you need might be the specific order of colors in a painting on the opposite side of a house that tells you which mushroom to grab from over a dozen sitting on a table. You might realize immediately what you must do, but the world has its own idea of what order and reason means.
Essentially, Creepy Tale is the story of a young boy struggling to learn a specific variety of witchcraft with no training or guidance. It is an ancient magic built on a profound understanding of a world you know nothing about. Its language is suggestion. Nothing will work without intention and even physically manifesting your intention will not guarantee you know how to brew a potion or satisfy the demands of the followers who live in this world.
The further you go in the story, the darker and more disturbing it becomes. There are moments in this game that chilled me to the bone. The story is told with no dialogue or narration, only visuals and titled chapter markers, and the true nature of what’s happening is up to interpretation. Even when you think you have something figured out, a new episode reveals a new layer to the story that can change everything.
Creepy Tale is a short and challenging adventure game with a great aesthetic. Perhaps the biggest drawback is the lack of clear guidance. There are puzzles I struggled with and I’ve been playing this style of adventure game since the early 90s (and its text-based predecessors before then). Fortunately, there is no permanent game over screen. If you make a mistake, you’ll respawn with the items you’ve collected and unfinished puzzles reset. You might even start to force a respawn just to have an easier time getting past a particularly challenging stealth or platforming section. Experienced adventure gamers will find rich world to explore with a unique style of horror. Newer players might want to keep an online walkthrough handy just in case.
Creepy Tale is available on PC, Mac, Linux, and Nintendo Switch.
