Review: The Cluster of Echoes #1 Nightshift

Nightshift is a horror gamebook written by Victoria Hancox and was originally published in 2019. It is a self-contained product, but the most recent offering (2nd edition) ties it to the author's later gamebooks, forming a series called The Cluster of Echoes. I should note that the connection is fairly surface-level; I actually started with book #3, and it didn't impede my enjoyment or understanding one bit. Apart from the sixth and final book in the series (Game Over), you can play them in any order you like.

In case you're not familiar with the tern, a gamebook is a form of interactive fiction. The text is organised into numbered sections (or paragraphs). Most sections offer you multiple ways to progress, and depending on your choice you are directed to another section to continue, hopping from section to section in the book.

Writing and Art

The text is conversational but competent. Apart from a few typos and missing commas, it's all pretty clean. Because the game is structured very much like a puzzle, I didn't really experience a sense of dread, but there were definitely a couple of horrific scenes in there.

The game has 400 sections in total (reminiscent of old-school gamebooks) plus one that ties it to the series, with 42 "bad endings" and one victory paragraph. The interior images are all black-and-white. I liked some of the filler illustrations meant to break up the text. The art ranges from serviceable to off-putting; some of them are quite pixelated for some reason as well.

Mechanics and Structure

Nightshift is much closer to the Choose Your Own Adventure series than Fighting Fantasy in that no randomisers (cards or dice) are used. However, much like old-school gamebooks, it is about collecting items, gathering clues, and solving puzzles. There are a few cases where you can progress by sheer luck, but it's never because of a die roll.

Although I enjoy elaborate mechanics as much as the next nerd, I've come to like this approach just as much — as long as the puzzles are varied and challenging, and there are ample opportunities to gather information to help you make the right choices.

There a few riddles in there, and another puzzle or two test your knowledge of the real world, but most challenges require an item or a specific action for which you had hopefully found a clue earlier on. There are a couple of these that you can easily miss out on but absolutely cannot finish the game without. It can be a little frustrating unless you keep track of your runs.

There's one red herring in particular that I thought was both ingenious and cruel. Not everyone you can talk to is a friend (although most of the time you can tell who's on your side).

Story and Gameplay

You work in a hospital as a nurse. It's the night shift, and you're just waking up from a nap between two emergencies. You immediately realise something's wrong when you find your colleague murdered, and the murderer is still around... Can you survive the night shift?

As you explore the hospital, it becomes apparent that you're not in Kansas any more. Creeping along the dark hospital corridors, it all starts to feel like you're in a nightmare, with an appropriate cast of creepy characters and surreal environs. It's not just a terrifying hospital; it's weird and otherworldly too, which makes it feel much more like a game, but it also means there's always a chance of something crazy awaiting you in the next room, rewarding exploration with a clue, description of a gory scene, or an interesting way to die.

Navigating the environment is IMHO unnecessarily challenging. Although a lot of times various sections of the hospital are named explicitly ("if you want to enter the vascular ward, turn to XX"), there were still numerous "left or right" choices without any hint whatsoever. I'm told that the hardcover version actually contains a map of the hospital (but it's also available on the author's website).

Summary

Overall, Nightshift is a great little puzzle if you're not squeamish about body horror (it takes place in a nightmarish hospital after all), and you don't mind the occasional "you hadn't picked up the right item so you die" sections. It's not perfect by any means, but it's a decent romp, especially from a first time designer.

Nightshift is available in softcover, hardcover, and Kindle formats on Amazon (com, uk, de, etc.).

Review - Best Left Buried

Disclaimer: Note that some of the links below are affiliate links (meaning I get a small percentage of the sale without extra cost to you or the publisher).

Best Left Buried is a fantasy horror game, where the protagonists are poor schmucks exploring dungeons or dungeon-like environments (called Crypts). It advertises itself as an OSR game (according to the system category on OneBookShelf), but it should be noted that the game isn't strictly D&D-esque.

Review - Esoteric Enterprises

Disclaimer: Note that some of the links below are affiliate links (meaning I get a small percentage of the sale without extra cost to you or the publisher).

Esoteric Enterprises is a modern occult horror dungeon crawling sandbox RPG. It is a synthesis of the premise of World of Darkness and the structured gameplay of old-school D&D, where outcasts and/or adventurous souls venture below the city and become involved in all sorts of illegal things, rub shoulders with the underbelly of society, ally themselves with vampires, and get in the crossfire of various gangs, cults, and supernatural big baddies.

The author, in an interview, describes the game as follows:

This is a world basically like our own, except magic is real, and dangerous, and wildly illegal. Of course, plenty of things are dangerous and illegal – such as drugs and organ-legging and bank robberies – so the worlds of organised crime and the supernatural have become inexorably linked. Things are only like our familiar world on the surface; beneath every city there is a literal underworld, where strange things hide from scrutiny, and the reckless or desperate traffic in things humans really shouldn’t be meddling with.

The mechanics are chiefly based on Lamentations of the Flame Princess with a few twists here and there. The game also comes with a robust system to generate various underground factions and undercity locations to facilitate the sort of free-spirited dungeon crawling and conspiracy the game is built for.

Review: Kuf

Disclaimer: I was provided a review copy of the game free of charge.

Kuf is an occult investigative game with a system based on Knave. The player characters are aware that something is fundamentally wrong with "reality", and thus they are drawn into a frantic search for knowledge and power. In the postscript it is explained that the author intended to match seemingly opposite styles of gaming: modern day gnostic horror (like Kult) and old-school D&D (even if some would argue that Knave isn't exactly that, I guess it's close enough).

Review: Eldritch Tales

Note that some of the links below are affiliate links (meaning I get a small percentage of the sale without extra cost to you).

Eldritch Tales, as its subtitle says, a Lovecraftian White Box role-playing game. It takes place in the 1920s (like the majority of games centred around the Cthulhu Mythos), where the player characters investigate mysteries and strange phenomena (just like in Call of Cthulhu or Stalkers of the Elder Dark).

Review: The Nightmares Underneath

This review is part of a series on thematic OSR games (as defined here). Also note that some of the links below are affiliate links (meaning I get a small percentage of the sale without extra cost to you).

The Nightmares Underneath is a monstrous game sewn together from various bits of both classic and modern games; it combines both old-school and modern design sensibilities in an exemplary way. The basics are simple, but it seems quite complex at first as it addresses a plethora of situations that may arise in play.

The premise of the game is that the mortal realms (collectively called the Kingdom of Dreams, where law and science provide the ruling ideology, as opposed to most fantasy setting's pagan idolatry) are threatened by incursions from the realm of nightmares. The upper levels of these dungeons resemble the mundane world to a certain degree, but the deeper one goes, the more surreal and alien (dare I say nightmarish) they become. Most people are helpless against the influence of these nightmare dungeons and their denizens', except for the player characters.

Review: Stalkers of the Elder Dark

This a reading review of the recently published Stalkers of the Elder Dark. It is a game of cosmic horror in the veins of Call of Cthulhu and Silent Legions. It is a small game (roughly 12k words on 94 pages of 6×9 inches) with very few mechanical widgets, set in the 1920s, and the cosmic creatures, grimoires, and alien technology greatly resembles the Cthulhu mythos (although it also alludes to another product by the authors, Opherian Scrolls).