Nightbound (ProP) is a heroic-fantasy CRPG made with Twine. The blurb promises “an inventory system, turn-based combat, and class and leveling systems”, and that’s what it’s mostly focused on.
A compelling, tactically non-trivial, balanced, well-paced CRPG combat system is difficult and laborious to design. In an all-text medium, it’s doubly difficult, because you can’t lean on the visual excitement of action or the tactics of physical position. There are works of IF that have overcome this, but in most cases you end up with a system that’s basically filler: something that goes through the expected motions of RPG combat, without providing anything of the dramatic excitement or tactical challenge which those systems were invented to create, doing nothing but pad out the play time. And thus, Nightbound.
You start out by picking a stock post-D&D class (fighter, mage or rogue). You also get a choice of gender, but it was clearly written male-default and a lot of pronouns and the like have slipped through. There are the usual fantasy races in this world, but you don’t get a choice of those or a clear statement about what you are. You’re described as a war hero and various NPCs already know you by reputation, but there are hints of a shameful past.
While the combat system isn’t great, the way it’s presented is the real problem. When you encounter a monster, you just see a link that says ‘Fight!’ before you’re told anything else. Then all you’re shown about the monster is its name and hit-points: if you want to know anything about what, say, a Barghest looks like, you need to go to the menu and look it up in the bestiary. The mechanical combat information is weirdly spaced out, with lots of empty lines; even on a good-sized desktop monitor I kept having to scroll down to check that I hadn’t missed any options. Combat jumps between different pages a lot, which is disorienting, and it doesn’t do a great job of visually communicating what phase you’re in, particularly once you get a companion.
And, since there are monsters in most rooms of the map, the great majority of your time is consumed with repetitive, minimally-described, narratively-irrelevant combat.
As a story, it’s… very much a fantasy CRPG. You’re a visitor from a far-off land, but your reputation as a great albeit nonspecific war hero precedes you. The lands of Eritan have been cursed with perpetual night somehow, and as a Hero this is presumably your problem, so you do the Heroic thing and wander around doing side-quests until some plot tokens show up. You accumulate companions who trust and obey you on the basis of a few minutes’ acquaintance.
As a basic structure, that isn’t beyond redemption. You could do exactly this and pull it off through prose and characterisation. But the writing’s just trying to get the job done.
“Ah, sure,” she says, smiling. She sets the handle of her mop down against a table. “I never mind helping travelers from far off. Well, to begin…Eritan’s a big continent. It’s divided into four holds: Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western. Each is governed separately. You’re standing in Southern Hold, the southernmost tip, in fact, in Shiravelle Beach.”
So there’s some strangeness about a ‘big continent’ being divided up into only four holds – ‘hold’ suggests something a lot smaller and more directly ruled than a nation – but that’s the least of the problems here. Rather: you shouldn’t infodump on the player unless it’s important that they have that information, and if it is important then you want them to retain it, and if you want them to retain it then you probably want to call your holds something less generic. The other thing is that this whole conversation feels artificial: when was the last time you interrupted janitorial staff and had them cheerfully deliver guidebook summaries of the local region? This is a conversation that only makes sense in the mouth of Info-Giver NPC.
A frequent refrain: there’s nothing wrong with leaning on genre and its tropes. They exist because they’re powerful tools. A lot of my favourite works, in any medium, are genre-reliant as hell. But you’ve got to do something with them, not just recapitulate them.
Nightbound is a piece of large scope but small ambitions: it’s trying to do some technically laborious things, but it’s fundamentally uninterested in doing anything that might make it stand out. 3.
These Heterogenous Tasks 