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solo_knightPlaythrough/Review: Legend in the Mist - Comic Starter
What is it?
It’s a choose-your-own-adventure comic book that teaches you the basics of the ‘Legend in the Mist’ game.
As such, the actions and outcomes are limited.
Is it playable out of the box?
You can play through, but you can’t play.
Amendments:
None. I did interpret a couple of items, but the game encourages you to do narrative interpretations, so while that was individual and the next person may come to a different outcome, this remains within the scope of the tutotirial,and it made no difference whatsoever.
Tools
2d6, thrown together.
Price:
Free. This is the taster. The Core Rulebook is $30. which means I will not pick it up for a very long time, if ever, and only if it’s on sale.
All in all, this didn’t captivate me enough, and I have more than a hundred different games in my collection. (itch.io charity bundles FTW; I grabbed the first when I wasn’t even that keen on solo play, but that figure is not an exaggeration.)
Verdict
📟 Ultimately, the tutorial is not a game
🧳 Needs unpacking
I had fun, this was quick, it needed no brain, and I want to know the other main branches of the story, but I’m not going to grab the rulebook.
This took me around 1h to play, I made minimal notes. There are plenty of story hooks that I would want to play if this was *my* story, but it turns out that I’m more invested in a character that sprung from my brain, however casually in the King’s Courier than the much better-fleshed out character that a hundred other people can pick up and equally play. I had fun, but it wasn’t as intense an experience.
This is a tag-based game, and I’m not sure how well that would work for me, because you have to make up tags and then decide what advantages/disadvantages they give you, and some tags were described that I have no idea where they came from (maybe I just didn’t read the adventure well enough). I have other games using similar systems that I can play without spending $30 on them, so while I’m not retiring this yet – I’m curious and I eventually want to play through the other branches rather than just reading them – this is not a priority.
It’s made me more curious about tags, but not about this game.
I actually love the idea of introducing a new game system with an adventure you can play through in your own time and get to understand how things work.
So why did I enjoy myself while playing and felt disappointed afterwards?
Part of it is the railroady characters of the adventure. This is inbuilt in the medium to a degree – a comic means you need to draw specific moments in the story – but I’m not sure whether it goes beyond that and I will pay attention to how other games introduce their rulesets/game loops.
This is weird, because I started out really liking this, game/adventure, and the longer I think about it the less I do.
Some of that is inbuilt – there was little opportunity for roleplay, for making decisions about the character.
Normally, you’d choose your descriptive tags yourself, but I also wonder how easy it is in tag systems to evolve your character in response to events.
In the Legend in the Mist system, there is a mechanism (if you had three negative events, you abandon the tag, if you have three positive ones, you evolve it; either way it’s gone) and part of my problem might simply be that I haven’t played long enough to grow into the character.
We’ll see. I’m not sure what is going on yet, so I’ll just mark this as ‘something I want to think about again/watch out for when playing games with a similar system’ rather than coming to a conclusion about whether I like this or not.
What is it?
It’s a choose-your-own-adventure comic book that teaches you the basics of the ‘Legend in the Mist’ game.
As such, the actions and outcomes are limited.
Is it playable out of the box?
You can play through, but you can’t play.
Amendments:
None. I did interpret a couple of items, but the game encourages you to do narrative interpretations, so while that was individual and the next person may come to a different outcome, this remains within the scope of the tutotirial,and it made no difference whatsoever.
Tools
2d6, thrown together.
Price:
Free. This is the taster. The Core Rulebook is $30. which means I will not pick it up for a very long time, if ever, and only if it’s on sale.
All in all, this didn’t captivate me enough, and I have more than a hundred different games in my collection. (itch.io charity bundles FTW; I grabbed the first when I wasn’t even that keen on solo play, but that figure is not an exaggeration.)
Verdict
📟 Ultimately, the tutorial is not a game
🧳 Needs unpacking
I had fun, this was quick, it needed no brain, and I want to know the other main branches of the story, but I’m not going to grab the rulebook.
This took me around 1h to play, I made minimal notes. There are plenty of story hooks that I would want to play if this was *my* story, but it turns out that I’m more invested in a character that sprung from my brain, however casually in the King’s Courier than the much better-fleshed out character that a hundred other people can pick up and equally play. I had fun, but it wasn’t as intense an experience.
This is a tag-based game, and I’m not sure how well that would work for me, because you have to make up tags and then decide what advantages/disadvantages they give you, and some tags were described that I have no idea where they came from (maybe I just didn’t read the adventure well enough). I have other games using similar systems that I can play without spending $30 on them, so while I’m not retiring this yet – I’m curious and I eventually want to play through the other branches rather than just reading them – this is not a priority.
It’s made me more curious about tags, but not about this game.
I actually love the idea of introducing a new game system with an adventure you can play through in your own time and get to understand how things work.
So why did I enjoy myself while playing and felt disappointed afterwards?
Part of it is the railroady characters of the adventure. This is inbuilt in the medium to a degree – a comic means you need to draw specific moments in the story – but I’m not sure whether it goes beyond that and I will pay attention to how other games introduce their rulesets/game loops.
This is weird, because I started out really liking this, game/adventure, and the longer I think about it the less I do.
Some of that is inbuilt – there was little opportunity for roleplay, for making decisions about the character.
Normally, you’d choose your descriptive tags yourself, but I also wonder how easy it is in tag systems to evolve your character in response to events.
In the Legend in the Mist system, there is a mechanism (if you had three negative events, you abandon the tag, if you have three positive ones, you evolve it; either way it’s gone) and part of my problem might simply be that I haven’t played long enough to grow into the character.
We’ll see. I’m not sure what is going on yet, so I’ll just mark this as ‘something I want to think about again/watch out for when playing games with a similar system’ rather than coming to a conclusion about whether I like this or not.
