Apollyon: River of Life
The Planar Danse · 2023 · Choose Your Own Adventure, CRPG, Dark Fantasy, Strategy RPG, Interactive Fiction
PC
Positive89% · 36
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About Apollyon: River of Life
Apollyon is a dark fantasy narrative RPG focused on choices, where you summon demons and spiritual entities, deal with them for power, and delve deeper into an occult universe! It is a multiplayer choose-your-own adventure RPG mixed with a roguelike strategy board game and hidden deckbuilder elements.
In this 40+ hour game, you will:
- Use obsidian tokens upon the Apollyic table to control the powers of the world. Moving them upon the table influences what spirits can approach your table, which abilities you can use, as well as aiding or harming every challenge before you!
- Deal with three spiritual entities every round. These might be creatures of other worlds, other occult practitioners, visions of the beyond, or many, many more! They must be dealt with through violence, invocation, treaties, deception, or the like.
- Make difficult decisions that will change the narrative, both in small arcs and large stories for character and table alike. Your choices will matter, for better or worse!
- Invoke spirits of your own. You may bring some of these spirits between rituals as permanent unlocks, known as Invocations. You may also bring a small charm into every ritual, such as the Silver Timepiece to keep yourself sane while projecting into the spirit world.
- Play Apollyon with up to two friends, who will share the table's alignment and take on every spirit together! This creates a unique strategy only present in multiplayer. For example, your efforts to escape a hostile fire spirit might be led by the player with more Agility, or the player who has a Guard on their physical statistics, in case they fail and take damage!
- Unlock and play the ten playable characters, and progress their stories alone or in multiplayer! Gaining power through these skills and abilities will help you complete later missions, known as Intentions.
In the world of Sartova this practice is used to evoke angelic beings, gods, and other intelligences related to souls, elements, the Themes, night terrors, disembodied voices, and even things older than the gods themselves... Through this practice, Apollyon, one may speak with them, make deals for power, capture them, or even project one's soul from their body entirely. The table can provide all of this, and it is all dangerous.
Apollyon is a narrative story that will be shaped by your choices. It comprises 550,000+ words and has over 600 pieces of custom-made art in the Apollyic mosaic style. These words and pictures will not be seen in every playthrough, and nearly every line of text can react in some way to choices you've made, items you carry, or even your character's identity! For example, the scientist of magic has insights different from the man shackled to devilish deals he regrets...
Head on over to Apollyon's discord to give feedback, ideas, report bugs directly to the developer, or find others to join in Apollyon!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1472060/Apollyon_River_of_Life/
Also, find the next game in The Planar Danse on Steam, with a free demo!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2814060/Skulltide/
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
Apollyon: River of Life, developed and published by The Planar Danse, is an unusual and deeply text-driven experience that blends elements of tabletop role-playing, narrative experimentation, and dark fantasy worldbuilding into something that feels more like an interactive ritual than a conventional game. Rather than guiding players through a fixed storyline, it presents a shifting, reactive system where events unfold based on choices, positioning, and the unpredictable nature of its mechanics. From the very beginning, it establishes a tone that is dense, mysterious, and deliberately opaque, inviting players to explore rather than simply progress. The narrative is one of the game’s most defining aspects, though it does not present itself in a straightforward or linear manner. Instead of following a single protagonist through a clear arc, the experience is built around fragments of stories, encounters, and character-specific paths that gradually reveal pieces of a larger, interconnected world. The writing leans heavily into dark fantasy themes, often exploring concepts such as power, sacrifice, identity, and the consequences of dealing with forces beyond human understanding. It is …2 found this helpful
As somebody who enjoyed Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours, this game is far too esoteric even for me. The gameplay consists of moving various tokens on your table to one of eight positions, each causing somewhat different effects that you can look up in your journal. These moves are limited to three a turn, and tokens sometimes get moved by events you encounter. So what's the issue? The issue is that many negative events in this game cannot entirely be avoided, meaning many scenarios run on a timer where your stats at whittled down over time until you lose. This on it's own isn't a game-breaking problem, but the issue is that how progression events are rolled isn't obvious, and even if you encounter one, you may not be able to succeed (either due to RNG, or due to not having some pre-requisite). Let me use Talon as an example. If you listen out for rumours, you are told of a shady group in the worker's quarter of the city. An interesting and obvious plot point, except travelling to the worker's quarter does...nothing. Even if you have heard of these rumours, it's unclear what dictates wheteher or not you meet this group. Same issue travelling around Talon in general. Frequentl…2 found this helpful
lack of a external wiki is abit rough but i can build my own spread sheet with the table info, no spoilers needed for any of the cards cause its better if you go in unspoiled, but it is abit of a pain without somewhere else to see the table info, can still recommend.1 found this helpful
Apollyon is a game about occult ritualism that's every bit as complex as Cultist Simulator while having nothing to do with the sex pest who made the latter.1 found this helpful
This is a very interesting, very unique game. As others have said, it is not for everyone: it primarily involves reading text, and you have to be willing to make some guesses and experiment with where to set the tokens. Pay attention to where they are set during the tutorial, and read the starter lore pages about each token to begin to formulate some guesses about what settings will work best and why. But also don't be afraid to mix it up. The first several hours my character kept dying. Then I decided to take more risks and lean into the story, and it helped a lot, but I still felt stuck after a while. So I started a brand new character and that helped even more; at the 10 hour point I feel I am starting to get the idea, although I also suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg. For $2.99 in the summer sale it was not much of a financial risk, and it seems to have a lot of depth. For people who like story and exploration, rather than 3D graphics explosions, I recommend trying it - it deserves more exposure than it so far has achieved. There are a couple videos with a player and the developer playing the first couple chapters, which might be worth watching, but they move slowly. …
Onerosoi is a good for nothing; but the rest of the game is good.
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