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.

I didn't know ZZT could do all this. And the 437-art is  amazing! Often with animations! Thank you for sharing this with us.

Always glad to see new, innovative uses for piss.

Just like an actual MS-Dos game, good job!

Reminded me of The Long Dark, but without the stress on survival (and escaping from hordes of ravenous wolves, that is).

The game itself is funny (I keep getting lost, but I take for granted it's my fault ^^;), the only thing really needing your intervention right now is... well, the palms. I think they should be changed to a different kind of tree as they don't quite fit into your "frozen wasteland" setting. Seeing a palm in the middle of a snowstorm is a bit odd.

I've spotted other trees around, could you simply replace the palms with them?