RPG-ish

This is an entry in a minimalistic twine jam. It makes the smallest RPG possible. There is a village with an inn and one location to fight monsters, with maybe 2 or 3 kinds of monsters. You collect XP and gold to get to the boss, who is extremely strong.

I really enjoyed this, it encapsulates the essence of an RPG in a fun way.

Apperently, this game was written for a game jam in which the games could contain no more than 300 words of text. As a proof-of-concept that that is enough to build a rudimentary RPG in Twine, I suppose RPG-ish is a success. But I will ignore such issues of context and history; the aim of my review is, as always, strictly to assess whether you, as a player, should be interested in playing this game.

The answer is a resounding 'no'. This is surely one of the most boring RPGs ever made. There are no tactical decisions, there is no interesting prose, there is no sense of discovery -- indeed, there is nothing worth seeing here at all. The only way to lose is through boredom, when you really can't be bothered to check how much health you have left or go through the grind for more XP. Best avoided.

Another reviewer tells us that the game is a critique of RPGs. But can something be a critique of a genre if it is indistinguishable from the worst examples of that genre? There are some very interesting critiques of RPG tropes and game mechanics (the pen-and-paper meta-RPG Power Kill comes to mind, as does the cRPG Undertale; I myself once tried something in this vein with my pen-and-paper game Vampires; but really, such critiques are almost as old as the genre). RPG-ish isn't one of them.

Yeah the game is simple (remember it was for a 300 words or less Twine game) and the boss might be a bit hard, but it kind of illustrates that RPG elements can work in Twine.