Feedback:
I’ve tried out most of your games, and I have to say, I honestly don’t understand why there are all so similar. It makes it extremely hard to get into anything new that you write.
You start out in a small medieval fantasy town as a novice magic user, and are thrust into an adventure featuring either ghosts or demons as the main threat/villain. You always have almost the same exact list of spells/powers every time. You are always some kind of village reject/outcast and it always has something to do with your abilities/family, which is always kept vague. The love interests always consist of the same generic archetypes. You have to either expel a demon/deity/ghost at the end. They even all have similar titles. Yet you never make an Enchanter feel any different at all from a Magician, a Mage, or even a Necromancer. To me, all of your newer works feel like rewrites of your original Demon Hunter books.
Now, someone might bring up another author like Lucid who also has his own signature style, but see, every single Lucid game feels completely different, even when he returns to his signature genre, fantasy. He’s adept at making these big, stat-based sim games where you can expect to embrace a completely different role than the last, even though he’s relied on a specific core set of mechanics for years. His most recent game, Life of a Starship Captain, contains every single Lucid trope from the past five or so years. But it still manages to be mostly fresh, because he picks a new setting and plot every time and takes good advantage of it.
I feel like you’re trying to do the same thing, Sam, but in my opinion, you’re on the opposite end of the spectrum. All of your recent games are too samey. Necromancer feels no different than this or Burden. Or again, your original books.
Sadly, Mysteries feels that way, too. It feels…uninspired. Like you keep trying to nail a very specific story but no telling will ever turn out good enough. Now, this new installment could be a turnaround, but that’s what I’m saying. Not from the small slice you’ve already put out. I’ve never read your work before recently, but, having binged through good chunks of your library of work, its clear this problem seems to have persisted. I’m honestly shocked no one has pointed it out before. You’re obviously not the only one on here with this problem, but with how many books you put out, I thought it needed to be stated.
Because of this saminess across your body of work, it also makes things impeccably boring. I feel like I’ve done it all before, every time. I’m a DnD player who loves when I get the ability to be a mage or a wizard. A game like Necromancer should have been right up my alley, a day one purchase, even. But my I had no confidence in the quality, and I was proven right in the end. It’s all the same cynical, moody fantasy trot with another cynical, moody, outcasted character who wields the same magic and same stats with the same characters in the same exact setting every single time.
In my opinion, you never change the setting, MC, romance, magic, origin story, roles, villains, monsters, genre, nothing. And so it is impeccably tiresome to even test.
This is all just my honest thoughts, of course, meant to encourage and uplift, not break down. Whatever you decide to do, I wish you the best of luck.
