4x4 Archipelago

It's really cool to see a full roguelike in Twine like this. This game has a lot going for it: the prose is good and the combat is decent, albeit simple. There’s a good amount of variety between character classes and types of main quests. However, the whole game falls apart in the incentives. The optimal strategy, by far, is to explore everything first, then do the lowest-risk activities in the archipelago while leveling up. This strategy makes the game very easy, while an aggressive strategy has no upside and almost guarantees a death. In this sense the game is not so much a roguelike, or even an RPG, but a grinding game. You grind your stats on stuff that you can easily do at your level, until you win. That's the playstyle that's heavily incentivized, and it's a pretty boring one in my opinion.

The game does seem to be written as though you have reasons to take risks, so I think this was an unintended consequence of the design. One great example of the problem is the unstable ore in mines. If you keep mining unstable ore, there's a chance that it will cause the cave to collapse on you, causing damage. This seems like a mechanic where you can choose to take risks, but it isn't. A collapse won't do enough damage to kill you, and there are no enemies when backtracking, so you're guaranteed to make it out of the mine alive, allowing you to heal for a trivial amount of currency at an inn. The game is full of these 'risks' that are either guaranteed to have no actual downside, or are just levelchecks. And if you do beat an enemy that's tricky for your level, there is very little upside.

Once you accept that the game is based around grinding, you can get some enjoyment out of finding the next step to progress, but there’s a lot of screens to click through in that process (like going back and forth between a dungeon and an inn a bunch of times) so it’s still pretty tedious.