After a few weeks of playing this I will leave my thoughts in an updated review. Bottom line my PERSONAL score is full marks but this is a niche style of game I would not give a full recommendation to most of my gamer friends yet I will totally gush about it to!

First off, this gave has been around for almost a decade. For any live service game that is a good sign to me because it says one single thing: loads and loads of content. Now, with a game like THIS (being turn base, solo, text/ dialogue/ story) that means an absurd amount of it. Translation to actual game play: if you played this every day, all day and really milked as much as possible out of it each and every week, then managed not to die, your character would actually be seeing brand new content many many many months in.

This game is live service meaning you need to maintain connection to the net to play it, and has OPTIONAL $$$ purchases (no lootboxes or dlc story conent really) yet you honestly don't ever have to pay them money to enjoy this. A few paths might present a quick access route for credits (the in game currency) or you can use credits to refill your action amount, which will refill naturally. Restrictive to play free? Nope. Pushing you to pay? I don't see that, no.

As I mentioned and you likley saw this operates off a action timer, which is a little like energy for a mobile game. I've come to learn that most actions once you get established don't cost actions. It costs 1 action to draw 3 cards, and those cards can take me the full 10 mins it takes to recharge 1 action to read them completely! There have been days where I started to play at full 50/50 actions as a free player, read everything as it came up, go slow, and then about 4 hours later I was down to my last few actions. Sure you can not read stuff and burn em in 15 mins but the game is a living reactive immersive story novel you craft as time goes on.

The last thing I will address is death. Your character can die. For good. But you also are warned if a type of action you take COULD be fatal. Also you could get beat up over and over then perish from injury. The game has a few 'health' type values you need to juggle and doing certain things can keep those in check, which you can discover by playing. A game I might compare this to would be the survival craft game Don't Starve as you have to really figure many things out on your own. DO and DO NOTS. Yet death is a mechanic you can avoid if like me you detest enforced permadeath.

There were some really ODD game mechanics I had to learn which took me a few days each. I felt they were not intuitive as a life long RPG fan. In game time, the inventory/ storage system and how to get dressed/ equip stuff. You have you consumable stuff like food and cheap booze but also a few things can be used such as rumors for various things in your inventory. Some conditions like moods can be selected to be equipped as set time buffs (which I believe play off number of turns, not actual time). This system felt very clunky, even slow to grasp. Even now it feels a bit strange, though I understand it.

What this game does bring to the table is immersive storytelling. I feel like its MY story not just the same thing anyone experiences. There are many options for who you are, what you are like, choices you make, who you side with and how you choose to go about playing. Unlike most immersive games there isn't one or three game loops but this seems to have dozens or even a hundred. Playing this my friend watched me stream it and commented about how I seem to have unlocked a lot but I feel like I caught 1 small fish in a lake stocked with trout.

I would recommend this to a chill mature or older gamer that finds joy in the journey. Enjoys learning a robust game with pretty vast setting lore. This game is really designed to be play for months or even years, so keep that in mind. There seem to not be any negative side effects to putting this down for weeks at a time, unlike other live service games that try to tether you to maintain daily play. But to those that might wanna give it a go? Its free. Its well written. Despite the quirks I would give this rating a 4.5 out of 5

EDIT: I forgot to mention something. While this game is steam exclusive I believe it takes up 0.5% of my CPU on high loads as a background process. My system has crazy amounts of ram so the 1.6gb overhead it has is no concern to me. That's pretty low anyways. In windowed mode you can resize the thing into a tiny box, which is what I do on my 2nd screen. Once in a while I'll glance over to see what my action rate is (xx outta 50) so that's why I have a pretty high play time for being so new.

After a few weeks of playing this I will leave my thoughts in an updated review. Bottom line my PERSONAL score is full marks but this is a niche style of game I would not give a full recommendation to most of my gamer friends yet I will totally gush about it to! First off, this gave has been around for almost a decade. For any live service game that is a good sign to me because it says one single thing: loads and loads of content. Now, with a game like THIS (being turn base, solo, text/ dialogue/ story) that means an absurd amount of it. Translation to actual game play: if you played this every day, all day and really milked as much as possible out of it each and every week, then managed not to die, your character would actually be seeing brand new content many many many months in. This game is live service meaning you need to maintain connection to the net to play it, and has OPTIONAL $$$ purchases (no lootboxes or dlc story conent really) yet you honestly don't ever have to pay them money to enjoy this. A few paths might present a quick access route for credits (the in game currency) or you can use credits to refill your action amount, which will refill naturally. Restrictive to play free? Nope. Pushing you to pay? I don't see that, no. As I mentioned and you likley saw this operates off a action timer, which is a little like energy for a mobile game. I've come to learn that most actions once you get established don't cost actions. It costs 1 action to draw 3 cards, and those cards can take me the full 10 mins it takes to recharge 1 action to read them completely! There have been days where I started to play at full 50/50 actions as a free player, read everything as it came up, go slow, and then about 4 hours later I was down to my last few actions. Sure you can not read stuff and burn em in 15 mins but the game is a living reactive immersive story novel you craft as time goes on. The last thing I will address is death. Your character can die. For good. But you also are warned if a type of action you take COULD be fatal. Also you could get beat up over and over then perish from injury. The game has a few 'health' type values you need to juggle and doing certain things can keep those in check, which you can discover by playing. A game I might compare this to would be the survival craft game Don't Starve as you have to really figure many things out on your own. DO and DO NOTS. Yet death is a mechanic you can avoid if like me you detest enforced permadeath. There were some really ODD game mechanics I had to learn which took me a few days each. I felt they were not intuitive as a life long RPG fan. In game time, the inventory/ storage system and how to get dressed/ equip stuff. You have you consumable stuff like food and cheap booze but also a few things can be used such as rumors for various things in your inventory. Some conditions like moods can be selected to be equipped as set time buffs (which I believe play off number of turns, not actual time). This system felt very clunky, even slow to grasp. Even now it feels a bit strange, though I understand it. What this game does bring to the table is immersive storytelling. I feel like its MY story not just the same thing anyone experiences. There are many options for who you are, what you are like, choices you make, who you side with and how you choose to go about playing. Unlike most immersive games there isn't one or three game loops but this seems to have dozens or even a hundred. Playing this my friend watched me stream it and commented about how I seem to have unlocked a lot but I feel like I caught 1 small fish in a lake stocked with trout. I would recommend this to a chill mature or older gamer that finds joy in the journey. Enjoys learning a robust game with pretty vast setting lore. This game is really designed to be play for months or even years, so keep that in mind. There seem to not be any negative side effects to putting this down for weeks at a time, unlike other live service games that try to tether you to maintain daily play. But to those that might wanna give it a go? Its free. Its well written. Despite the quirks I would give this rating a 4.5 out of 5 EDIT: I forgot to mention something. While this game is steam exclusive I believe it takes up 0.5% of my CPU on high loads as a background process. My system has crazy amounts of ram so the 1.6gb overhead it has is no concern to me. That's pretty low anyways. In windowed mode you can resize the thing into a tiny box, which is what I do on my 2nd screen. Once in a while I'll glance over to see what my action rate is (xx outta 50) so that's why I have a pretty high play time for being so new.