I tend to call it “barely a game” personally, for a handful of reasons. First, while it has game mechanics in a sense, these are primarily used as narrative devices rather than for actual gameplay. For example: you have Health and Morale bars, but resource management and making sure you’re not dying to damage isn’t really a prominent part of the game. Instead, taking health or morale damage in dialogue is used as a sort of narrative emphasis or punctuation. There are skill checks with dice rolls, but they are there to play into the overarching theme of failure rather than as a challenge to overcome - which is why failures often give superior outcomes to successes. There are skill points and a trait or feat system, but it’s there to customise your character portrayal in a roleplaying sense rather than for minmaxing.
But maybe more importantly: the dialogue choices do not behave the way we are conditioned to think RPGs work. From experience, we think that picking “wacky” dialogue options will be punished - however this is not the case here. This isn’t a game where the challenge is picking the “right” dialogue option. You can pick what you want to roleplay and/or consume more or less of the content, that’s it. It’s better to think of it as an interactive book where the dialogue options are pages you can read in any order.
Like an interactive narrative game, or legitimately it’s a book?
I tend to call it “barely a game” personally, for a handful of reasons. First, while it has game mechanics in a sense, these are primarily used as narrative devices rather than for actual gameplay. For example: you have Health and Morale bars, but resource management and making sure you’re not dying to damage isn’t really a prominent part of the game. Instead, taking health or morale damage in dialogue is used as a sort of narrative emphasis or punctuation. There are skill checks with dice rolls, but they are there to play into the overarching theme of failure rather than as a challenge to overcome - which is why failures often give superior outcomes to successes. There are skill points and a trait or feat system, but it’s there to customise your character portrayal in a roleplaying sense rather than for minmaxing.
But maybe more importantly: the dialogue choices do not behave the way we are conditioned to think RPGs work. From experience, we think that picking “wacky” dialogue options will be punished - however this is not the case here. This isn’t a game where the challenge is picking the “right” dialogue option. You can pick what you want to roleplay and/or consume more or less of the content, that’s it. It’s better to think of it as an interactive book where the dialogue options are pages you can read in any order.
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