Unreview: 🎪🧳🪫Bound
Oct. 31st, 2025 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solo_knightUnreview: Bound
What is it?
A one or two player journalling game about characters tied together in a bleak journey.
Is it playable out of the box?
Can’t tell. This involves a deck of cards, pulling from said deck to get journal prompts, It looks playable, I just don’t want to.
Amendments:
n/a
Tools
Playing Cards
Price:
$10
Verdict
🧳 Needs unpacking
🪫 Very draining
🎪 Really not for me
So this one actually has me torn a lot. New.Unfold I found easy to remove from my life because it’s bleak and not a game and lacks guidance. This one has intriguing design, a game mechanism (where you advance towards reaching your destination or being bogged down indefinitely), a random element of playing cards you pull to determine the next event you journal.
And some of those prompts are very interesting indeed. There’s a lot of potential story here, but once more, you need to bring the setting and the characters and the nature of the threat and the nature of the journey, and _because_ it’s all deep and reflective you can’t just roll on a random DnD table for goals (‘To steal back your sibling’s soul’) or encounters ‘four halflings with elven cloaks’. To do this game justice, you have to delve deep and think a lot and… I just don’t have the spoons.
And even if I had the spoons, this one is dark. Maybe you can haggle it down to ‘melancholy’ but I am not the audience for this. If journalling a grim perilious journey appeals to you, by all means, take a look at this (There are both one- and two-player versions available).
Part of the reason I have started this journal is to unburden my brain and my hard drive. I will never play all of the games I own (not unless I refuse to let any new games in my life, or treat them as a job, and slog through even when I don’t feel like it, and… hello? ‘Games’?)
And therefore, slightly reluctantly, I am deleting this one, too. This one is not for me, and I’m not investing the time and spoons it would need.
What is it?
A one or two player journalling game about characters tied together in a bleak journey.
Is it playable out of the box?
Can’t tell. This involves a deck of cards, pulling from said deck to get journal prompts, It looks playable, I just don’t want to.
Amendments:
n/a
Tools
Playing Cards
Price:
$10
Verdict
🧳 Needs unpacking
🪫 Very draining
🎪 Really not for me
So this one actually has me torn a lot. New.Unfold I found easy to remove from my life because it’s bleak and not a game and lacks guidance. This one has intriguing design, a game mechanism (where you advance towards reaching your destination or being bogged down indefinitely), a random element of playing cards you pull to determine the next event you journal.
And some of those prompts are very interesting indeed. There’s a lot of potential story here, but once more, you need to bring the setting and the characters and the nature of the threat and the nature of the journey, and _because_ it’s all deep and reflective you can’t just roll on a random DnD table for goals (‘To steal back your sibling’s soul’) or encounters ‘four halflings with elven cloaks’. To do this game justice, you have to delve deep and think a lot and… I just don’t have the spoons.
And even if I had the spoons, this one is dark. Maybe you can haggle it down to ‘melancholy’ but I am not the audience for this. If journalling a grim perilious journey appeals to you, by all means, take a look at this (There are both one- and two-player versions available).
Part of the reason I have started this journal is to unburden my brain and my hard drive. I will never play all of the games I own (not unless I refuse to let any new games in my life, or treat them as a job, and slog through even when I don’t feel like it, and… hello? ‘Games’?)
And therefore, slightly reluctantly, I am deleting this one, too. This one is not for me, and I’m not investing the time and spoons it would need.
