The Nascent Necromancer
By Samuel Young
The corner of the demon’s lips twitch upward in amusement. “Creative, ambitious, and most of all hungry for revenge,” she notes. “All admirable qualities in a nascent necromancer.”
Supernatural romance might be one of the most common romps in interactive fiction, but almost as comfortable is the ‘deal with the devil’ sacrifice. What are you willing to give up in order to get the power you need to do the things that need doing? Ghost Rider to Constantine, Spawn to The Phantom of the Opera. This makes these stories feel like a well-worn glove, one where it needs some major twists to really stand out.
General Story:
After an alleged goblin assault on your village, you begin to realize your brother may have gained powers. But before you can get answers, witch hunters arrive and begin terrorizing you and your friends in the search for your brother. As the story progresses, you realize you may have the same potential for power that your brother does.
This story leans pretty hard initially on the ‘bullied gains power’ trope, replete with the moral quandaries involving nebulous means and justifications. You’ll spend most of your read on the run, learning about the world and lore. The villains are pretty simple fare, with no redeeming qualities, but are interesting nonetheless.
For a story which is a literal power fantasy, I do have some issue with almost every single choice in combat ending with you slightly injuring your foe and then being knocked out (and this is with successful checks). Seriously, you’ll see ‘then you blacked out’ fairly often.
Side note,I was expecting a bit more ‘spooky’ in an October release with Necromancer in the title, but that doesn’t really harm the story.
Format and Typos:
Readability is high. There are a few typos, and there are a few unfortunate coding issues that stymied my first choice romance during my playthrough, with the medic, Tozi. This is already reported in the announcement thread, so I assume it won’t last for too long.
Game Mechanics and Stats:
As the game continues, you’ll build up your various stats like Combat and Agility. Choices can be locked away if you don’t meet certain requirements, but these are visible and easy to understand. The personality section eschews the normal opposed pairs (sort of), There are three stats, Introverted, Extroverted, and Thoughtful. Most choices that affect Introverted or Extroverted will reduce or increase the opposite. Thoughtful doesn’t have a reduction, and this actually becomes an issue because there are plenty of instances where the game checks against your Introverted vs Extroverted vs Thoughtful. Unless you are purposefully trying to be crude and unlikeable, you’ll likely outpace your other two stats, and will be locked out of the choices that require those to be your highest stats. As you progress through the title, you’ll gain one of three separate sets of powers.
Replayability:
Those powers sort of add some basic replayability, but the real draw is pursuing the various romance options. There are 5 romance options (3 female, two male) and each of them have quite a few scenes throughout the story.
Dislikes:
- So many instances of your character almost seeming to do something cool, but just being worse than your opponent and depending on some form of deus ex machina. A pervading sense of powerlessness until the end of the story, and almost no payoff.
- Feels like opposing pairs, adding something to oppose Thoughtful specifically, would have been helpful to be able to see more of the options the author wrote.
- For as much as you spend in close proximity with everyone, there are very few reactions to your romantic actions. I think that someone I knew as a friend for a long time kissing another friend would elicit at least some reaction if we were all sitting within five feet of each other.
Likes:
- Romantic options are varied enough to make it worth playing through each of them.
- The demon that grants you power is interesting and can make you understand what moral choices are needed to end up at the end of the story.
- There is quite a bit of good writing involved in action parts, and I’m looking forward to instances of actual powerful scenes in future titles.