Featured Image Credit: Secret Mode
Topics: Reviews, Indie Games, PC, Steam, Nintendo Switch
Perplexing is how I’d best describe A Storied Life: Tabitha. What is, on paper, a wonderfully inventive premise somehow loses its potential for potent sentimentality as it becomes torn between two varying identities. While part of A Storied Life: Tabitha wishes to hand total autonomy over to the player in the shaping of Tabitha’s life, the rest demands a specific solution resulting in an experience that requires a second playthrough if you’re to get the emotional payoff you seek.
Developed by Lab42, A Storied Life: Tabitha is a cosy narrative puzzle game about the items we leave behind. You step into the shoes of an individual clearing out the home of a recently passed loved one, Tabitha. It’s up to the player to determine how Tabitha’s life played out. In each room of her home, players will save, sell, and discard items, with the saved items shaping passages of Tabitha’s memoir.
A Storied Life: Tabitha is beautifully presented; there’s no doubting that. Lab42 has crafted a charming little home for the titular character, and it’s a great joy rummaging through it, unlocking cupboards and shifting furniture out of the way as you search for all of Tabitha’s leftover belongings. When you find an item, you’ll then need to drag it into a recycling bin, put it up for auction, or put it within a packing box.
Those that enter the recycling bin are never to be seen again. Those that are put up for auction are done so with the hope being that you can afford a nice holiday by the end of the game. You can only sell a couple of items per chapter, so you’re going to want to pick what you believe will make the most money. Finally, you’ll be able to pack up a limited number of items to keep. This is where a key aspect of the game’s puzzling element comes into play.
The box essentially comprises a grid and in a Tetris-like manner, you’ll need to fit the items together you wish to keep like puzzle pieces within the confines of the box. There are a couple of other elements to consider, namely the box's weight and whether it contains any fragile items. Throughout the experience, players will unearth tape, envelopes, vacuum bags, and bubble wrap. Tape will reinforce the box, permitting you to increase the weight it carries. Bubble wrap is required to ensure breakable items don’t, well, break. Finally, envelopes and vacuum bags can reduce the space taken up by soft and foldable items.
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It’s difficult to fault any of this. All of the systems work really well and it felt like the perfect level of challenge for a low-key cosy title such as this. It’s not always easy to pack all of the items you wish to keep but, of course, players will need to figure out how to do so if they want to best inform the next section of Tabitha’s memoir. It’s that segment of the game, however, that left me feeling a little underwhelmed.
As I said, the items you keep will determine how Tabitha’s life played out. At the end of each chapter, you’ll unlock a new passage with blanked out words. The items you kept in that particular chapter will unlock related words that you can then use to fill in the blanks. It’s a nice idea in theory but in execution, it can become a muddled mess.
A Storied Life: Tabitha presents itself as if you have total control over who Tabitha was. It offers the impression that you can curate a selection of items of your own choosing. Perhaps a copy of Pride and Prejudice, a house plant, and a family photo are what you choose to keep from the living room in an attempt to show several facets of Tabitha’s life. The problem is that items within A Storied Life: Tabitha are quietly categorised and the more eclectic you are, there’s a high chance Tabitha’s memoir won’t make an ounce of sense.
This became apparent in early chapters where my item choices lead to some rather weird segues where Tabitha would go from talking about her horticultural and writing careers within the same sentence when clearly only one was intended to exist. In later chapters, I had to fill in blanks where none of the four available word options from the items I’d picked even made grammatical sense. I hoped to feel a certain level of catharsis by the story’s end. This should be a tale of grief, love, and sentimentality, but Tabitha’s memoir was so wildly jumbled that it unfortunately lacked any such feeling.
It was no surprise to me that by the game’s end, I’d received a letter from a publisher rejecting Tabitha’s memoir as it was too disorderly. The game prompted me to play again in a bid to try and unlock an alternative ending, so I did. On my second playthough, I was a lot more methodical in my item selection. You see, if you want Tabitha’s memoir to make an ounce of sense, you’re going to have to commit to quite a rigid picture of her life.
Perhaps you proceed through collecting all of the medical related items, depicting a lifetime dedicated to helping others. You may choose to focus exclusively on family photos, with Tabitha’s memoir recounting her years as a wife, mother, and grandmother. There are also zany arcane items the player can focus on if you’d prefer to depict Tabitha as someone a little more unusual than most. Narratively, this vastly improved the experience and yet, it somehow removed the heart. It felt less like I could shape every facet of Tabitha’s life and more as if from the get-go, I had to determine one limiting life path.
A Storied Life: Tabitha offers a formula that unfortunately should work better than it does in practice. Players become stuck between creatively crafting Tabitha’s life only to end up with a nonsensical outcome or adhering to a rigid, predetermined path, resulting in a better ending but less joyous experience. Even still, there are some delightful puzzling elements within this short, bite-sized experience that is really exquisitely presented. I enjoyed A Storied Life: Tabitha despite its shortcomings, but it didn’t tug on the heartstrings as I perhaps expected it might.
Pros: Beautifully presented, packing items and searching rooms is fun, charming soundtrack
Cons: Story is nonsensical unless you remove player agency and select specific items which limits enjoyment
For fans of: A Little To The Left, Unpacking
A Storied Life: Tabitha launches on 14 April on PC (version tested) and Nintendo Switch 2. A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.