Studies in Darkness

I was given a review copy of this game.

This is one of the lower-rated Hosted Games, but I liked a lot of aspects of it. It uses an open sourced TTRPG ruleset called Blades in the Dark, which assigns a difficulty to every action and has randomized rolls to meet that difficulty. You can fail with a complication, fail, succeed with complication or succeed. Complications raise meters for bad things like dying or losing your current objective. You can pay for better results by acting out flashbacks or by saying you had the right tool all along (which takes up inventory space).

I was a little bummed that this story was presented as a vignette, with 9 short chapters that build up to a big event but don't show the aftermath. I think with different framing it could feel like a complete game; giving it the tutorial setting makes it feel less engaging.

I do like the backstory, a gothic arcane city with a school filled with magical beings, ghosts and monsters. We play as 3 characters with two additional friends. The characters make choices to navigate a tower and retrieve a signet ring for their club, preventing them from getting expelled.

The mechanics had some highlights (I liked the 'Devil's Bargain's a lot) but I often felt like they interrupted the story too often. This is contrast to the last Choicescript game I played (Falrika the Alchemist) which had all story and almost no choices/mechanics. To me, I feel like there is a bit of a war between narrative momentum and mechanical enjoyment. They can work together (when a big choice has been built up the entire game until you finally make the choice, like in Slammed during the final fight), but I felt like in this game they were treading on each other, the big narrative story beats interrupted by choices at inopportune moments.

But I had fun. Each page was fun. I would definitely read more by this author.