There’s a needlessly convoluted backstory; those wacky Satanists have taken over a town and summoned a nice murderous demon, I guess for the lulz. You’re a priest and you’re here to….
I’m not sure, actually. For all the words in the backstory, it’s remarkably short on motivation. “Bless all 12 holy crosses scattered throughout the town, and the demon will be sent back to hell.” Boom. Motivation. Fixed it. Just pretend it’s that.
The game takes a bit of getting used to. The engine it’s based on is clearly meant for an FPS, but it isn’t one. This is survival horror; there’s a monster running around out there, and if he gets you, game over.
Ah, this fucker
You have four vials of holy water that you’re going to be using to bless those crosses. You can throw one of them at the demon, but that’s stupid. Both the “bless” and “chuck” actions involve holding down the mouse button, and if you see this fucker bearing down on you, you do NOT have time for that cycle to complete. The game suggests that splashing it with holy water only stuns it for a moment anyway. And besides, if you throw a vial, now you’re down to three vials! Screw that!
There are only three things in the environment that matter: the monster, the crosses you need to activate, and the fonts of holy water you use to refill your vials. Everything else is just an obstacle, and cannot be interacted with.
The game tells you to pay careful attention to the sounds you hear, presumably because they’re important. Most of them are not. Grime & Gaslight is here to deliver jump scares, and surprise noises are one of its go-to tricks. I saw this coffin:
Ominous
Moments later, I heard a loud creaking noise from behind me. Oh, no! Something nasty was coming out of the coffin to come after me! Right?
I turned around.
Nope
Coffin was unchanged. Coffin is just decoration. It’s all just decoration, really.
Now, the running noises? The growling noises? Those are the noises you care about. Those are your cue to run for it.
Once you accept how dirt simple this game really is, it’s fine. Run around, find the crosses, bless the crosses, do it before the monster kills you.
It feels like there ought to be a stealth element here, but nah. Just leg it. That’s really your only trick.
This has the feel of a decent B-movie. It’s ultra low-budget, clearly, and raw as fuck in a lot of ways, but if you can get on it’s wavelength, there’s something to enjoy here.
It’s not for me; I prefer a little more meat on the bones than this, and got bored of the game fairly quickly. But I could see someone having fun approaching this as a puzzle to be solved. If getting chased around by a monster sounds like fun, give it a look.
What game will I run into the arms of next? C’mon, Random Number Generator. It’s been a while since you gave me one I really enjoyed. Hook a reviewer up here.
Page 10, Game 7: Headliner: NoviNews by Unbound Creations
“Award-winning adventure where you control the news and its impact on society, your friends and career.”
Hey, I’ve heard the media is this all-powerful entity that can warp the very fabric of reality with its whims. I could handle getting me some of that.
When strapping into a battlemech made out of spare meat and using it to punch the shit out of fascists has become tedious, something has gone horribly wrong.
EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER is a visual novel set in a world where something is very … wrong … and where Cronenbergian body-horror biotech has become so commonplace that folks think nothing of it when a farmer rolls into town strapped into a robot made of meat. For real, it’s like the dude’s just driving in on his tractor. Equally common are fascists, which infest both the town our heroes live in and the surrounding countryside.
In it, you’ll follow and direct the adventures of four marginalized people who also happen to be meat-mecha pilots as they try to find a safe place.
Every individual element of this game makes me want to love it. Every individual element of this game fails to land.
Let’s start with the biggest and most deal-breaking problem: mech combat. While all the interstitial stuff is presented as a visual novel (and follows that format so rigorously that the dev must be using some kind of canned tool), the game part of the game puts you into the fragrant, blood-stained seat of of a literal meat battlemech. Once there, you will do battle with fascists — it’s ALWAYS fascists — and punch them a lot.
Specifically, you will punch them off a cliff. There’s always a cliff, too. Good thing, because that’s the only way you can actually take somebody out of the fight.
Good mech combat should make you feel like a bad-ass. This made me bored and annoyed. You punch a dude, you knock him back. He punches you, you get knocked back. Punch him enough times and you get a status effect that stuns him a bit, so you’ll need to run back up to him — did I mention successful punches knock YOU back as well? — and try to nail him enough times to get him to that precious, precious cliff edge.
Every once in a while, a punch will land with such devastating force that it basically knocks one or both of you clear across the screen. I have absolutely no idea what triggers turbo-yeet mode; is it a timing thing? Random-number-generated critical? Whatever. It can end a fight in an instant.
Let the enshovening begin
Your four different pilots have different special powers. Since movement and positioning are THE critical concerns, that means you have two characters with movement-based special powers who are worth selecting and two others you can choose if the game forces you. Always, always, ALWAYS make sure to keep your opponents between you and one of the cliff edges, because if somebody suddenly gets launched, you want it to take you one step closer to ending this goddamn fight and not force you to start the fights all over again.
Ah, yes. As the game progresses, each action sequence consists of not one fight, but several strung together. Lose one and you’ll have to go back to to beginning, an unforgivable design decision that had me loudly cursing at my monitor several times.
These fights are NOT FUN. They’re tedious and unwelcome. Maneuver yourself so that when you punch the guy, it’ll push him towards the cliff. Punch the guy. Move back up to him. Punch him some more. Move back up. Punch some more.
Ever seen an American football game that’s degenerated into a “field position battle?” That’s what the announcers call it when the game has gotten so boring that they’d seriously rather just go home than keep watching. Home team gets a first down, and has to punt. Away team fails to get a first down, and has to punt. Home team gets another first down, and has to punt. Away team again fails to get a first down, and has to punt. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Home team will eventually kick a field goal, viewers at home will go do something else.
EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER somehow captures that back-and-forth-but-I’m-technically-making-more-progress-and-will-eventually-score tedium. WITH GIANT ROBOTS MADE OF MEAT. BEATING UP FASCISTS.
How can a concept that exciting lead to gameplay this dull?
There’s a “Skip battle” option when you die again. I did not press it. I won the game fueled by spite.
I think I might have started skipping the fights if the fiction had been more compelling, but the visual novel element of the game isn’t that good either. At least it’s concise; unlike some other bits of interactive fiction I’ve encountered, the author does not permit the prose to become hopelessly bogged in minutiae, so I can at least give them props for discipline. And I actually REALLY liked the ASCII-art backgrounds; I presume the dev’s budget didn’t allow for them to commission backgrounds that were of the same quality level as the character avatars, so rather than use canned assets that would be questionably appropriate, they simply cranked the dial all the way in the opposite direction. I was into it.
Raise a glass to clever minimalism
But the worldbuilding is sloppy as hell. There’s no sun, but that characters refer to day/night cycles and some of the interstitial images are clearly showing light and dark skies. Does this Mean Something, or is the author just sloppy? Turns out it DOES Mean Something, but I’m still not sure what. The discrepancy doesn’t even get acknowledged until Chapter 5 (out of 6). There’s no sense of place, of context. Okay, we’re driving meatmonsters, there’s no sun, and fascists are everywhere. Also, televised sportsball is a thing, and so are bars and small towns and churches. So, it’s just like our world, except for when the game needs it not to be?
The main characters you follow are a mixed bag. (Which one are you? None of ’em. You’re a kind of godlike entity directing the story. At any given moment, you could be deciding which choice any of the characters will make, and which character you’d like to follow. It’s a valid design choice, but it comes at the expense of immersion; I would sincerely have preferred to step into a single character’s shoes.) The casting here is hyper-consciously woke, to a degree that I actually found intrusive. I don’t feel like “LGBTQ” is supposed to be treated as a checklist.
It actually hit the level of self-parody after the Final Boss Battle, when the triumphant character announced “Betcha didn’t think you’d get beat by someone who’s [marginalized_identity_1], [marginalized_identity_2], and JEWISH!” Really? Are we actually firing-up the Oppression Olympics at the last minute and seeing how high we can score? Take THAT, fascism!
And I’m seriously wondering — would ANY of my characters have made that announcement? They could have. Being Jewish didn’t seem to matter for the character in question up until that point. You could have followed the exact same pattern for any of them, just need to swap out some adjectives:
“Black, gay, and JEWISH!”
“Transgender, bisexual, and JEWISH!”
“Disabled, lesbian, and JEWISH!”
“Asexual, agender, and JEWISH!”
Maybe they are all canonically Jewish. You’d think it would have come up. Oy vey.
I did at least like most of the characters, except for one: the disabled lesbian girl’s identity is best summarized as “Jerkass.” It did not take me long to get fed up with her bullshit. This hit its apex when the transgendered character confronted her over interacting with him in a way that was invalidating to his gender presentation. Disabled Jerkass got so shitty with him that it ACTUALLY ENDED IN A FIGHT.
Look, I’m a cis het white dude pushing fifty. I am not the most woke motherfucker out there; on a good day, I’m like 70th Percentile Woke, tops. I do my best, but Get Out was seriously making fun of white people like me (though with a bit more wealth and murder). But even I know that if your response to getting called-out by a trans dude for invalidating their identity is PHYSICAL FUCKING VIOLENCE AGAINST SAID TRANS DUDE, you SUCK and I don’t want you hanging around me or anyone I care about.
The framing fiction indicated that the loser of the tedious meatmech shoving match which ensued would have to leave the group. I, naturally, chose the trans dude. This was a mistake; I should have chosen Disabled Jerkass and then done nothing and let the guy whomp me. Would have ended the fight sooner. But, I DID manage to win, and the game completely punked out; Disabled Jerkass got to stay with the group anyway. (Though she DID respect him more for beating the shit out of her, thus proving you do not actually have to identify as male to wallow in toxic masculinity. Equality. Yaaay.)
Look, this game, like all these games, was effectively donated to a worthy cause. That’s the only reason it wound up in front of me. For that reason, I’ve been trying to go easy on the games that didn’t work for me or even that I consider to be objectively bad.
But every now and then, a game crosses that “bad” threshold and enters “Actively Pisses Me Off.” The gulf between what this game could be and what it actually is grew so vast that it actually entered that territory.
I like battlemechs, I like seeing representatives of traditionally underrepresented communities being given a chance to star, I like the kind of bugfuck creativity that leads one to say “What if Gundam, but made of steak?” But the action sections of the game actively annoyed me, and the fiction varied between “Passable” and “HELL NO.” This game simply does not work, and I cannot recommend it. The game’s page indicates that there’s a part 2 forthcoming; I won’t be playing it.
Bah. That was a downer. Let’s see if this guy can raise my spirits:
Page 33, Game 21: Grime & Gaslight by Nekros Arts
“Victorian Era Horror Game”
Terror and cataclysmically repressed emotions? Sounds like a solid combo. I’m in.
This is a piece of software meant to be run in the background. Sort of like Desktop Goose, only instead of annoying you, it wants you to be chill.
It achieves chill by letting flowers grow across the tops of your windows, and summoning the occasional birds and butterflies to land there.
See? Pretty flowers.
It also wants you to send messages, like the one above. Who will receive the message? Oh, you know, somebody or another. What does it matter? Just send some kindness out into the world.
Or, you know whatever
On my personal list of “Things I find chill and relaxing,” “Receiving letters from Internet randos” isn’t terribly high on that list.
Ah, good to know
Luckily, the developer isn’t a complete lunatic, and apparently moderates the system. That’s a smart move. Hope his passive-aggression filters are up to the task.
Also, may you live in interesting times
When letters arrive, they’ll just hang out in the mailbox that now lives on your desktop, nice and unobtrusive.
Hey, there’s a corner of my desktop that ISN’T littered with icons! Who knew?
And I did get a nice letter from somebody.
Aw, thanks, Sakura. BTW, why are your font and stationery way cooler than mine?
This is … fine. Not really my bag. But, hey, if you’d like to have some weeds growing atop your windows and get the occasional friendly anonymous message from a stranger, it’s hardly the worst thing you could do to your computer. Seems to take a heavier toll on the graphics processor than I expected, but not dreadful. I saw in the dev comments that people were having trouble uninstalling it, but if you just find the appropriate icon in the task bar, shutting it down seems easy enough.
Honestly? I preferred Desktop Goose. I kinda liked the mean little fucker chasing my mouse and dragging in self-aggrandizing memes. I guess some people like disruptive geese, other people like weeds and friendliness. Plenty of room for both types of people.
But. Is there enough room for the sort of people who are into:
Page 1, Game 19: EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER by Heather Flowers
“Gay disaster mech pilots killing fascists”
O_o
Right. This is either going to go on the “Awesome” list or the “Totally pissed me off” list. I see absolutely no room for middle ground here.
An ambitious-as-hell voyage through the stars, one that’s almost more interactive fiction than game. I’m not sure it necessarily achieves everything it’s setting out to do, but I respect the hell out of what it’s attempting.
So, first thing’s first: if you’re playing this on Windows, you’re gonna need to download and install OpenAL. Without it, the game will simply fail to run. Naughty naughty, Underflow Studios, shipping an incomplete piece of software. I’m wagging my finger at you.
Earth is dying, and you’re one of the last ships out. Literally; you’re the ship. More precisely, you’re the ship’s AI. You are shepherding six humans … somewhere. To their new home. If you can find one.
Six lost souls
You’ll travel, you’ll explore, you’ll read. You’ll read a lot. This game is all about the scripted encounters, emphasis on SCRIPT. But I didn’t mind so much. The prose and the storyline aren’t scintillating, but they’re executed well enough to be compelling and to draw me in. I’m not convinced scripted bits needed to be this VERBOSE, necessarily, but it worked well enough that I didn’t mind. Given that “Fiction writer uses 50 words where 5 would have done” is one of my big pet peeves, that honestly means it worked pretty damn well.
I found the story rewarded me for engaging it on its own terms. Does doing that thing sounds stupid? Then I’ll not do the stupid thing. Is there not a threat I can see? Then I’m not going to tell my crew to run their asses back to the shuttle when walking is a perfectly viable option.
The most impressive thing about the (reams of) prose was how it was liberally flavored with extras that directly tied into the traits assigned to my characters. The Politician Guy was depicted as charming, but reckless; and true to form, he did something stupid with something dangerous and died horribly as a result.
GOD DAMMIT KEALAN
Open Mic Comedian Lady volunteered to do dangerous shit every time she said “That’s what SHE said!” I’m confident that’s what she meant.
There are often choices to be made in the prose. They seemed meaningful.
I was particularly fond of how some of the “puzzles” were handled by the choice that boiled down to “Just solve it with your galaxy-sized brain, you’re an AI for fuck’s sake.” This was often the only choice available. I’m normally grumpy when a game doesn’t let me take choices, but honestly, this non-choice pulled me more into the character I was supposed to be playing. Goddamn RIGHT I figured this one out, meatbags. Who’s your artificial daddy.
Where the game stumbles is in the GAME parts of the game. When you assemble your titular away team, you can assign a leader, a medic, and a mechanic, and the game will track how often an individual has taken that role. The character backgrounds seem to be indicating pretty clearly that some people are better suited for the roles than others, but … did it matter? It did not appear to matter. If it did, the game handled it invisibly behind the scenes and offered-up “Here’s a choice you can make if your chief engineer isn’t an incompetent douchebag” as one of my choices. Okay, fine, but I’d rather KNOW that my choice was significant than have to guess.
You’re managing food and fuel as resources, and the game’s balance feels hopelessly wonky here. Resources are TIGHT, and very difficult to come by. I visited three planets where I wound up grabbing one food apiece from each, and … comedafuckon. You’re kinda wasting my time here, game.
If you DO play it, I highly recommend you click both “Cheat” options — have each system just show you where the planets of note are, and don’t consume food unless the ship is actually in motion. For a game that’s ostensibly about exploration, your resources burn so quickly and are so tough to come by that it doesn’t seem like it actually wants you to do much exploring.
Hey, I found a food!
What’s more, I kinda didn’t understand where I was going when I hit the jump drive. Some places gave me clues about which planets to try next, but some … didn’t. In some, I wound up having to hustle my six pet blood blisters the fuck out of there when things were clearly going sideways. I figured this would have repercussions, but nope, I just hopped into hyperspace, and found another thing.
I played the game to an ending. A decent ending; they found a home, of sorts. I’m not sure the ending completely made SENSE, it certainly wasn’t the direction I was expecting things to go, but what the hell, it beat starving to death in the deep and uncaring void.
There’s clearly a ton to explore in this game, and … I’m not completely certain I want to. I don’t know that the game parts of the game are fun enough to bring me back. If the writing were tighter or the gameplay more rewarding, maybe I’d poke around some more and see what else is out there.
As it is, though, it wasn’t bad. I certainly have no regrets playing it. If shepherding six lost souls to some unknown home among the stars sounds like a good time to you, I can definitely recommend taking a look. Maybe it’ll grab you more than it grabbed me.
The big question is, of course, will this game grab me:
Page 25, Game 21: Desktop Meadow by samperson
“Your computer is a beautiful garden”
Nah, my computer is more of a junkyard with piles of random forgotten crap and occasionally dirty magazines. But that does sound pretty zen. Let’s see what it’s like.
The way I’m approaching the entries in the bundle likely did this particular comic a disservice. I’ve been largely hitting these blind, diving straight in based only on the short description and image used in the bundle entry. Unless I’m baffled by something and struggling to figure out how to proceed, I haven’t been visiting the entry’s main page until I’m wrapping the write-up and need something to link to.
This usually turns out fine; I feel like a given work ought to stand on its own two feet, and I want to let it impress me (or not) on its own terms. However, coming in through the main page would represent a more typical user experience. In this case, it would have informed me that I was about to read a piece of fanfic spanning two video games, only one of which I was familiar with.
I eventually figured out that I was reading Undertale fanfic, but since I haven’t played Deltarune, I didn’t know that was also a key ingredient until just now. (Hell, I hadn’t even heard of Deltarune. But given that it’s by the same dev as Undertale and given that Undertale is awesome, it clearly needs to be on my radar.) Because I didn’t have that knowledge, it took me a hot minute to get on this book’s wavelength.
So, this is a Fanfic comic centered around Undertale and Deltarune, translated into English from Japanese. (Luckily, I figured out I needed to read from right to left pretty quickly.) A quick Googling suggests that all the characters are canonical and not author inserts. It’s seventeen stories, most of them focused on themes of identity and acceptance.
I kept swinging wildly between being deeply confused and deeply moved. The confusing bits come from the assumption that the reader already knows good and goddamn well they’re reading fanfic based on a pair of video games. I sometimes struggled to tell the characters apart, and felt blindsided by weirdness like digressions on being controlled by The Player. I cannot imagine the book’s intended audience having either problem.
There’s also the issue that these stories are just a compilation of work done by the author, and weren’t necessarily intended to be part of a larger whole. Little surprise that it comes off a bit disjointed, with big reveals being dropped and never mentioned again.
Where the book truly sings is when it explores its characters’ gender identities. I have no idea if these stories of pain and rejection represent logical extrapolations of the characters’ canonical backgrounds or if they represent the author using these characters to process their own experiences, but either way, they pack a fucking wallop. The Chara and Frisk of these stories went through terrible pain figuring out who they are, and still carry that pain with them.
The artwork is excellent, clear and evocative. I also understand it’s presented real-time chronologically, meaning you can see the author’s skill increasing as the comics move forward.
This is not for everybody, and even knowing that it’s fanfic, there are still some parts that I find impenetrable because I’m only familiar with 50% of the source material. (What’s it mean when Chara is see-thru?) Nevertheless, if you approach this comic on its own terms and accept it for what it is, there’s some tremendously moving storytelling here. This is not something I would have downloaded had the RNG not demanded it, but I’m glad that I read it. If you’re curious at all, I can definitely recommend it.
That was intense. What’s next?
Page 7, Game 29: The Away Team by Underflow Studios
“In this interactive sci-fi adventure novel, you are the AI pilot of Earth’s last interstellar ship.”
I’ve found interactive fiction to be pretty hit or miss … but then again, isn’t everything? Let’s see what this one has to offer.
You’re heading home after visiting her grave, when you have a … visitor. Who may or may not actually be there. But either way, she has a chest, and some shit she’d like you to tend to.
Don’t ask me, game; kinda want your input here
From there, you return home and … play the game, basically.
This is where the story kinda sorta lost me, but the gameplay kept me rolling. The actual game is an olde-timey point-n-click adventure puzzle solver, where you’re hunting pixels and determining which objects to rub against other objects. Not the most compelling playing experience, certainly, but the classics are classic for a reason; I did indeed get invested in searching through this woman’s home, looking for the clicks that would cause the story to fall out. (“Okay, I just sawed her broom in half! … why did I just do that?”)
The visual and aural presentation both evoke a strong sense of mood, of creepiness that never quite spills into horror. The house feels icy and alone. Would the game have let me freeze to death if I didn’t figure out how to get the oven fired-up? No idea. But I felt viscerally more at ease when I did it.
How am I cold just looking at this?
The big hole in the game is … WHY am I rubbing things against other things? What’s going on here? Sometimes, clicks will reveal little snippets of what life was like with grandma, enough to deepen the sense of loss but not enough for me to piece together a story.
As you proceed and hit milestones, the environment changes around you. It feels like you’re moving through a life. Grandma’s? Your own? Are you … dead?
I made it all the way to the end, and I’m honestly not sure. Perhaps Part II will tell me.
So the gameplay is nothing special, I still don’t understand the story, and yet somehow the overall mood is compelling enough that I’m glad to have played through it. It really does feel like a piece of folklore from a culture I don’t fully understand. This is a really cool little game, and I do hope I find Part II in here somewhere.
Perhaps it will be this game:
Page 19, Game 22: SOULS & STRIPES by feralphoenix
“UT/DTR comic anthology”
Ah, so back to comics. Warning you now, comic, I’m kinda not in a place where I’m down for either jingoism or religious propaganda, and that title makes me think either might be on the table. But let’s have a look at what it really is before going any further down that rabbit hole.
The biggest hurdle is, of course that the game is in Spanish. (The title translates to “You will not cut your sister with the edge of this sword”.) My thirty-year-old high school Spanish and the smattering of obscenities I picked up watching Narcos were not up to the task. But, this is a bit of browser-based interactive fiction. So if I run it through Google Translate, I can at least get a look, right?
That didn’t help as much as you’d think.
You’re living in … Japan? And there’s an invasion of some sort coming. And you’re traveling around to unite people against the invasion, I think?
I was never sure what I was doing, or why. I’m pretty sure I lost really, really hard though.
There’s a level of disconnect here that Google Translate was utterly unable to bridge. I have no idea if that’s a defect in the game, or a simple cultural gap. For all I know, this is like a standard trope in Central American literature. “Oh, a gather-the-gangs-against-the-invasion story? But set in Japan, and interactive? That sounds fuckin’ dope, hermano!”
So … hey. If you speak fluent Spanish and would like some interactive fiction, check it out. This might be your jam.
Destined is for veteran role-players looking for something a tad more epic than goblin-punching but less epic than unleashing a horde of dragons upon the world. You’ll be playing heroes within a specific community, with mandatory time jumps (two of ’em) to better explore you your heroic shenanigans have affected that community. It’s rules-lite but definitely not rules-free; the most detailed section is the one detailing how the characters and their home are influenced between sessions.
The game recommends playing three sessions — and after the third, determine which player has fallen and become The Antagonist should you choose to pick the game back up again and start the cycle anew.
This one is damned interesting, operating at a scope that I’ve never done much with as a player. It definitely has a Beowolf feel to me, like you’re setting out to create a story that could legit have come down from Ye Olden Times in a way that no 10-by-10 stone corridor could capture. It’s super light on rules, particularly during character creation, and relies very heavily on players successfully getting into the headspace it’s shooting for. Power-gaming this one is missing the point entirely.
In fact, come to think of it, I think that’s what’s missing from this: the very simple rules state that either you succeed at a task and get a Rise at game’s end, or fail and get a Fall. What if this followed the Apocalypse World model, but reversed the final slots? Bad roll means you get a Fall, good one means you get a Rise, and a great one means you get both? Let the seeds of your own demise be tied to the moments of your mightiest victories. Let pride cometh before the fall.
Gyah. I’m here to review it, not design it. Anyway. Interesting game, well-conceived. I wouldn’t mind seeing a little more meat on these particular bones, but with the right players, this looks like it could be the core of a memorable gaming experience. If it sounds interesting, give it a look.
(Oh, and: I tend not to mention the stand-alone price for these games, because I don’t want to keep that shit up to date. But as of this writing, the list price for Destiny is $50 … but the author will provide a 98% off coupon if you provide evidence of a recent purchase of a small indie TRPG. I kinda love that.)
Okay, RNG. We staying in the physical tabletop realm?
Page 44, Game 24: No cortarás a tu hermana con el filo de esta espada by TwineDoctors
“Viaja por la ciudad reclutando bandas para vencer a la invasión.”
I … have absolutely no idea. It has something to do with my sister. And an invasion? Let’s see if my three years of high school Spanish let me play this one at all.
This is a one-page RPG that would probably work really well as a long-form improv show. “All right, Jasmine here is about to go on an epic quest! Show me something you brought with you that you’re gonna give her to help her out! Pepper spay, thank you!” “Uh oh, looks like Jasmine’s been stopped by a deadly trap! What item do you have on you that’ll help her get past it? Some Kleenex! She’ll need to be creative….”
Anyway. This isn’t so much a “game” as it is a set of guidelines for crafting an adventure based around whatever shit you happen to have on you. There’s not much to it beyond the cute idea … but what the hell, it is a cute idea.
Ah, another Powered By The Apocalypse entry. The second one I’ve encountered in this trawl, if I’m recalling correctly — or second-and-a-half, depending on how you count Delve. This looks like a very promising early draft. I’d be curious to see where it–
You’re fairies! You and your fellow players are creatures of legend and magic, making your way through a hostile world. Sometimes it’s the subtle hostility of simply not belonging, other times you’re being actively hunted, because fairy magic. Good luck out there.
This is a Powered By The Apocalypse game, which means it’s based on the rules for Apocalypse World. When the game is working well, AW rules allow for an intriguing mix of structure and creative storytelling. Anytime you want to do something, you roll 2d6 and add a number. Low roll means you failed, middling roll means you kinda sorta pulled it off or that you did the thing but there was a complication, high roll means you nailed it. The details of what happens next are very much up to you and the game master. When a game goes well, you still feel like you accomplished something (or were bested by a deadly foe) while still allowing for a hell of a lot more variety than “I stand there and whack it with a sword.”
Where A Touch of Glamour feels like it totally nails the AW feel is in all the options it lays out for the players. Looking over how the mechanics work, yeah, you can totally do some fairy shit with this game. Do stuff! Create stuff! Wreck stuff! Mess with mortals! Be magical! The game has excellent guidelines for all of it that give you options without bogging down in the rules. That’s a great start.
Unfortunately, it’s what the game DOESN’T do that’s causing me to give it a bit of game-reviewer side-eye.
How do Masques work? What are they? Is it like a physical masque the fairies can put on, or does their entire physical appearance change? How many masques do fairies get? I imply from the character sheet that the answer is “Two to start with,” but why is that implied and not simply stated? How big a deal is it for me to don or remove a masque? Am I expected to just be wearing one the entire game, or do I take them on and off as my fey whims dictate? This is just a straight-up hole in the rules that I have to think would have been patched in response to some blind playtesting.
Where are the character archetypes? I’m far from the most hard-core player of indie RPGs out there, but my exposures to Apocalypse World-based games make me feel like clearly defined pre-built character options are a big part of the appeal. You choose an archetype, and then your character sheet lays down your options for turning that archetype into a character uniquely your own, as well as giving all the mechanical information you need to actually play that character. It’s a great way to streamline both the character creation process and actual gameplay, and really lets you dive into the action. Why does character creation in this game force everybody to look at the same book and go hunting for the information they need?
Where are the GM moves? This is one of Apocalypse World’s starkest departures from traditional RPGs; the GM and players are literally not using the same rules. An AW GM is a diceless GM; the GM moves define how and when to fuck with your players, and what degree of fuckery is appropriate. A Touch of Glamour’s GM section has tips that are well-suited for general purpose game running, but completely omits that bits you need to be a GM within this ruleset. Tellingly, the only examples of characters being harmed come as consequences of botching their own moves. In a world where the PCs are explicitly being hunted and harvested, I’d think some guidelines on just what can hurt them and how badly aren’t just appropriate, they’re mandatory.
What’s the world like? The author explicitly does not want to go into too much detail setting up the world, on the grounds that it feels presumptuous — that they’re imposing their sense of reality on someone else. They have some guidelines for helping players and the GM define the world together, but even then, they leave out the bits that have been explicitly stated elsewhere in the rules. There are mortals who hunt fey; I’d expect the guidelines to at least remind the players they need to define who those people are, how common they are, how much power they successfully derive from harvesting fey for magic. Are they a secret society, or are they openly using stolen magic? The decision to only give the loosest guidance conceivable in defining the world honestly feels like a cop-out. The author very clearly has a vision for how fairies work within that implied world; defining some key elements of that world isn’t an imposition, it’s a welcome piece of structure.
Looking at these comments, it’s clear to me that the biggest hole in the A Touch of Glamour ruleset is not how it helps lay out the players’ experience, but the GM’s. Yes, there’s some sloppiness in the rules and it fobs-off more character creation work onto the players than I’m used to seeing in an Apocalypse World game, but those can be overcome. It’s the GM who has by far the largest gaps they need to fill. There’s a very real timidity here, a sense that any but the broadest advice on how to run the game would represent an unwelcome intrusion upon whoever is running it.
As a result, I can really only recommend this game if you have a confident, experienced Apocalypse World vet to run the thing. But what the heck, if you want to put together an AW-based game of fairy shenanigans, there are worse starting points you could look to; there is some good stuff here.
Let’s see what the playful sprite known as “My Perl script” has in store for me next:
Page 38, Game 21: It’s Dangerous To Go Alone – Take This by Margaret Catter
“A spur of the moment RP game where you play an adventure using only the content of the GM’s bag.”
