Reigns

Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling
"entertaining in short spurts"
Ultimately, the story experience is a little dilute for my tastes. The tinder-style mechanic, the randomness of card availability, and the fact that you die so often, all made me sit back rather than sit forward. After all, the stakes are low (what do I care if yet another king dies of gangrene after an ill-advised boar hunt?) and my control is likewise limited. Still, Reigns is entertaining in short spurts, and I’m always interested to see new QBN-ish pieces, especially ones not written in the StoryNexus toolset.
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Rock Paper Shotgun
"May it reign forever. But… maybe on your phone rather than on your PC."
To its eternal credit, Reigns doesn’t feel repetitive despite asking only ever one action of its player: swipe/click left or swipe/click right. A combination of gradually throwing new cards (and thereby scenarios) into the mix and your situation eternally being so damned precarious that even a familiar curveball can be disastrously or redemptively disruptive keeps each new reign feeling fresh for a bloody long time.
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The Guardian
" a simple, charming but sometimes infuriating mobile game"
Feats of memory are perfectly possible, because even though the game promises 400 unique cards, you will see a lot of them multiple times. That’s fine when you’re simply trying to set a high score. But as the game’s story-arc comes into play, featuring a demonic curse passed down through the generations, and an achievement-style system, you’ll find yourself swiping through tens of cards you’ve seen far too often, just waiting for the one card that you need to fulfil some objective.
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