Greymarsh

You speak to the innkeeper. You have died. You try to enter the city. You have died. You enter a shed. You have died. You speak to some children. You have died. The game seems just full of "gotcha" moments with little to no foreshadowing. Play Roadwarden instead. It's the better game.

Scratched the IF itch!

Greymarsh is very much inspired by the gamebooks of yore, and as someone who grew up reading/playing a lot of those, I was cautiously optimistic. I'd say Greymarsh is closest to the famous Fighting Fantasy series, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good is that it has a certain nostalgic familiarity if you know those books, and presents a classic romp around a perilous city (in the vein of something like City of Thieves or Kharé: Cityport of Traps). The bad is that it eschews the elaborations on the FF formula introduced by other series like Lone Wolf, Way of the Tiger, or Cretan Chronicles. Even a number of the FF books themselves added further, more complex, mechanics (Black Vein Prophecy, how overlooked you are). Greymarsh is, mechanically, pretty basic. That doesn't make it not worth playing, though. It certainly makes it pretty accessible for someone who didn't grow up with dozens of those books. I mentioned that it follows the City of Thieves type of format, where you roam a city filled with hazards and treasures, and often no way to tell which is which without trying them out. Fortunately it's more forgiving than the infamously punishing gamebook classics. Fo…

I wanted to enjoy this game, but there is a lot of misleading language in the game. "Checkpoints" are actually save points; I had to repeat the fight on the road least 10 times because I failed to get in the city so many times and then when I was in the city, some children killed me. I figured moving into Chapter 2 would be a "checkpoint," but it wasn't. I am a big fan of text based adventures, but this was not fun to play or read. There were also several instances of inconsistencies in the writing. For example, the purple stone was said to be around our neck, but now its in our pocket, but now its in our hand, and now it is implied its back around our neck. Or basement and cellar being flip flopped in a scene. Much of the writing was bloated and needed heavy editing to be steamlined.

I think this is a fairly solid modern equivalent to gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy, it takes a bit more advantage of being digital compared to the FF adaptations that exist on Steam. Thing is, I can only recommend this game [i]if you are already into gamebooks[/i]. You need to be willing to read passages carefully, experiment, make notes/maps on everything you've found, and then restart the whole game taking advantage of this info. Mercifully, past a certain point the game starts feeling more like an adventure game rather than a gamebook, so inefficiency just means taking longer rather than needing to restart the whole game. My main critiques against the game would be the somewhat lacking variety in encounters (a good chunk of the game will be spent clearing two separate arenas), how objectives typically only had one true path to advance, and the highly limited save system. In exchange it pulls out a few things that would be impossible or unreasonable for paper gamebooks to do, like [spoiler] stealth sections with guards moving on fixed paths. It's nothing crazy for games but it's something that'd just be an infinite pain with pen & paper. [/spoiler]

This is a short but very good text based RPG. It is fairly linear but still entertaining. Considering how cheap it is, it is well worth to take a look at if you enjoy narrative driven games. Took me 5 hours to finish the whole game, it is entirely possible to do it faster if you roll well in fights and realize where you need to go next sooner.