A quick review of a quick read of Hello World
Hello World is immediately captivating with it’s name, cover-art, and choice of formatting. The sense of immersion is instant, and extremely well maintained. This book knows what it wants to deliver, and delivers it with every step of the process. It’s never ceased to amaze me as I read through the whole thing (well I skimmed as I got towards the end, but you know what I mean).
Here are my thoughts as I read through:
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The setting is fascinating. A premise of memory as the key value of society? Color me intrigued.
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Love, love, love the way “Crew” is handled, where the party as a whole has its own character sheet.
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A couple of page-references are listed as xx, not sure if intentional but an easy fix.
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Really like the “Single Highest Die” rule for rolling, very easy to grock, I trust new players to be very comfortable with it.
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I just love the gameplay structure
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I find myself so immersed into the Lore and Setting that I genuinely forgot to look for code-inaccuracies. As an overly analytical jackass and a software engineer, this is very impressive to me.
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Love that the “Functions” or “Moves” as folks may be more familiar with, all have a recommendation when a different function may be better. Feels like an excellent way to educate players and GMs alike. I love that overlap is intentional. Gods and I love the function names.
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Attributes that are Determined by skills? Oh I love that, what a fascinating mechanic. I love its implications and execution.
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Stress as HP, I’m just dancing in delight. This May be among my favorite games now.
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“Crashing” the status and “Crash” the function share similar name space, which may be a problem, but then again, from a coding perspective, you use Crash(Entity) to set Entity into the Crashing status. Sooo maybe not so bad.
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“The Stack” and “Drift” ugh, I love it. I love it so freaking much.
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Memory is used to generate items? That’s so intuitive and great. Just so much impressed.
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Kind of skimmed over clocks, it seems they work as I’d expect from my experience with Blades in the Dark.
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“Position” for difficulty, I love the quirky names for things, very cyber, very relatable.
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“Daemons” gods, is this a review or is this just a gushing about a new special interest?
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“Derez by being arrested by the Troubleshooters” is an instantly evocative statement, that immediately creates an idea of what sort of game this is, and what dangers exist.
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Heck, even COIN that seems to be a comment in game, or acknowledgement, of the block-chain boom in popularity.
- COIN is “real money” while “crypto” is a game term for pocket change, and it’s defined by the fortune of your team. Like how IRL certain to people $5 is “nothing” money because they have enough wealth not to think about it, and to others $5 is a serious amount. Amazing.
- 1 COIN = 1 MEM fantastic, I instantly know the actual value of the currency as a player/GM.
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I’m curious why there 7 playbooks, but it doesn’t seem like a bad number, but I’m always curious if specific math went into these sorts of things.
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Subtle Color coding in the Art and the format of the playbooks is great.
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Did I mention I love, love, love the art?
Thundering hell, I’m going to be singing this game’s praises in quite a few places.