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Review
It’s a truism that RPG sessions are often way more fun to experience than they sound when you describe them to people who weren’t at the table. And it’s a truism because it’s true – even I, gentle reader, have seen an interlocutor’s eyes glaze over while telling them some totally awesome story about the Satyr I played in this Changeling game back in undergrad. Descriptions that sound great when improvised come off flat when it’s part of a presumably-rehearsed narration. Out-of-character friendships liven up the banter that can feel lame shorn of that context. The drama of uncertainty, of not knowing which way the dice are going to fall or what lurks behind that nondescript door, is way more intense to experience first-hand than hear about second-hand.
(Seriously, though, Harry Dedalus was the coolest fae in the San Jose Court, the stories are great).
The Sword of Voldiir is a choice-based game that touts its origin in a tabletop DnD campaign, and it’s a case in point. It’s definitely got some shaggy charm, with a cast of NPCs who seem to enjoy hanging out and razzing each other, and solid pacing that keeps the narrative ticking along. But the fantasy world and quest plot are mostly generic, the RPG-inflected mechanics aren’t that engaging, and the whole thing, especially the prose, is in need of some polish – I only played the free demo rather than shell out for the full version, so perhaps there’s a significant uptick past the parts that I was able to play, of course. But while I definitely would believe all the original participants of the tabletop game had a great time, on this evidence you kind of had to be there.
I’ll take my first and third critiques together, since they wind up reinforcing each other. While there are some flashes of originality in the character creation section – the races on offer are human, half-elf, and siren – the setup is one you’ve definitely seen before, with your character hired on to accompany three NPCs on a mission to recover the titular artifacts: the reasons, and its powers, are underexplained, as are the personalities of your crew (there’s a sidebar with some biographical info: the first one’s “quick-witted, smart, and conniving,” while the second is “intelligent, rather quiet, and alert”. The poor fighter, meanwhile, just gets some middling backstory, with no actual characterization listed. The story does go through some twists and turns, but there’s little narrative groundwork laid, so it can came off feeling like just one thing happening after another, and each incident is a trope you’ve definitely seen before (the one exception is the bit where you’re able to track down a bandit because she gave her real name, and declared the magic items she was carrying to customs, upon entering a city).
The classics are classics for a reason, of course, but making them sing is down to execution, and here’s where the omnipresent typos, eyestrain-inducing dark-red-on-black color scheme for links, and leaden prose prevent Sword of Voldiir from going down as indulgent IF junk-food. There’s just a little too much friction, a few too many details that jar – like the party members setting up a fire in the middle of an enclosed cave without worrying about smoke inhalation – and a few too many scenes that seem to be included out of a sense of obligation rather than because there’s anything compelling about them. Here’s a sequence where you check in on a companion after arriving at an inn:
“What have you been up to?”
“People watching.” She nods to the people sitting all across the dining room. “Interest folk who come here. I always enjoy watching them.”
“That’s fair enough. Have you seen anything interesting?”
“Plently.” She lets the conversation die there.
(There’s a pick-which-NPC-to-spend-time-with mechanic that appears that it eventually leads to a romance – I played the field to try to get to know all of them a bit, so in fairness it’s possible that if I’d stuck with one they’d start opening up a bit more).
As for the second item on the bill of particulars – I like RPG-style mechanics in IF, but Sword of Voldiir’s implementation doesn’t leave much room for the player. You do get randomly-rolled stats for your character, which I dig, and they do influence how some of your decisions play out, as well as coming to the fore in a couple of combat sequences. But their impact is obfuscated, as dice are only rolled behind the scenes, and your role in fighting is just to pick whether to use magic or weapons at the outset, with no information given about the options, and then click through turn by turn to see whether you die. There are various ways to make these kinds of mechanics legible to the player, from the simple expedient of showing the results of die-rolls, to graying-out options that aren’t available to you due to your build, or signposting where you’re getting more information because of a skill or background – and the RPG elements of the game would be stronger if some of these strategies were pursued. Heck, even the non-RPG bits suffer from a lack of player agency, with many choices literally coming down to picking which of three doors or passageways to go down, sans any context to make this anything but a stab in the dark.
Like I’ve said, all of this is stuff that would be eminently forgivable if it came up around the gaming table on a Thursday night – all the players would know what was going on at the system level, the low-key world building and action-oriented plot could make for a fun beer-and-pretzels experience, and the fact that the characters all talk about being “stoked” and curse a lot would just be an indication that the group is unwinding after a long day at work. Even the choose-a-door-any-door bits would indicate someone is about to have fun doing some graph-paper mapping! But it’s hard to make a tabletop campaign work as IF without deeper-seated changes than what Sword of Voldiir has to offer; adaptation, rather than direct translation, is what can breathe life into old grognard stories, and there’s not quite enough of that on offer here.
