Well, this is a bit of an update/ general thoughts of the review of Cryptkeepers that I posted on the thread when the game came out. I like the Fledgling Realms very much, and the game was on my mind these past few weeks.
I took a new character into Hallowford, looking at the code to clear things up. I was very surprised when I discovered the hidden variables the game keeps track of and the multiple ways you can pass checks. All in all, looking at the code gave me the chance to see how much work went into the game, and it left me with a good taste, feeling like the sequel flowed better and was stronger than what I first thought during my first and subsequent playthroughs.
However, one problem that stuck with me, maybe more than in my first journey into Hallowford, was that there were some variables are kept hidden, even if they result in pretty important moments. In Chapter 5, for instance, the number of Cryptkeepers you have with you, the time you spent fighting the Ever-Living, the numbers of the enemy, the time you spend building a defense are all valuable information, but they are mostly just alluded to by the prose. Without looking at the code, I wouldn’t have known that they have something to do with the action in the chapter, and I would keep thinking that a loss against the Ever-Living is scripted, and not something the player can change in any way.
I understand that some stats should be hidden (like suspicion) and it makes sense to keep others a secret (like the relationships), but I thought that keeping those things in the code just made the choices of Chapter 5 a lot more confusing to me as a reader, since, without the code, I spent my time thinking that choices were mostly judging how high my stats were.
If I were to give a suggestion to the next book, I’d say that making a few of those variables explicit, either through the text (like warning “You have such-and-such Cryptkeepers with you”) or in the stats page would make the reading a lot smoother on the player’s part, and it would also save a bit of the hard time some, like me, might have had with the game. But, all in all, I found the game to be a lot more agreeable and interesting this time around, which makes me more excited for the sequel.
