The Hunter's Journals - Pale Harbour

So, you really don't need to get too deep into Pale Harbour to run into this issue. Writing-wise, it's fine. It's decently evocative. You have a good sense of the setting and your stakes, and your character has some personality to the way they move and interact with the world. But let's talk about infesting your gamebook with instadeaths. This used to be a style, with some books going all in on having one golden route and a TON of random gameovers hidden behind, like, drinking the wrong flavor of wine. This style hung around for a little bit, but progressively fell out of favor. And designers were correct to ditch instadeaths in gamebooks, because it isn't interesting. The consequence for "go into the field" -> "you die" is that the book has wasted your time. If you took damage or lost skill or lost money or lost medical supplies or got walled out of a later event or *something* with lasting impact, you would feel it for more than a moment. But if it's just a random insta that you h...

Excellently written and narrated text based adventure. It's fairly difficult, so expect to die a lot. It's a very niche genre, text based choose your own adventure games, but as far as quality goes this one is at the top. The art is quality, and the voicing of the narrator is excellent.

Disclaimer: This is not a technical critique. I'm a streamer and I will review based on whether I enjoyed games and how well my community responded to them. I hope there's value in that to some. This game isn't going to blow you away visually if you're used to 'flashy' games with 'action'. However, as someone who very much enjoyed the 'Choose Your Own Adventures' books in my youth, it was easy for me to see beyond the not-full screen. It's a book and as such would have looked odd if it filled the screen. It was easy to pick up what to do, and there were different difficulty levels to choose from. As someone who enjoys the 'journey' and to experience the stories rather than stress too much about having enough health to last the game, I elected for the easiest setting. In the old 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books, you could turn down the corners of critical pages and return to them if you made a bad choice - this game has a single bookmark - it adds an extra layer of thought - you need...