Unfortunately buggy and full of typos, I feel like this could have been truly great with just a little more care and time to cook.
Fhtagn!Unfortunately buggy and full of typos, I feel like this could have been truly great with just a little more care and time to cook.
Fhtagn! is very clearly based on The Yawgh, a text-based single-player/multiplayer storytelling experience with wonderful art stills and a huge variety of events to keep it interesting for countless replays - and yet it's old enough that I've been happily awaiting some other game to come and iterate on it's style ever since and finally we get a game trying to do just that... but only about half as well.
In the very first line of the very first screen of the tutorial my partner and I were met with a spelling error of "fot" instead of "for" and already I felt uneasy with what that meant for quality control. Many of the events are riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes but not generally game-breaking... except when they are. Fittingly Lovecraftian, there are times where a plot segues into madness giving options no one would rationally choose and sometimes with what I assume is a mistranslated word completely baffling the meaning of the event.
That, combined with an excessive amount of repetition of events and a lack of variety in the dialogue for choosing a location each turn simply drags out the experience towards a very confusing endgame, each cultist is meant to blindly pick a role guessing at qualities they may or may not have acquired to fulfill a doomsday ritual at the end of the game. Seemingly novel at first, though you do not know what skills are needed participating grants you Elder Signs to unlock information on future playthroughs... something I would have thought was a fun concept except they are FAR too few and far between to acquire, meanwhile only lasting for any playthrough they are used on, not permanently unlocking anything at all. Add to that a bug which wiped my progress on crash of the game and lost all my hard earned signs, I think I'm done playing this game after 4 attempts.
Novel, but probably not worth it in this state. Patch it up, add some quality of life improvements, and call me back to the Abyss when you're done and I'll give it another try.… Expand
