A Storied Life: Tabitha Review

A Storied Life: Tabitha is a 2026 puzzle game developed by Lab42 and to be released by Secret Mode. Soozi Q wrote about her impressions of playing the demo here.

In A Storied Life: Tabitha, we are packing away Tabitha’s estate while completing her soon-to-be-published memoirs, uncovering secrets and remembering a life well lived in the process.

A Storied Life: Tabitha is a narrative puzzle game about the objects we leave behind and the stories they tell about us. The game combines two genres – on one hand we have a sorting puzzle, where we save, sell and recycle items, while putting them into boxes, making sure they fit; on the other hand we have an investigative game, where the items we save create prompts we use to fill out Tabitha’s memoir, either following certain pre-determinated story strands, or writing an entirely new tale.

The game is structured into chapters, each chapter centered around a room in Tabitha’s cozy house. We need to move furniture around, open cupboards, and generally look into every nook and cranny, because important bits like letters, drawings, and such can sometimes appear beneath something else.

We sort everything we find into three categories: recycle, sell, and save. Early on, it becomes apparent that you can’t save everything. Items you put for sale don’t sell immediately. They are auctioned off, and their value rises with time. The total is revealed by the end of the game. Also, each chapter has a set number of items we can sell, so some things that seem of value might still end up in the recycle bin.

Saving items is a bit more complex than the auction mechanic. The save box is actually a grid puzzle, so we need to rotate, arrange, and even shrink items to fit as many matching items as we can. Some items are color-coded or have a specific pattern. Matching items generate matching prompts in the same storyline.

There’s a dot pattern on the top left of the packing box for saved items. Each item has a corresponding dot pattern visible next to its name. If we look for items with the same dot pattern, we are sure to get prompts of the same storyline. Of course, you can do what I did and completely ignore the patterns, creating a brand new story. Besides fitting the items into the box’s grid, the saved box has one more limitation: weight in “Story mode”. However, if we choose to play in “Relaxed mode”, there are no weight restrictions.

As the game progresses, we get different packing materials – bubble wrap, scotch tape, and so on, to ensure whatever we’ve chosen to save actually survives the trip.

After completing a chapter, players can restart it at any time to try new combinations of items and prompts.

The second part of the game uses the prompts mentioned above. Once we are done sorting and unpacking the “saved” items box, we get information about some of the items, then go to Tabitha’s journal. Each item generates four prompt words, which are color-coded to indicate where we need to fill them in. On one side of the screen, we can see the items with the words, and on the other, a short text with missing words, which need to be filled in.

Each item generates different words, so multiple playthroughs help uncover all endings in A Storied Life: Tabitha. The first playthrough takes about 2 hours; finding all Tabitha’s secrets takes 8 to 12 hours.

Besides the clean and intuitive game mechanics, A Storied Life: Tabitha is simply gorgeous to look at. It’s done with a lot of attention to detail, in a hand-drawn art style, with clean lines and a cozy color palette. The soundtrack fits well with the rest of the game.

A Storied Life: Tabitha has Steam achievements, but no Trading cards yet. The game still has its demo up on the Steam page. In terms of settings, we have the usual audio and video settings, as well as accessibility settings, including a very helpful dyslexia font.

A Storied Life: Tabitha is, without a doubt, a charming game, even with its somewhat heavy subject. While part of life, the topic of death and what we leave behind is never easy. Still, the game manages the topic with grace. It turns something heartbreaking into something positive, showing that we always leave something behind in the relationships we forge and the people who love us.

If you are in the mood for a thoughtful and wholesome narrative puzzle game, I urge you to try A Storied Life: Tabitha. I think there’s no reason you won’t like it as much as I did.