The Hunter's Journals - Tattered Sails Reviews

The interactive mechanics are not like other interactive fiction I've played. It is much more like a table top game. Combat is actually handled in rounds with randomly generated dice rolls. You can speed this up to just show the final result but it's still a table top way of handling things and I didn't like it. In table top games you can build your character to weight the dice rolls through backgrounds, stats, gear, race, etc. This game's character creation was so minimal that I felt that the outcome of combat was very random. This was a huge interruption to the story because poor results weren't injuries or delays. Poor results (at least early on for me) meant death. Also, the introduction didn't explain how skill points were used. I guessed that they would power abilities that I would unlock because I gained and lost skill points from the simplest choices. For example I looked around a house (+1). Another time the game thought it was rude of me to want to speak to someone (-1). I never figured out how this would come into play because I felt too weak in combat (which I did not expect from interactive fiction) and too wary from the skill point hits from exploration to enjoy the game. I just opted for a refund. If you like rogue-like interactive fiction than give it a try, but I prefer choices that matter rather than dice rolls.