Maybe you'll respect this dead person instead

Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made.

The game initially shipped without a blurb at all, until it was added a day after the Thing opened for public consumption. The lack of a description, a wordy title, and what looked like a chocolate dessert on the cover art served to pique my interest.

As the description says, your character is a mute summoner who calls up a spirit to speak, or fight, or do whatever the situation demands. In the tradition of all aspiring fantasy adventurers everywhere, you go to the guild of violent monster hunters for work and to prove yourself. One of the things I found interesting is that the narrator is one of the summoner’s spirits. The narrative voice is non-intrusive (unless you consistently summon Cathareen, which I understand the appeal of), with the occasional cutting comment or inclusion of the pronoun “I” to signify that it’s not a usual second-person point-of-view.

Your choices are basically deciding which of your four spirits to summon. They have a few things they excel at and a few things they don’t, and you have to remember what they were like in their introductory scenes, and what the situation calls for, to get a good outcome. At the beginning and middle of the game, most of the choices seem to be for flavor text, with the exception of a (Spoiler - click to show)climactic fight, which acts as a final exam where you summon the appropriate spirit in response to an enemy’s attack. I managed to come out unscathed in my first try, though after using the back button to click as many “wrong” choices as I could, the outcome isn’t too different, just changes your score a bit.

I liked the pacing and could clearly visualize the action scenes from the writing. A valiant first effort, and if the author gets the urge to write the continuing adventures of the summoner, origin stories for the spirits, or other stories set in this world, it would be interesting.