Ring Sculptors

Ring Sculptors is a sci-fi / cyberpunk gamebook IF released for Nintendo Switch in 2024. It's an adaptation of a Polish gamebook by Tomasz Kołodziejczak, an author and game designer of some renown in his country. The title rings are those around planets, and in this game, the player selects a character from a roster of various hacker and mercernary types, then becomes a pawn in the machinations of rival space guilds, the Ring Sculptors amongst them.

The lore of this world seems juicy and interesting. Aesthetically, the game is attractive, with AI artwork that already looks typical but effective, and which works because very few scenes ever have to be shown more than once. The broody and glitchy audio soundscape also works. However, mechanically, the game makes no affordances for the kind of gamebook it seems to be when translating those mechanics into playability in videogame format, resulting in high frustration and repetition.

Ring Sculptors's core style is of a hard Fighting Fantasy gamebook, though without all the physical combat. What this means is high danger, lots of ways to lose, lots of die roll stat tests, lots of high stakes choices, lots of unpredictable consequences for actions. This can all be great perilous fun in an actual gamebook where you can cheat or reroll or keep your thumb in the last page as much or as little as you like, but Ring Sculptors the videogame misses all this.

There's no UNDO or RESTORE. Each death means a total restart, including going through the big linear passage at the beginning that precedes even the character selection stage. The stat check moments present as metaphorical black boxes, short bars which fill up before reporting POSITIVE or NEGATIVE. POSITIVE means you succeeded, which has a counterintuitive duality in that when you're being tested for things in life, POSITIVE is usually bad. And what die was rolled versus your character's MIND, BODY or EGO scores? The game hides this. I couldn't get any sense of the probabilities involved, and therefore of the worth of increasing any stat by, say, just one point. And this is a game with die-roll bottlenecks that can basically pass or fail your entire session.

This world of warring guilds and neuroimplanted weirdos seems really interesting, and the story could get away with leaving most of it mysterious, but given that the player's mission comes down to one typical exploration of an abandoned outpost on one planet, the lore is being wasted.

There's also a time pressure mechanic in the planet section, but whenever I was asked to choose how much Oxygen to spend on a particular activity, I couldn't work out what happened. Either I didn't understand the interface, or it's bugged, or it's not actually a choice but an automatic drain of your stat in accordance with the duration assigned to the activity, in which case the amount involved should have been declared along with the choice (and probably was in the book version). The prose is also careless at such moments, referring to wasted time in a way that really makes it feel like it's the player's fault.

I can't compare the game to the Polish source material, but as a gamebook videogame, Ring Sculptors is a big miss which doesn't avail itself of any of the wiser choices made by previous gamebook to videogame translations. This is a shame because the Switch seems a good venue for this type of game. It was attractive enough to hold me for a few plays, then I realised I wasn't prepared to try again with so much pointless repetition and bottleneck randomness.