Heroes of Book & Paper

Pretty fun game for DnD fans - more content than i had anticipated and good replayability. Good to support an indie game!

The interface is clunky - there's no easy way to get a display other than ~720p at the center of your screen. Fullscreen gives a black border which is the majority of my 1440p display, and attempting to go Windowed with Lossless Scaling as a workaround breaks the interface. I also found that the framerate felt more steady with G-Sync disabled. There's also little details like not always being able to return to the main menu, like during character selection, and volume settings not saving between launches. Still, I get how difficult getting these details right as a solo dev is, so at this price point I'll tolerate it. There is music and SFX, but they're being oversold here. Nice that they exist, but you're not missing much if you mute in favor of a secondary activity. Negatives out of the way, what you see is what you get - short adventures that have interconnected consequences, a lot of outcomes determined by d21-1 vs [Relevant stat or lower] checks, and a small amount of action variation so that there's no immediately obvious "right" way to play. It does feel like the combat-focused classes do better, since it doesn't always feel like the alternative of avoiding combat is possib…

I noticed that this game is still being updated. That's amazing, thank you for this. Something like this feels like it was made for me and I really want to re-visit it now that so much more content has been released since. My internet went out once during a stormy day and this was what I played that day. Turned what should have been an absolute bummer day into a real treat now that I look back on it.

A good game to play with kids or even adults.

This is a cool concept for a game. It's a series of miniature gamebook-like adventures that you can play in any order. I like that each story is replayable with multiple endings and randomized sections that are different each time. It's also cool that items you collect in one story might offer a surprising benefit in a different story. Managing your limited inventory is very important. The writing of the stories is very simple. There is not much descriptive language, and the grammar is weird. But they read quickly and keep the focus on the danger and adventure. Each story builds out the sword-and-sorcery world more and more.

A nice reminder of the old 'Choose your own adventure' or 'Fighting Fantasy' gamebooks that I grew up with. The adventures are nice and quick, and the mechanics are simple to understand. I just have two minor issues. First, I would love more ways to heal my character during an adventure. Second, I feel the inventory is too limited. Most of the gamebooks would have a weapon and armor counted as equipment instead of taking up an inventory slot, same with special quest items. And they'd have smaller sections for food and money, instead of having them take up inventory space. Definitely a good amount of replay value here though, trying to see all the different permutations and events in the adventures. And seeing how much easier it'll be coming back to the first ones with a high level character.