Minor Arcana by Jack Sanderson Thwaite
A second tarot game in a row! But where Saint Simon’s Saw is a game where you actually do a reading for yourself, Minor Arcana is a game where you play a tarot deck. I mean: the player character is a tarot deck. At the beginning, you do some customisation of your history – but whatever the choices you make, things sound somewhat bleak and foreboding. Things certainly didn’t end well with your first possessor.
You then do two quick readings. As a deck of cards, your job is to state which card comes out on top. You then feel what happens to the customer whose reading you did; and while the card you chose does make a difference, there’s one thing it doesn’t make a difference to: the fact that the customer is going to make a bad choice and die horribly. This is an interesting use of choice. One does have a choice; the choice makes a lot of difference in terms of narrative colour; but you seem to be fated to lead people to their doom.
The game ends when you are stolen by a collector who wants to analyse you. Or does it? In fact, you are invited to start over; and when you do so, some new options come up. Nothing major, just enough to suggest that new pathways may be open to you. Persevere, and the truth comes out: you admit to your new owner that you are, in fact, cursed; and that by having stolen you, they too are now doomed to die a horrible death.
I like the twist on the classic horror theme (“there’s a book and if you read it you die… and it’s this book!”) here, where it’s quite unexpected. Shades of Spider and Web here? I do wonder whether the story would have been a bit more coherent, and would have had a bit more payoff, if the owner had been introduced as a framing device also at the beginning of the story. Still – fun. The writing is also quite strong.