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A sprawling, mechanical explore-em-up, November 29, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I generally find people who like to bang on about their unpopular opinions kind of irritating; typically they’re either casting a perfectly normal opinion as “unpopular”, or taking a perverse, trollish glee in pushing what’s often thoughtless contrarianism. In both cases it’s unpleasantly attention-seeking – like, just say what you’re going to say and let it stand on its own.
But – of course there was a but coming – I am going to fail to take my own advice here, because I think before you read this review, you should know that I don’t like Fallen London. I know that this is a minority view, especially around here, and I can appreciate the appeal. The weird-Gothic setting is creative, and the writing is very good at prodding the player’s imagination with a whisper of a suggestion here and an unexplained proper-noun there. And the idea of a role-playing game where the highest-stake conflicts aren’t about shoving your +18 Flaming Zweihander of Golgothan Fury into someone else’s entrails 17-24 times, but decocting the rarest vintage to impress jaded partygoers or gambling your soul in a high-stakes poker-game – yes, very cool. But despite the quality of the fiction, I can’t look past the mechanics. Everything you do gets commodified – if you have a flirtatious encounter, the game informs you that you’ve gained 13 Memories of Kisses, and if you get betrayed by a co-conspirator, you gain the Vow of Revenge quality. And on and on and on, until your character is toting around dozens of different abstractions and enough personality tags to populate a madhouse.
For some players, I can see how that leads to greater engagement by tying the narrative and mechanical sides of the game together more tightly, but for me, it just makes everything feel arbitrary. The sprinkling of flavor across the top isn’t enough to distinguish the various sub-currencies that begin to feel interchangeable, and the transparency about how your stats translate to a probability of succeeding in any particular course of action reduces choice to just trying whatever’s most likely to succeed. After a very short time playing, I even found myself skimming the lovely prose, since all that mattered was the number. This is a very self-defeating way to play Fallen London, obviously – and I’m aware that most people engage with it in a much more rewarding way – but I can’t figure out how to turn off the part of my brain that jumps straight to the mechanics; I’m like the guy in the Matrix who just sees the code behind the simulation.
I’ve allowed myself to go off on this digression at length because, for all that it has notable differences, my experience of playing Lost Coastlines is 90% similar to how it felt to try Fallen London. This is a big game, taking the protagonist into a randomly-generated dreamworld that’s home to dastardly pirates, sentient frogs, diamonds that hold magic in their hearts, and a whole city of clowns (admittedly I noped the hell out of that one rather than explore it). There’s an RPG-style character generator where you can focus on your fighting or sneakiness or seacraft – oceangoing is a key part of the world, with settlements scattered across a series of islands – and choose a few additional advantages, then you can opt into a nicely-done (albeit occasionally infodumpy) tutorial that walks you through the basics, or skip it in favor of reading the high-production-value manual that comes with the download, and then you’re unleashed on this world of adventure to make a name for yourself. You can explore randomly – sometimes coming across blank spots on the map, where you’re given the opportunity to name them – or take on quests for various factions, or trade commodities from one village to another. And at most locations, you’ll encounter a little storylet where you’ll have a choice of bespoke options, like whether to STUDY or PLUNDER a set of ruins, and get some money – here called “pleasance” – or Fragments of Knowledge or some other reward, if you succeed at a stat test.
It’s a lot to dig into, and there’s even a good balance between randomly-generated content and hand-crafted locations that seem to offer deeper, less randomized storylets with unique mechanics and dependencies on stuff you do, or people you meet, in the rest of the world. And there’s a medium-length sea battle system. All of this is stuff I should dig, but unfortunately, despite all the craft that went into Lost Coastlines, it still left me kind of cold. It just gave me that same old vibe that it didn’t matter where I was exploring, mostly the events were being pulled out of the same hat, with just a different probability distribution depending on where I was sailing. And for all that there are many kinds of rewards and things to collect, they all seem to work similarly, either directly increasing your stats or pleasance or providing abstract coupons that could be redeemed for these benefits in the appropriate circumstances.
It wasn’t long before I was mindlessly sailing the seas, looking for whatever options seemed most likely to succeed and skimming the resulting text to see which numbers were increasing. Again, this is maybe just something broken about how I’m able to relate to games like this, though I do think there are a couple factors that maybe exacerbated the problem. The most superficial is that I find the default ADRIFT presentation ugly and a bit hard to read, and though there are a variety of view options I haven’t been able to find a combination that’s any better. The most significant, though, is that the overall game structure isn’t very compelling. While there do appear to be hard-coded stories, there isn’t an overarching plot to follow; at any point you can choose to wake up from the dream, and you’ll get a score that’s just your pleasance minus the sum of negative characteristics you’ve accumulated. I ended the game twice, once with a couple hundred pleasance and once with about 1,500, but I got the same perfunctory ending each time, with no narrative reward or even context for what’s a good score and what’s a pathetic one – as a result, I didn’t feel myself especially motivated to try again to cover more ground or get a bigger number just for the sake of it.
My enjoyment was also reduced by the suspicion that the game could use a little more tuning – that’s a little churlish to suggest given the scale of what one amateur author has created here, but still, it reinformed my mechanical mindset when I realized that the penalty from failing to feed my crew was significantly lower than the cost to buy food, so I might as well let ‘em starve. I also felt like I succeeded much less frequently than the odds cited by the game would imply; I lost like four Chancey tests in a row, for example, when I should have had like a 55-75% likelihood of succeeding at each. Sure, could be that’s just the luck of the draw, but it grates, especially since UNDO doesn’t change random results and at least in my playthrough, I found it pretty hard to get much of a toehold in the early going. Plus I think I ran into a significant bug when I visited the aforementioned City of Frogs – my options were either to hire one using a resource I hadn’t yet found, or attempt to gain their trust, but nothing I typed would allow me to have a go at the latter choice, so I had to UNDO my way out of there.
I’m curious to read other reviews here, because as with Fallen London, I’m guessing that my reaction is pretty idiosyncratic – I can recognize the passion and effort the author put into the game, so I’m hoping that once again my opinion is an unpopular one, and there are other players who can give it the praise I think it deserves.