Zelda-inspired tabletop RPG Break!! is the next big crowdfunding hit
The successful campaign has spawned an ongoing series of adventures
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The successful campaign has spawned an ongoing series of adventures
Developers Torpor Games have been teasing something mysterious over the last few months and they’ve finally shed light on their future plans. The acclaimed political RPG Suzerain is getting even deeper thanks to an upcoming paid expansion called Kingdom Of Rizia and a free 2.0 update called Amendment, the developers announced during this week’s LudoNarraCon digital fest.
One of 2022’s bestest games, tabletop-ish RPG Citizen Sleeper is now being turned into an actual tabletop game called Cycles Of The Eye, designed by series’ creator Gareth Damian Martin and long-time TTRPG smith Alfred Valley. Indie book publisher Lost In Cult have launched their latest campaign to crowdfund Cycles Of The Eye, as well as their next art book focused on the game’s dystopian cyberpunk world.
Confession time, everyone: I’m still only about 2.5 hours into Disco Elysium. Games journalism sin or what? Somehow, despite being primed by the excellent time I had with its demo five years ago, I just bounced off this one. I very quickly got stuck in a frustrating loop of fatally ballsing up no matter what I did – presumably I badly biffed my stats right out the gate to get soft-locked in the first area – and despite deciding I’d restart in a day or two, several years later my play-time hasn’t extended past that first session. Sad times all round, I’m sure you’ll agree, but what’s it got to do with Betrayal At Club Low?
Well, when I picked up Betrayal At Club Low for the RPS Game Club this month, I was transported back to my abortive run at Disco Elysium. It’s not that I’ve never played a stat-check-heavy RPG before. Far from it. But somehow, each game’s presentation resonated together in my weird brain mush. It must have been something to do with the combination of a surreal, seedy, not-quite-our-world-but-still-very-recognisable setting, and the constant presence of numbers reminding me of my character’s strengths stacked up against their many, many weaknesses.
Honkai: Star Rail throws you into the body of an amnesiac protagonist with unknowable hidden powers who has been awakened from a deep slumber by someone called Kafka. This woman is something of a mystery and seems to have a flair for the dramatic as she kicks off the whole game by playing an invisible violin along to the classic Baroque epic Pachelbel’s Canon as massive, intergalactic monsters invade a spaceship.
It’s an incredibly cool opening, the kind of thing that John Wick would watch to get pumped up before, well, John Wick-ing all over the place. It’s pretty clear that Kafka isn’t a hero, but they’ve woken you up, and since you’ve got no memories, you must be one of the good guys. This setup feels familiar, but there are enough changes to make it feel new and get the blood thoroughly pumping.