Green_Knight's Solo Adventures

Unreview: Lorekeeper

( Game Description )

I’m tired to the bone. I had all the life sucked out of me: here’s a bunch of words on a page (some missing in a mock blackout) and it appears that the game the creator envisions has nothing to do with the game I’ve caught glimpses of while reading the rules.

Indie game makers: will you please make a whole game? And then give it to someone who has never seen your game before and ask them to play it and take notes what they find clear and what they don’t? I’m no longer completely new to solo space, though I still have a literal mind.

I can’t make sense of this, I can’t make a _game_ of this, and at this point, I’m too pissed off to invest more time and try harder. Somewhere in here is an interesting game. I haven’t found it, and I will no longer try.

First Impressions: Arcana After the Fall

( Game Description )

On the one hand, Tarot. One the other tentacles, there’s no gameplay as such, though you pull only 8 cards (plus the Fool/the World); the prompts are always the same but in different order, and this is postapocalyptic with ‘you’ as the protagonist.

While I did not see anything terribly off, not all of the interpretations are quite on the nose for my tarot practice. ‘What does wonder look like to you’ doesn’t scream ‘hermit’ to me.

Add the apocalypse, and I have no interest whatsoever.

Random tables are not exactly agents of chaos, but they’re related. You use dice (and sometimes playing cards) to select items on random tables. On the other hand, there are few RPGs that make zero use of random tables; they’re extremely useful.

In this post I want to go over different types of random tables and the roles they can play in solo RPGs. Not covered are oracle tables (‘spark tables’) that give you a word or three and make you think about the narrative. What does ‘imprison, success’ mean in the context of your adventure? Only you know. And sometimes you don’t.

As far as I know, the terminology I use is my own (though I may have picked up a thing or two from elsewhere) – I just needed a way to think (and talk) about this.

( Generic vs Specific tables )

First Impressions Be Still, Archivist

( Game Description )

I’m always down for games using Tarot, and I’m always interested in making investigation fun as a mechanism, particularly for solo play. The Tarot interpretations provided look sound, and this is from the creator of the Froggy Hat game, so there's a certain amount of trust. For the time being, with a limited amount of spoons and concentration, and a certain amount of fragility, I am putting this on ice.

First Impressions: You are a bird

( Game Description )

This is a pure journalling exercise with some mildly interesting prompts (and some that are not); I don’t think there’s much replay value (you get the prompts in a specific order) and, well, that’s all there is, you answer a few prompts and the thing is over. This is very lightweight indeed.

Playthrough/Review: Dog Detectives

( Game Description )

I have a keen intrest in running mysteries, so this one intrigued me: you go to multiple locations, roll on a theme table, then roll to see whether you find a clue. When you’ve visited all locations, you try and assemble a possible explanation from your clues. The more clues you use, the better your chances of rolling a success on the deduction table.

This is an interesting approach. In the end, it depends partly on dice luck (you can get 0 clue and a setback, 0 clue and a minor setback, 1 clue, or 2 clues in each of the 9 stops). The two failure conditions also mean you reduce your investigation dice by one step. Since you start with d10/d12 (one for friendlyness the other for ferocity, you decide what kind of dog you aren and what's appropriate in that moment) that quickly takes you down to precious few clues and little option to succeed, so you might need to reset your dice and forego one location.

The themes are all over the place - adventure, abundance, jealousy, trust – and sometimes completely baffling. What does ‘payment’ mean at a school when you’re a dog?

I’m also not a fan of the resolution table. The odds are not in favour of finding your missing human, and I struggled to weave the clues into a coherent tale.
A medical worker, a deity, a token of affection, some of my favourite treats, a thief, and a piece of clothing. Put them all together and you find your missing human (or not).

I concocted a wild tale, rolled lucky, and wrote ‘the end’.

This game has taught me something about mysteries, I guess. It falls into the gap between ‘using randomisers to determine success’ and ‘using your imagination to reach your goal’. Overall, I was lucky that I managed to gain enough clues and that I could build a narrative out of those clues, and that I was successful in my roll.
Failing to reach my objective would have sucked and I kinda feel I cheated by bending narrative reality in my favour.

I don’t think I fully understand how you are meant to play this, and all in all, it was much less fun than I had hoped to find. I wanted to go to different locations based on the clues I found/the story so far, but a church/temple wasn’t available, and I’d visited the health centre before gaining clues that should have led me there.

So neither the tables nor the mechanism fully worked for me. Maybe I was just unlucky in my rolls/draws, but this does not fascinate me enough to try again under the exact same rules.

Not tagged with single session though it would certainly be possible, because I had to make myself come back and finish it – my playthrough started with setbacks and I wasn’t getting enough inspiration from the game to build more story.

So yes, I vanished for a while, am trying to finish and post the half-written posts I made earlier, and get back to blogging. I’m fine, everyone is fine, I just had zero capacity for anything that needed brain and concentration.

( Where I'm at )

I’m enjoying the casual format of this blog so far and intend to keep up this series; I love discovering new and weird games in bundles.
But I also want to be a bit more focused in my hunt for a solo practice that suits me, and thus I am going to try something new: every month in 2026 I want to focus on one play style/mechanism/type of game.

(This month, or what’s left of it, is reserved for generic Solo RPG resources).

I have no idea how long I will follow this plan, whether I'll get through all of it, and when I’ll abandon it (with the 20x24 I always seem to crash in July/August), but it’s better than no plan.

( Twelve months, one rough plan )

We'll see how it goes, and what, if anything, I will plan for 2027.

One thing I think will help is that I can pre-select resources; write down the ones that are most interesting to me and thus start each segment of the year right off the bat, instead of desperately around for resources on the day.

First Impression: Commons Rider

( Game Description )

The ‘Conflict’ system is… complicated. It involves dice pools and a lot of judgement: how expensive would it be to do this thing vs. that thing (this is akin to a difficulty class, only you have one system for deciding how many dice you roll, another what number you roll against, and then you take your successes and buy actions; you don’t roll against ‘I hit it’ directly.

I can see this system being interesting to run, but also carrying a greater-than-average mental load. This will become easier over time, but I’m not sure how smooth the negotiations-with-self will be; it would need a lot of switching between player and GM mode. The fact that this is a tag-based system where you decide what traits your character has and what those traits mean, mechanically also points to a high cognitive load, and if I needed another reason not to engage further with this game, this is it.

Playthrough/Review: Rise of the Gods

( Game Description )

The idea isn’t horrible. If you have your toolbox at the ready and you want to play among the gods, with a clear-cut mission, and this story appeals to you, you may love it, and you may end up in interesting places. I’m a writer with a million ideas churning through my brain, I can create new ideas at the drop of a hat, and while I sometimes appreciate a ready-made quest starter to give to my player in DnD, the things I look for there are simpler and things that fit into my world.

This doesn’t. There may be a day when I feel I want an epic story seed and this is it, but that day may never come, and in the meantime, this is taking up space on my hard drive and in my brain that I can use better.

Playthrough/Review: Scroll of Changes

( Game Description )

I’m happy this thing exists but it didn’t work for me at all. Part of it is that it’s just so fussy, and I had to constantly look things up. Part of it is that the instructions about what kind of event the characters meet are just a bit too vague.

A giant turn-off, the thing that made me want to not use this at all, is that it encouraged me to think about success/failure (you have to use a binary result as part of the system), and that I was rushing through the gameplay/story creation to reach the next step in the gamified system. That’s partly my fault – I wanted to simulate the use of this tool and did not want to spend days or weeks playing, one event at a time. At the same time, ‘the characters will encounter an event of this magnitude’ ruined the discovery for me, and I found myself un-inspired.

The longer I engaged, the less I liked it.

I need to go back and think about whether this type of mental oracle – what *type* of challenge am I facing – is useful and/or fun, and how this list compares to other GMing tools.

With the DM in the driving seat, I can see how determining ‘this is a skirmish’ vs ‘this is the Big Bad’ and ‘this encounter is about the party growing together’ or ‘this is about discovering a truth about the world’. (I _think_ Ironsworn works a bit like that? I’m just leaving this as a note to self). Coming at it from a player perspective, you obviously have an idea about where in a storyline you are – at the beginning, near the resolution – but emergent gameplay and unexpected complications are a big part of the fun, as are ambiguous results (you killed the Big Bad, but you lost something important, and discovered a third thing. Is this a success or a failure?

Having thought more about the process it’s entirely possible that this type of oracle – an oracle shaping the mood/theme of an encounter – would work for me; this particular resource definitely doesn’t.

Here, the Marie Kondo lens is definitely an asset. I was quite excited to try this out, but found the actual gameplay uninspiring; this does not spark joy for me.

So this isn’t a bundle, just a sale, but it’s a massive sale on drivethrurpg.com (Apparently there will be special deals on Friday and Monday, but I cannot wait, so I bought things on day one; if another reduction happens, I'll have to cope with that.)

Over the past months, I accumulated a wishlist of items that I really want; and when everything was around 1/3 off, I pounced. A couple of solo games, Diana Warrior Princess which I absolutely HAVE TO check out, a rules light game for two players called Gawain (I’m contractually obliged to get this, I don't make the rules) and a stack of books about games. Most of them Mythic. I’ve used the Fate Chart of Mythic GME, I’ve read parts of the book, and I do have a policy that if I borrow a book/read the preview to the end and like it, I will buy it. (I also have a policy of rarely buying things I can't check out. Bite me.)

And with that massive spending spree, my RPG resource collection is pretty much complete.

This doesn’t mean I won’t buy more products. I mean, let’s be real. There’ll be more itch.io charity bundles, and more Humblebundles, and the occasional product that catches my eye (some of them on my wishlist AND discounted, but my budget ran out before my wishlist; such is life). But I currently have more things than I can play in a year (because a lot of them are scenarios or game systems and while I can handle a one-page solo game in a day, or two in one week, a game system with two dozen possible adventures will Take More Time, and that’s great.
I’ve made the majority of purchases after working out how to have fun with solo games, and while I am going to tweak this to have MORE fun, I am having plenty of fun already and I can see a lot more fun in my future.

In the meantime, I’m going through my very long list of resources I’ve picked up in the last ten years or so, so I finally know what I’ve got and where I can look when I want inspiration.
(I will never use everything, and that’s ok, but turning ‘huge mountain of stuff’ into ‘organised pile of stuff, taking note of interesting settings/subclasses/rule sets’ is a huge reduction of mental load; it’s exciting.)

Dice are, by far, the most common random element in TTRPGs and solo play. There are very few games that don’t use dice at all, though some use them sparingly: throw 1d6 and otherwise, pull cards.

Dice you need

( The bear neccessities )

I cannot imagine playing RPGs and having no dice at all.

Paraphernalia

( Things that make rolling dice better )

Besides a dice tray for containment while rolling, having spillproof clear containers to keep whatever I currently use at hand and visible, I have refrained from extras.

Materials

( It's true… or not )

Thankfully, I actually love cheap acrylic dice best.

Sources

( Where should you get your dice? )

And this is how you become a dice goblin. Ooops.

Unreview:
Hell and Death and An American Guitar

( Game Description )

Drat. This looked like fun; it has a slightly weird dice pool mechanic, you’re ultimately fighting the Devil (who has, of course, 666 hit points), but a good chunk of game is missing.
I do not know how to fill the gap, so this is an unreview after all, and I’m deleting it, but I’m a bit miffed, because this could have been fun.

First Impressions: Origin Story


( Game Description )

I got to the first instruction, where you're supposed to put down your name and your superpowers, and I just froze. Instant stress reaction. Completely blocked, could not think of anything, just completely in a state of fear.

Yeah, I don't know what's up with that, either. I've always had a problem with being creative on demand.
Compare that to all of the characters I have created recently with Colorful Characters some of who were a lot weirder than your bog-standard superhero, I come, once more, to the conclusion that anything that starts with a stylized description is a bad match for me (I always freeze when character creation begins with 'name, hair colour, shoe size') even though the journey in ColorfulCharacters *does* have name as the first category, but there you're talking about why you're called that, and you may be prompted to say more about your name(s).

I bailed at the first comics panel. One day I would not mind attempting to make a comic or graphic novel (I even have a couple of ideas, though not the drawing skills), but you need a certain amount of brain to translate story into comics panels.

It's a great exercise. It's super creative, and you get great prompts. It's just not for me. I'm not keen enough oncomics OR superheroes to want to do this. So goodbye, BlueTack Woman (who can mend anything at all), I guess BlandMan (not invisible, just unremarkable; he'll blend in anywhere) wins this round.

Honourably retired. I don't think I'll ever want to play this, but it feels solid, and I think someone else will have fun with it.

This is going to be a series of posts, not in the least because I do not actually have ‘the answer’ to ‘how do I get started’.

The answer to that will be different for different people and different types of games, and depend on your mental state, time budget, and personal preferences, so expect this more like a which Discworld book should I read first chaotic flowchart than a simple ‘a, b, c’. .

The short, trial-and-error, might-be-fun-and-might-not answer is 'pick something that appeals to you, throw yourself into it, and keep tweaking it until you have fun (or until you're thoroughly bored with even the idea of solo play and give it up forever).
It's not wrong. Many people come to love solo RPGs by this route, but I would recommend that even if you're keen to delve in right now, you spend at least 10% of the time and spoons you have available researching other systems, and exploring what else you could play and how else you could play it.

( Sparking Joy )

Domain 1: Complexity

There's more than one axis here, so many games can be very simple along one axis and create a high mental load along another. If something feels too much, it's ok to walk away, sometimes for now, sometimes completely. I'm learning that lesson and will probably have to learn it again.

( Length and Prep )

Domain 2: Style of Gameplay

DnD rests on three pillars: Social, Exploration, and Combat. Solo play touches on all of these, but coming from a slightly different angle.

( Preliminary musings )

I *think* I'm tending more towards exploration than combat, especially as some of the fun parts of combat in TTRPGs – outwitting the DM by using special abilities and collaborating with other players – just don't work anywhere near as well in solo play.

Domain 3: Preparation

If you're lucky, prep is play. Otherwise, at least make it fun.

( When you can't avoid prep )

Domain 4: Gameplay Loop

I don't feel I'm familiar enough with SoloRPG-the-Hobby to say much of substance on this topic yet.

This is a problem because this is how I will find the answer to 'what do I enjoy' and 'which game should I pick right now' if I don't know what's possible?
I mean, I've been studying soloRPGs for a few months, I've acquired a huge stack of games (some cheap, some free, some in bundles); I'm reading RPGs, solo and group games regularly; I'm rolling dice to try out mechanics, I'm (finally) playing games, I'm watching playthroughs… All the time I am finding ways of playing that I like and learning what is too complicated, too boring, or just too much of a mental load, all by poking at different systems.

From that point of view, I don't regret playing things that don't work for me; I'm learning from those games, too.

A lot of people who play solo seem to have a toolbox containing multiple approaches, so they can simplify conflict resolution, bring in additional subsystems, and just doing everything to keep the story flowing, and I definitely want to develop those skills.

TL;DR:
I don't think there is a straightforward answer to 'how do I start to play' beyond 'pick up some cheap/free games and mess around and see what you like while learning as much about the hobby as you can'.

To come back to the place where I'm stuck, because I think it's a good way of illustrating how solo RPG does or doesn't work:

I am currently attempting to start a short campaign using the Tiny Dungeon rule set. It's a game that is fairly pared down, originally a group game, but frequently soloed. I have used the Colorful Characters process to roll up three characters, who promptly came alive, and purchased a set of random dungeon cards that is highly praised, to see whether a randomly-created dungeon works for me.
So the main character (two are just along for the ride; this one has a goal and motivation, which was NOT my intention) comes to the city and is looking to pick up her first proper adventuring job (She'll just happen to team up with the other two characters I rolled).
I have a fair idea of what will happen to get her to the starter quest. If I was writing a book, I'd be skimming the surface of those scenes until we get to the real action, the dungeon is entered, and the first enemy awaits.

But I have been paying attention to how RPGs work, and – see the three pillars above – I don't want to play a game where all I do is fight enemies, even though this is the mechanic I want to try out.
If I was DMing this for others, I'd describe the marketplace a little and then ask 'what do you want to do'.
And I want to bring some of that energy – the 'play' aspect – into my own game, but I am not sure how yet. Which is frustrating.
So I will take this situation away, and think about it some more, and write out what I could do and how I could address it with the tools I *am* familiar with, and decide later. In the meantime, I'll check out more games and log some more resources and fill my toolbox, but I'm just somewhat frustrated and a little bit annoyed that I just… have no idea how to proceed from here.

I have a number of books _about_ solo play, and half a million rulesets; one of them will provide the answer, but I have no patience, I want to proceed NOW.

(How would you approach this in your own game? I don't want to create a complication; I don't want a fight in the marketplace, and I know exactly what the noticeboard looks like once my character finds it, but I want her to look around, maybe notice some NPCs or future quest hooks or potential allies. It may be relevant that Futto is a 4ft goblin in a marketplace of mixed clientele; she would NOT simply turn up and get an overview and head straight for the noticeboard.)

First Impresssions: LordSworn

( Game Description )

I’ve been staring at this for several days and decided to stop making an effort, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be in the mental space for this. A big part of the narrative will be how different characters react to events; and that sounds much more like a group game (albeit a grim, challenging one that I would want to play only with people I trust, and I probably want to play other games more).

It’s an intriguing thought, the materials are well-presented, the tables offer plenty of customisation, and the gameplay sounds interesting, and yet this has been open on my computer for over a week, and every time I’ve looked at it, my heart sank.

It’s time to acknowledge that this game is preventing me from playing games that excite me, that make my heart sing. I’m not going to eliminate it from my life entirely, but I will be removing it from my hard drive for now.

Unreview: New.Unfold

( Game Description )

I don’t think I fully understand what you’re supposed to do with these instructions. It’s a reflective exercise, but I’d like to see more guidance on how to use it, because I am baffled by where I am supposed to end up, and what I am supposed to learn.

Also, and this is a personal thing, I hate postapocalyptic settings. Having your life wiped out is not, to me, entertainment, or even a reflective exercise, it’s just a very, very scary reality for far too many people.

First Impressions Froggy Hat

(This is a first impressions post because I will need time to engage with this one, and can’t do too many events in a row. It’s delightful, but chewy.)

( Game Description )

The tarot interpretations are pretty darn good - not always what I expected, but solid. And just this once, the game document is long enough to go into detail: there's keyword lists for the minor arcana and slightly more detail for the majors; 15 pages of content in total.

You can treat this as the game it’s meant to be, and have a ton of fun. I’m choosing to treat it more like my tarot card of the day, where I engage with any one concept in depth, thinking about what it means to me and what tools I have/might find to deal with it. Only now with added frogs. And hats. So it will be a while before I finish this game, but I just love the gentle kindness of it, and the concept made me laugh.

Unreview: Heartbreak Heist

( Game Description )


Calling it what it is: this is a guided journalling exercise with minimal prompts and a small gamified mechanic that can easily be nudged into the place you want it to be.

Unreview: Now what do I do?

( Game Description )

Pet death is a real possibility in this game, and it’s probably inevitable. I don’t feel positive about that.
This is a game that demands that you create the whole story, everything. You find an object related to your death. Quick, quick, think of something. And eventually, you need to tie all of these together and make a story of who killed you and how.

This will be either draining or boring or unsatisfying, or all of them. I rolled one room and bailed.

Creating mysteries for TTRPGs is a Hard Problem, and most solutions either involve ‘the GM knows but isn’t telling you’ or ‘the GM sets up a matrix of plausible events, whatever you work hard for turns out to be the solution.’

This ‘game’ has no such resolution mechanic, so you need to bring *that* to the table as well.
Combined with the harm-to-pets and some dissonances in the random tables (your character can be from the Colonial era, but the game can take place in the modern day: How the fuck am I supposed to get revenge on my murderer by scaring them to death? They’re dead anyway.) I just don’t feel like spending hours and hours licking this into shape.

I’d love to try out the ‘track’ mechanic at some point but maybe not in this game.

Playthrough/Review: Colorful Characters (Character Creation Tool)

( Game Description )

This isn’t a game in itself, though it is gamified a little, but the prompting and the ‘feels-like-a-game’ part helped me to come up with things about two characters that I was struggling with (I created a character and a general setting/situation for Combat Apothecary that I did not get to play; in that game they would have been solo, this system needs at least 3 players.).

Character Creation is not my thing. It’s not how I write. Constructs made consciously don’t come to life for me; whether that’s in books or in DnD.

The format forced me to empty my brain of any other thoughts and distractions, and to just go through one step after the next. And yes, there’s a name on the list, and an origin, but I can _tell a story_ for that, and I don’t have to worry about things like hair colour and height, which I really don’t care about at all. This is more about the *Character* than their mechanical description.

I have taken the first of these characters back into the system I’m trying to use right now (Tiny Dungeon) and was able to come up with mechanics that work for that character. Some of the traits were a little surprising, but they fit with what the character had to say about themselves and what others said about the character. This one is treefolk, so they are proficient in Heavy Melee weapons and have mastered Clubs, they know no fear (and get advantage on save tests), they’re good at wilderness survival, but they also have an eidetic memory.

I’ll create the other two tomorrow (well, one I had mostly created, the other suggests a lot of stuff due to her heritage), but knowing what they look like from the inside, I can now find better traits.

Playthrough/Review: Tic-Tac-Tomb

( Game Description )

I’m in the mood for some solo dungeon delving. I’m looking for a simple mechanic where I roll for what kind of challenge or treasure I can find, roll to overcome the trap/monster, loot a little, and move to the next room.

This mechanism sounded like fun, but the tables you're rolling on don't work for me at all. The room description and challenge are based on multiple rolls on multiple tables, though I haven’t worked out what the ‘Being’ table is FOR; it doesn’t get mentioned. You can ‘sacrifice an item’ as part of your gameplay, but you’re not actually given items unless you roll a double, which I didn’t.

This feels half-baked.

This game is also the reason I stated in my last post that journalling games are not the ones with the highest mental load. So far, the highest mental load for me has come from Oracles/Spark Tables, where you get a couple of words and have to find out what they mean in your game.

Description of the Room: It is an endemic trap cache, where one can unlock gauze.
Challenge: Choose dull Alchemy.

I don’t even. I am not feeling intelligent enough to make a story out of that. (caper_est pointed out that 'dull alchemy' probably means turning gold into lead, so there is that.) I don’t want to start there. Give me a smoky Guard Room with a Sarcophagus in which a portcullis suddenly drops. ‘None Survived’ says an inscription and, for want of a better table, 1d6 = 5 Skeletons to fight.
This may end up deadly, but at least I know where I stand. Or where I got squashed.

Playthrough/Review: You are Roadkill

( Game Description )

This actually was one of the first games I played, chosen at random. On the positive side, you don’t need to know anything about solo roleplay to play this.

On the negative side, this is depressing as fuck.

This taught me something about solo gameplay; I don’t want to play it again.

Playthrough/Review: The Disguised Frog

( Game Description )

That was unexpected. Wrote just under 1300 words, guided by the Tarot cards I pulled and the vague suggestions provided. My brain went down some very unexpected – but ultimately very hopeful – tracks.

There is, of course, a pattern to journalling games: I write out the beginning of a story, not its muddle or end (there’s always a muddle in the middle where you have to stop throwing new content into a story).

I have always struggled with writing exercises and find these games (as long as they provide enough substance and enough inspiration) extremely inspiring. Combined with the archetypes and meanings of the tarot, which I happen to know quite well by now, this was a blast.

The resulting story was weird and wonderful and I don’t know whether I shall ever write more of it and take it further, but this is the fourth game of this kind that gave me a meaningful experience.

I have not marked this as retired because I intend to play it again. Not any time soon, but this one will stay on my hard drive.

Short RPGs like this are a great way of unsticking creativity. I spend around two hours writing and rolling dice and pulling cards, there’s a definite end point, and the stakes are very low - you can’t really do this wrong.

Playthrough/Review: Combat Apothecary

( Game Description )

Well. My first DNF, but after spending about 2h and not getting to the first combat while getting more and more frustrated I decided that I had too many unplayed games on my hard drive to invest any more time into an unplayable game.


( Wot I learnt, afterwards, from other people )



It's a game where you have to bring everything yourself: the character, the setting, the gameplay, the enemies… everything. You get a small matrix of 'Environ' (18 items) with entries like 'Fort, Acropolis, Kiln' and as many 'Essence' entries. ('scorch, corrupt, undead') which includes both 'ashen' and 'cinders'.

Even if the information were presented much better (there is *so much* talk of 'lore' which from context is the same as 'essence' because there's nothing else), I'd still hesitate to call it a game.

If I have to do all of the creation myself, I'd want a much more robust system with much clearer instructions.

I did roll a basic combat just to try out the system, but other than being very very confusing indeed, I also dislike how close to the edge the character lives all the time.

In my playthrough, I was supposed to fight an undead creature, which I decided should be a zombie.
My superpower is bleed.
So basically I either bend the narrative until it cries uncle, or I can't use my class feature.

So while I like the general idea and some mechanics like not knowing when you'll meet the boss – definitely a mechanic I want to try out again – I hated the combat system and the general confusion. This is more mental load than making up a game system on the fly.