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Thanks so much for your review! And congrats on FIST TACTICS getting the recognition it deserves!

Thanks for the review! I honestly wish I had more hauntings in the book, I'll have to check in with the college historian.

Thank you so much for the positive review! I'm glad the tone clicked for you.

Thank you! I'm so glad you liked the photos. I'm gonna be up on that campus again later in the year so I'm hoping to get even more onsite photography then.

There aren't many entries in the jam that are in color. The use of it here is great, really helps readability in something that could've been a mess without it!

The module's actual usability or balance, to me, is secondary to its novelty. This is probably something that'd have to be a central gimmick of a campaign or oneshot--maybe turning a run of Mandelbrot Set into even more of a roguelike or something. I think it's worth your time just to see that someone even made something like it and actually executed on it in full.

FIST does STALKER.

This is one of those cool games where the game and the adventure are the same, where the PCs are set up to go on one specific job--if you wanted more of this sort of thing in a more open, gamey structure, within FIST's existing milieu, there's a Zone Generator in the corebook, you'll be good. This game benefits from a high degree of specificity and a new, different, darker tone. The style of it is plain and stark--or unsubtle or aggressive or something. No art, plain black text on white. An ideal look for the game in my opinion. Conversational tone and natural language conveys both the tone and the intent of the game design excellently. It's even got me writing this review kinda tersely after reading it!

The GM advice in it is very keyed towards directing discussion and engaging with the party--there are no NPCs and nothing to fight. You're traversing dangerous and sometimes beautiful wilderness. This is super weird as a game, but if you've got one of those tables that's a "writer's room" this's going to really do it for you I'm sure. Not for everyone, but VERY good for the people it is for. Read this entry.

First of all I appreciate that the module can "accordion" between one or more sessions. I don't see that enough.

The vibes of cool, hot spy fiction here is great. FIST design often skews slightly grittier or otherwise less glamorous and giving the agents a moment to breathe undercover like Agent 47 is a really cool change--with specific beats designed to meet and then have to rescue or tangle with those guests. A timeline for the adventure that is essentially a set of rails designed to be jumped off of is my favorite way to design an adventure module. Really well done, tons of personality, I had a great time reading it.

I think something I'd like to see in future versions would be more art assets like the dope work on the front and maybe some maps of the hotel to help encounters emerge more naturally depending on where FIST is trying to get to--traversing the Hotel could end up feeling like planning a route in an older Resident Evil game or something!

FIST's place in the sort of unfiction and modern horror you see in the works of Remedy Game Studios or SIGNALIS is a really cool part of its design that makes it stand out as more than just an "Espionage Game." SYMBOL codifies that stuff in plain, clear english from the perspective of GM advice as opposed to a "setting book." The naturalistic language at use here is really good for FIST's improvisational, light roleplaying ruleset. New traits and roles related to the new theme is a CLASSIC move that I think every splatbook in FIST should do. I'm kicking myself not doing it in my own submission!

I find the aesthetic to be a double-edged sword: the plain word document style is extremely readable and usable and something as complex as memetic science fiction needs that clarity, but at the same time I feel like games about the conveyance of information could, very thematically, have cooler conveyance. I think that that's the number one place one could improve this project post-Jam and I think it's an excellent decision to get the text out the door before any aesthetics. Could you imagine taking on-site photography related to your project despite a looming deadline?? You'd have to be some kind of idiot, hahaha!

I'm not sure about some of the rules--cognitive therapy seems to take quite a long time, especially with more virulent memes, but it's an easily fixed rule you can play with, not something that the game is built on or that will have knock-on effects from changing. The COGNITOHAZARDOUS trait could use some better rules about how badly your DISRUPT should mess people up, but referring to other damage-dealing Traits is a good way to math out an ideal way to mess someone up that perceives you in the meantime.

Overall a really cool expansion with a lot of promise and excellent execution on a complex idea.

FIST's place in the sort of unfiction and modern horror you see in the works of Remedy Game Studios or SIGNALIS is a really cool part of its design that makes it stand out as more than just an "Espionage Game." SYMBOL codifies that stuff in plain, clear english from the perspective of GM advice as opposed to a "setting book." The naturalistic language at use here is really good for FIST's improvisational, light roleplaying ruleset. New traits and roles related to the new theme is a CLASSIC move that I think every splatbook in FIST should do. I'm kicking myself not doing it in my own submission!

I find the aesthetic to be a double-edged sword: the plain word document style is extremely readable and usable and something as complex as memetic science fiction needs that clarity, but at the same time I feel like games about the conveyance of information could, very thematically, have cooler conveyance. I think that that's the number one place one could improve this project post-Jam and I think it's an excellent decision to get the text out the door before any aesthetics. Could you imagine taking on-site photography related to your project despite a looming deadline?? You'd have to be some kind of idiot, hahaha!

I'm not sure about some of the rules--cognitive therapy seems to take quite a long time, especially with more virulent memes, but it's an easily fixed rule you can play with, not something that the game is built on or that will have knock-on effects from changing. The COGNITOHAZARDOUS trait could use some better rules about how badly your DISRUPT should mess people up, but referring to other damage-dealing Traits is a good way to math out an ideal way to mess someone up that perceives you in the meantime.

Overall a really cool expansion with a lot of promise and excellent execution on a complex idea.

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.

I don't play wargames. So please take it as a hell of an endorsement that this game is cool as hell. The style on display here is minimalist but ideal for conveying what you need to know to play this game. 

I'm a huge sucker for pixel art in tabletop, I think it's highly underrepresented, and it really contributes to the old "computer terminal" vibe the game has. That plus the hand drawn art helps convey the tone as a fairly light-hearted skirmish game.

Gameplay gives me a lot of nostalgia for multiplayer Splinter Cell with my dad. Making guards a third universally hostile faction was an inspired choice that really sets the tone here--the guards are your number one tool if you like to push people into map hazards in Smash Brothers. The fact that they activate as one after all players is great to feel both highly agile, outwitting these stupid goons, and desperately vulnerable if you get sandwiched between a patrol pattern and an enemy operative.

My biggest complaint is a classic, which is that I wish there was more! 2 maps and 3 loot tables are a good start for a cool, inspired game that I could see being easily compatible with other FIST modules. Ambitious and promising.

I don't play wargames. So please take it as a hell of an endorsement that this game is cool as hell. The style on display here is minimalist but ideal for conveying what you need to know to play this game. 

I'm a huge sucker for pixel art in tabletop, I think it's highly underrepresented, and it really contributes to the old "computer terminal" vibe the game has. That plus the hand drawn art helps convey the tone as a fairly light-hearted skirmish game.

Gameplay gives me a lot of nostalgia for multiplayer Splinter Cell with my dad. Making guards a third universally hostile faction was an inspired choice that really sets the tone here--the guards are your number one tool if you like to push people into map hazards in Smash Brothers. The fact that they activate as one after all players is great to feel both highly agile, outwitting these stupid goons, and desperately vulnerable if you get sandwiched between a patrol pattern and an enemy operative.

My biggest complaint is a classic, which is that I wish there was more! 2 maps and 3 loot tables are a good start for a cool, inspired game that I could see being easily compatible with other FIST modules. Ambitious and promising.