A browser game made in HTML5.
What?? What is this? A full length open-world RPG where combat is a deck building game? And entirely made in ASCII? Of all the things you didn't know needed to be made.
I binged version 1.2.3 and found the pacing very good (especially since there's sort of two difficulty curves) until at least the mid-end game. There's a lot of enjoyable world building going on though a lot of the implicit and subtle details are lost of me. Even the inverted Z (including the giant one smack-dab in the title screen) I just read as "S" the entire game, including the name of the game itself.
There's just so much good content. Though I think your character improves much more from accumulating trinkets and transfusions rather than deck improvements. But the two progression work well hand-in-hand.
There's a lot of characters and content to discover. Making all cards out of at most 3 effects was great design.
Some points of confusion:
- The main options screen is hard to navigate and I often accidentally change my character portrait and don't know how to get out.
- Where you can and can't walk in water is unclear and I had to guess the entire time by bumping against the walls.
- You can't increase your guild rank is gatekept by chapter progression and the in-game characters seem to suggests that you could and this is just a separate side-quest. Would have spent less time searching in earlier chapters.
- The game implies something very bad will happen if you don't voluntarily respawn but I couldn't figure out what that is. I did it the first two times when asked but then never respawned again.
I don't know how to put hide spoilers in reviews so I might instead post those in a comment. This game also let me discover ZZT but is very good at not needing to have already played previous ZZT games.
