Now we’re coming up to the other winners from this year. This is Chronicles of Kyrathaba by an unnamed author. Check out Brian’s review here.
Some things I liked
- The little sketchbook-style illustrations add a nice touch to the game’s passages. They’re not so big to be distracting but also not too small to be glorified icons.
- There’s a lot of content here and that’s no small feat.
- I like how simple the menu is. I remember playing a different game and just being hit with a wall of stats when I opened its menu.
Some suggestions
Giving players more autonomy in terms of making decisions.
Brian already covered it nicely, so this is more to agree with his point. Since it’s supposed to be an RPG it may help to let the player choose the tactic they’d like to use against the goblin. Similar to what Brian mentioned, passively watching stats change (if they even do in a given turn) isn’t very engaging.
Cutting down on the color palette.
I appreciate the author giving different text and link types different colors but the bright blue for dialogue makes it harder to read. The quotation marks are enough to indicate that a piece of text is dialogue. And since the choices with dialogue in them are functionally the same as the other choice links, they should be given the same color as well; it’d be less information to process.
Providing an overall goal.
I think giving the player a larger goal to look forward to may help the story feel more engaging. I don’t mind learning about the world but it’d be nice to have some more advancements in the plot than hearing Dorn give us lots of exposition.
Wrap-up
This is a really neat entry and shows a lot of promise. I hope the author finishes!