The Hunter's Journals - Pale Harbour

Senscape recommends this Visual novel. + Story + Characters + Graphics + Game length, many hours of replay value + It is a smart game, requires a mature vocabulary. “You are a hunter of beasts and monsters”. So begins our next quest in the “Hunter’s Journals” series. This time we are going to “Pale Harbour”. Pale Harbour has been overrun by sea monsters and you must save the townsfolk. It is all about choice; you determine your own fate. My fate was to die pretty quickly because I launched right into expert mode 😉. It sounded easy enough. Right? Wrong. This is a maze through a cornfield, you need to be strategic and think about your options. Luckily it was an easy reload and selection of a new story arc. I opted to die many times just to see how it would play out. Like its predecessor “The Hunter's Journals - Pale Harbour” is another rich absorbing story. You have a new basket of skillsets and weapons at your disposal. You will see no violence, blood or gore; combat is done by throwing the dice. This is a game you can take a break from and come back knowing where you are and what you need to do if you can’t play for a few days. The game mechanics and the world you enter …

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 had to read the developer's mind to predict---and especially in an *investigative game* where you're supposed to investigate stuff---it makes the book obnoxious to read through. Go into the field. Ins…

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 to decide where to place it - a wrongly located save could commit you to a 'death loop' (which happened to me). Something that I can't let go unremarked, is the art in this game. It is gorgeous. Th…

A fun interactive story, similar to a D&D campaign, too simple combat mechanics as you have just about no options in battles but the game is more focused on the story choices, tread carefully! :) If you'd like to see what we're playing next with regular updates, or request to review a game, feel free to follow us at: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35688508-Ember-Works-Reviews/

Great gamebook for anyone who loved Fighting Fantasy as a kid! Encounters make a lot of sense and play to the idea of fighting with wit, as much as your character's skill stat. Might be a bit linear for some people, as the book leans more into the "one true path" style similar to Ian Livingstone's works. If you like the puzzle aspect of his gamebooks, you'll enjoy this. The game's world is also fairly fresh to what we're familiar with in Fighting Fantasy, adopting a vibe closer to Victorian steampunk and the Lovecraft mythos, that sits well with the game's style of storytelling and encounter design.