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Conscience is a thousand swords, October 4, 2020I grew up on choose-your-own-adventure stories, and one thing that often frustrated me was that the random decisions came with no deduction, resulting in little reward for the good endings or anguish at the bad endings. In rare cases, there was a story where only one good ending existed. I much prefer this style, as it helps me feel invested in each decision. Tristan Jacobs follows that style here with (s)wordsmyth.
The setup here is intriguing, what with the sidekick that is a very chatty sword (don't worry, it makes sense!). On your way to revenge your master you encounter various adversaries from Japanese mythology (and at least one from Roman mythology). Each encounter presents with a decision-tree that often takes three to six correct choices in order to pass (with occasionally some minor room for midstream correction). For the most part, I found the correct choices to make sense and they fit the moral of the story well.
Generously, if you fail at any point in the game, you are brought back to the beginning of the section to try again. Unfortunately, this still requires quite a bit of clicking to advance the story and my wrist was literally sore by the end. Now, part of that is on me as for one scenario I think I managed to pick all ten bad endings before finally choosing the correct branch.
The graphics are easy on the eyes, and I quite enjoyed the noise the text scroll made, reminiscent of Japanese RPGs from the 80's (Dragon Quest comes to mind).
I was not as invested in the characters as I would have hoped. The player character is explored very little, and I was hoping to find the sword more charming. Still, very solid game design and cool idea.