JUN 29, 2024

Story-first RPG

<aside> 📒 Solid branching narrative about struggles, dramas, and spite of a medieval alpine village.

</aside>

It is a slow-burning, dialogue-focused role-playing game about a dozen families in the village of Tassing, across a few decades, propelled by the guise of solving murder mysteries. It is interesting to see how children grow up into adults and to see how player’s decisions echo later on.

The first murder mystery really caught me flat-footed with how little time I had to investigate and form an opinion about whom the killer might be. Although, I think I interpreted conversations as tasks, while just chatting does not take the “activity” slot. Either way, the game does not take away the ambiguity and rests the responsibility solely on the player’s shoulders – an interesting experience, not necessarily a pleasant one.

I was way more confident about the second mystery, was able to advance most of the suspects – and then it dawned at me that I just needed to pick with which one to go.

The final plot twist was a clever one. I’m not sure if find the rest of the ending super satisfying. It was fine: clever plot twist, resolution of a big thread – but I’m not sure if there was a grand theme I felt. The Christmas speech by Jorg, perhaps – but that was a pretty generic (even if heart-felt) Christmas speech.

UX and feel

• Credits have speed parameter (including rewind and full stop)
• Has autosave and tells about it
  • Although it's not every scene
• The end of dialogue is marked with an X

Non-dialogue Narrative

• Very fancy presentation for text. Scribing, filling with ink, some words left for latter (as if the hand needs to change pens). Mistakes