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Peak medieval weirdness, January 2, 2023by ccpost (Greensboro, North Carolina) I feel like this game was made personally for me. Centering around a monastic scribe who's thrust into a mission to investigate a potentially demonic book, Chronicon Apocalyptica hits on all my obscure interests and makes them actually quite compelling in terms of game play and narrative. Even if you're not personally fascinating by illuminated manuscripts and medieval history and lore, I'd recommend this game -- though having interests in those areas makes this one a must play!
The game reads like a work of medieval literature itself, akin to Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'history,' which mixes in lore, mythology, magic, and religion alongside historical events. From the beginning, when the player character encounters a disembodied 'tremulous' hand that's scurrying around the abbey, this game is full of wonders and strangeness. The main quest of the game revolves around investigating a string of strange phenomena reported in the aforementioned demonic book that sees the player character face ghosts, witches, dragons, and faerie. Like many works of medieval literature, the game is somewhat episodic, though the episodes follow a main throughline and add up to a satisfying conclusion.
The story itself is wonderfully weird and quite well written, but the game play complements the story and really makes the whole thing cohere nicely. The game puts you in the head of a monastic scribe, and you approach the various challenges in the game very much as a scholar. There are different ways to investigate the events and oddities recorded in the Book -- through archival research, intuition, or systematically analyzing patterns -- but all these avenues are steeped in a scholarly mode of attention. There's some swordplay and fighting, though it's mostly the non-player characters who are engaged in this action. The player character is a scholar through and through, and the ways they can approach challenges as a scholar are robust and interesting to think through. The game encourages the player to engage with the game text as scholar, and this close attention is rewarded -- quite explicitly, too, with such fantastic in-game achievements as "Archived: Your book is deposited in the royal archives. (30 points)"
This scholarly way of attacking problems is carried out well in the game: the game always outlines clear choices for how different decision points, representing different ways of approaching the problem at hand, and consequences follow from cogently from different choices made. However, I did not think these scholarly skills were well represented in the various stats tracked in the game. I've found the stats in other Choice of Games to be very responsive to different choices and reflective of my own understanding of how I'm shaping the character toward different tendencies, but I never really understood how the stats were functioning in this game. I also found the achievements very unevenly distributed throughout the game -- I earned a couple early on, and then earned a bunch toward the end of the game but missed out on many during the middle part of the game. This could have been a result of my own poor play, but it seemed like there were fewer opportunities for achievements during the meat of the game itself.
Despite these minor quibbles, I found the game very delightful and an overall great experience. I don't know if I would recommend this as some one's first Choice of Games title since the achievements and stats are kind of funky, but I'd recommend this to anyone familiar with choice-based games who also happens to be interested in medieval weirdness.