@Nightgaunt said this game needed a thread! I am the best at making threads for games I own and haven’t played! I apparently own it since January! So here we go!
I grabbed it sometime this year and have played it a few times. It hasn’t totally drawn me in but mostly because it does have a lot of reading and I’ve tried at the end of the day when I didn’t have the energy to really dig in. But once it hooks you I’m expecting to really dig it and the story.
Thanks, @lordkosc! As much as I didn’t want to start a thread, I have played for a couple hours and I think there’s a lot to like. It is a lot of reading, and in comparison to other text-driven games of last year (Teenage Exocolonist, Pentiment, and Citizen Sleeper), I think the author is a little less disciplined about length. So there are tedious parts, and I think that unfortunately includes the opening conversations at the first outpost–if it were me, I would have made these (and almost all the text) a little more streamlined.
But that doesn’t change that the world is carefully and fascinatingly drawn. (By which I mean in the prose, although I really love the artwork as well!) The game really does demonstrate a fruitful and unusual trade-off for an RPG in going deep rather than wide. One of many reasons I think it owes a lot to Disco Elysium–as do those other games I mentioned earlier).
Okay okay, I should just dive back in soon. Just a little surprised there’s no one who has already done so.
Played this through and loved it. It feels like a game that might have been made 30 years ago, but has really generous accessibility and bookmarking features to keep the game from getting frustrating.
The time limit mentioned earlier is generous and it’s very possible to see the whole game without hitting it. This is a traveling/expedition game, like Sunless Sea or Vagrus, so a big part of the game is weighing resource use against the narratives you can progress by visiting different locations (“If I bring this to the witch, I’ll pass through this hamlet and can also press the innkeeper about why he lied to me”). The time limit makes things more interesting than just fast traveling everywhere to knock out quests one at a time.
It’s also an impressive solo developer game, with one person doing all the coding, writing, and art.
Yeah, easy recommend for people who liked Disco Elysium. The premises are surprisingly similar, too – you’re an agent of the state visiting an abandoned region with people who reject your authority, and the goal is to get these communities to trust you.
I played the intro + path to the first major settlement and liked what I saw. Other games derailed me completely but I still plan on returning to this.
I like how you are basically given a very brief lay of the land and the major movers and shakers right off the bat to set some expectations, and when you move from the “Friendly Arm Inn” to the next spot there are lots of challenges and mysteries.
I’ll probably have to start a new game just because it’s been too long since.
It’s a neat little game. I would love it on mobile. Bound to a laptop or event the deck I haven’t gone all the way through.
A major update went out last month that expands the ending options, and gives more controls over the game’s difficulty.
Great time to try out this mini-RPG if you missed it the first time. Only $10! Has a generous demo!
The prequel (a remaster of the dev’s first game) also released recently:
I haven’t had a chance to try it, but I’m reading good things about it, at least in terms of the story.
In theory, I like these games a lot. When I do play them, I tend to play them for 30 minutes, and then go do something else, and never return to them.
Its a shame - But the gameplay is a mite old for me I guess. I do buy them though!
I looked at the store page, but I’m sort of wary because the font is one of those pseudo retro ones I don’t enjoy fatiguing my eyes upon. I’ll try the demo, but past 8 bits personal computers and some horrible misguided games (ah, Darklands!), text games made every effort to be pleasing to the human eye.
I’ve finally been playing this game through after hitting a stride. Approaching the end AKA I have like 13 days left.
The kicker for me at the start was prioritizing uncovering the loop that is the map as soon as possible. Like I would say within the first 5 days, which is easily done. After that, it’s all route/time management, and since you’ve established all the rest stops, forage locations, rivers to wash in…nothing is really a problem. So it’s just like riding the “Yamanote” with the occasional “Chou” line through the middle…to gather information and clear the quests!
Not sure how I feel about this game in general, as the game IS literally all text. Often times walls of it. No character avatar. No images of NPCs or monsters at all. Nothing. Just pictures of landscapes, villages. That’s it! And yet I still have other images in my head.
I went stock fighter and mostly choose hide emotion in dialog / and I fought and killed all the things. My character’s religion was path of freedom with my personal goal to escape my past!
Easily another 7 out of 10 but if you loath reading your games it’s definitely a -10 out of 10.