YMMV / Stories Untold

• Broken Base: Whether or not it was a good idea that to have The Reveal that almost everything that happened in the first three episodes were all part of James' coma episodes. Some take issue with the plot itself and claim that it's nonsensical at worst and a Very Special Episode about drunk driving at best; and many complain that the final result creates Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, since it reworks all the earlier stories to be about James and his guilt, while also bizarrely absolving everyone except James for their part (ignoring that he was drunk or even encouraging him to drink) in causing the accident. But there are fans that praise the twist and feel it does hit on interesting themes for the rest of the game.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • James' story unraveled the second the police checked his blood alcohol, or asked his parents about the bottle they found. That's why his mother doesn't want to talk to him; it's even possible she remembers how drunk he was, and already figured out what happened. Truth in television for people trying to cover things up during Alcohol-Induced Idiocy, since drunk people come up with stories that won't fool anyone who's sober.
  • James probably wasn't as obviously drunk as he in in the flashback. It's his brain's last grasp at denial, at blaming Jen. And if he was, given how fast Jen fell asleep, she was too drunk or tired herself to notice until it was too late.
  • If Mum and Dad are publicly shamed for the accident, they might actually move out of town and leave the House Abandon. It might just become more than a metaphor.
  • The games require more and more effort, and become more and more realistic, as James comes closer to reality. The Station Process literally thrusts him into the world, and that's the only one without some sort of computer shenanigans^note Except for the unusually high-quality 1986 computer display.
  • Trying to figure out the commands for an old-school text adventure captures some of the feel of being drunk, and a scene dovetails the two in the final chapter. The machines in the second chapter are like trying to operate machinery and not being in control of one's body, and the third chapter is about trying to understand and communicate with others.
  • In the final chapter, a doctor forces James to admit that he killed his sister. Some say that this would be a serious breach of psychiatric ethics. But it's also entirely appropriate to the type of shows that inspired the game and James' coma dreams. Heck, given how trippy the sequence is, it's possible that the "doctor" is just another example of James' own dreaming mind trying to make him face the truth.
• Fridge Horror: James' dad bought the whiskey. He saw James was somewhat drunk and told him to drive anyway. He gave him the car. He's going to blame himself for the accident, and Mum might partially blame him. Between Mum not wanting to talk to James, Dad's self-loathing, James being in a coma and Jen's death, the Aition family is functionally destroyed.
• Jerkass Woobie: James is obviously a terrible person for leaving his sister to die just to save his own reputation but with him spending years in a coma being tormented by his own guilt of the incident, it's hard not to feel a little sorry for him, especially considering that the story pins the blame entirely on him, despite all evidence in Chapter 4 pointing to his family being just as at fault, if not more so, for putting him in that situation.
• Narm: In "The Last Session", it's revealed that James was involved in a car accident with a blue sudan. It was supposed to be spelled with an "e" and not a "u". Now it just looks like you ran over an entire country.
• Nightmare Fuel: All four of the stories.
  • The House Abandon: the fourth wall gets obliterated, and there's something outside your room.
  • The Lab Conduct: what is going on with the object you're testing? Why is it getting into your brain?
  • The Station Process: you're working at a numbers station, and, as ominous orders get relayed through you to seemingly launch missiles, you're losing contact with the outside world. And soon, with the other parts of the base...
  • The Last Session: You killed your sister. You can't avoid it.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The microfilm reader in The Station Process functions like an actual microfilm reader, which doesn't translate too well in game. Doesn't help there's no instructions for the thing, but it does have instructions for the transmitter. It's also required at one point so that the player can literally decode actual Morse code.
• Tear Jerker: Jennifer seems to really have loved James, from the minimal interactions we see of them together, so The Reveal that he'd rather leave her to die in the car accident to cover up his mistake rather than save her, especially when the game suggests it would have been very easy for him to do so can really get to you.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: More than one reviewer has complained that The Reveal, and the way it recontextualizes earlier events, sucks all the fun out of earlier parts, either by centering them around such a deeply unlikable character, removing all the fantastical and interesting vignettes and leaving behind only a depressingly realistic story.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: James garners this from a number of fans. While the story clearly intends for him to be completely unlikeable, the fact that it does so by completely absolving the many other equally-guilty parties of blame (as detailed under Unintentionally Unsympathetic below), and that James has been tormented by his doctor and his own unconscious mind for a long time while all the other parties get off scott-free, makes it hard not to feel at least a little bad for the guy. It also doesn't help that the event that the story tries to frame as his Moral Event Horizon- him choosing to frame the other driver instead of save his sister while he had the chance- was done in a state where he was by definition incapable of thinking rationally about his decisions, and yet the story, which had previously made a big deal about him being incapacitated by the alcohol, suddenly switches to treating him as if he was completely in his right mind.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Okay yes, James very clearly should not have been driving that night, and what he did caused a lot of pain and suffering, but from what we see in Chapter 4, the very fact that he was in that situation in the first place shows an absolutely disgusting lack of responsibility on the part of the rest of his family. His father gave him a bottle of extremely strong whiskey for his birthday, his family spent the entire party pressuring him into drinking more and more, and then they were either too drunk to notice that he was clearly in no fit state to drive himself and his sister home or else they did notice and just didn't care, to the point that at one point they- including the sister who later dies in the accident- outright demand that he get behind the wheel to drive her home, even as James protests that he shouldn't do so. And unlike James himself, who's spent years in a coma being tormented by his own guilt, it's highly doubtful that they will face any sort of legal responsibility for their actions. In particular, James' mom refuses to visit him in the hospital, implicitly blaming him for an accident that, by all rights, she actively helped push him into.^note It's possible she doesn't want to see him because she realizes it's partially her fault and can't look him in the face, or some combo of the two, or she blames herself entirely and thinks she failed both her kids.
  • There's also the matter of James's doctor. Again, what James did was awful, but the behavior of the doctor in the situation is outright horrifying to anyone with even a passing familiarity with medical ethics. Rather than doing anything to actually care for the patient under his charge, the doctor has deliberately allowed James to fall into psychosis for weeks, months, or even years, all out of a desire to provide evidence to the police for his own personal satisfaction. This man has violated the Hippocratic Oath dozens of times over, and yet the story treats him as being in the right.

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