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DARK REFLECTIONS's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
SUBSTANCE | #7 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
Overall | #20 | 3.300 | 3.300 |
STYLE | #27 | 2.200 | 2.200 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
I really did not expect that amount of content going in. So many pages, so much writing!! Wow.
OPERATION FROG EATER is a gigantic amount of work and clearly a labor of love. That's a whole extra supplement inside a supplement. You should be proud of what you accomplished here.
My one hangup is with the setup of the CRO players' fireteam - why the choice to go with just one trait, altered independently and uniquely, as opposed to, say, one rolled trait and one fixed trait (or one of four fixed traits, to ensure at least one attribute bonus), like you have done with roles (CROW)? I'm definitely not saying "come up with pre-defined unique effects for every trait" because I opted to do that and I wouldn't wish that on anybody else, but it seems odd that the universally better-funded, better-run, evil organisation would be disadvantaged in trait count, of all things, even if all their other stuff is slightly buffed.
This is a really cool submission. However, from page 24 the tables appeared incredibly strange on my reader (I use SumatraPDF) and the writing is quite small so some places like page 36 are a little difficult to read while playing. I really love the content of this release but have some friends who would struggle with the current layout, so would love an accessible version!
What a heck of an addition to FIST! DARK REFLECTIONS is a hugely ambitious work fitting an ULTRA class jam. The real star of the show here is OPERATION FROG EATER, a modular megabase with procgen elements in the style of MANDELBROT SET pushed to ludicrous heights. Connecting interior and exterior rooms is a joy that sets my brain alight, I absolutely adore it. It makes me want to learn scripting languages to make a tool to autobuild iterations of the Lyagushka complex.
Playing as CROs is sick as hell. The rules for it are clean and intuitive. Coming from over a decade of roleplaying on forums and discord servers, PvPvE is one of the things I see often in freeform RP (I hear it called FKR in tabletop spaces???) and not so much on the table. DR deserves a deep dive for how it converses with the other game jam entry FIST: TACTICS.
I would like to see two major changes: the first one is preference that I think I could just do in my home game, which is expand and improve the loot available on the Lyagushka map tiles. I feel like part of the appeal of PvPvE games is "riding dirty" and trying to extract with loot, and I think that GMs will need to be liberal with their crate drops to make extraction feel thrilling and tempting--or give a lot of visibility to the parts of CYCLOPS's briefings where they're extracting various anomalous materials. The other problem I have is the formatting; the tables are a little rough right now. Easily fixed but it really breaks the flow of map generation, which is the absolutely coolest part of the map.