Hi, my name is Raphael and I built this thing. Why? Because I'm a developer who always wanted to be a writer, and building Untell was the only way to reconcile these two obsessions. Also, I really, REALLY wanted something like this to exist in the world. I looked everywhere but just couldn't find it.

In this post I'll try to explain how Untell came to be, how a certain video game absolutely broke my brain in the best possible way, and what I genuinely hope this project becomes for lovers of interactive fiction.

What is Untell?

Untell is two things at once: a marketplace where readers discover and experience interactive fiction, and an engine where creators can build these stories. Not just branching text and "choose A or B" — writers can layer in voiceovers, soundscapes, images, conditions, and any level of interactivity they want, from a story with a single meaningful choice to something that feels closer to a living world. And if your story is good enough to charge for, that option is there too.

Yeah, but why?

Interactive fiction has been around for decades, but never remotely close to its potential. I think it deserves more. Way more. It deserves to be taken seriously as a form, as an art medium, because most people have never experienced what it can do to a reader: things linear storytelling simply cannot. Untell exists to fix that, by giving writers every tool necessary to push this form as far as it can go.

The alternatives exist. They just feel like they were built for a different era, for a different reader. Most of them treat interactivity as a symbolic gesture: a fork in the road that leads to the same place regardless of which path you take, but now your character has blue eyes instead of green (👍). The ones that go further require you to learn something that is essentially a programming language before writing a single sentence. And none of them is addressing the fact that human attention in 2026 is the most competed-for thing on the planet. If interactive fiction is going to survive that competition, it needs to actually earn its place. That is what Untell is trying to do.

Disco Elysium

What's this funny combination of words, you might ask.

I am not a gamer, and yet, Disco Elysium rewired my brain in a way I am still processing. I am genuinely not the same person I was before playing it.

It is peak interactive fiction. Yes, it is technically a game, but its traditional game elements are not what makes it extraordinary. What makes it extraordinary is the writing, and the way the player doesn't just read the story but actively builds its moments through questions and choices. You are not playing a character. You are assembling one.

And it is not only the writing that makes it what it is. The soundtrack, the voice acting, the images, all of it works together to create something that feels total. Disco Elysium understood that a story experienced through multiple senses hits differently than one experienced through words alone. That is why Untell aims to give creators the tools to build exactly that, voiceovers, soundscapes, images, conditions. Not as decoration. As storytelling.

This game was the final trigger. The moment I finished it I knew I was going to build Untell. Not someday. Immediately.

Anyone who looks at the reading experience in Untell will notice the inspiration instantly. I "borrowed heavily" (read: tried to copy it) from Disco Elysium's design choices and I have absolutely no problem admitting that. Genius deserves to be learned from.

Expectations: none. Hope: quite a lot.

I am a single developer building this after work, every day. No team, no funding. Just me and a laptop.

I have no expectations. I know how the internet works. On the other hand, my hope is quite a lot. Sometimes I daydream about a new kind of Kindle that supports Untell interactive stories. That would be great, actually, but there's a small chance this won't happen.

In practical terms: I am just thinking about the first few users and the first stories, and then we go from there. There is a roadmap, and there are still important features missing, but if users show up, their requests become the roadmap.