Apollyon: River of Life

This is a very interesting and very very deep game. It feels a lot like cultist simulator in terms of depth but it feels more like you can actually *grasp* things in it better once you know what you're doing. I find it fascinating and always want to explore more in it to find out just how deep it goes.

Apollyon: River of Life is a game where you venture through the adventures of an individual whose life has inevitably lead them into an occult practice. The game is aimed at players who enjoy letting themselves immerse fully in a fantasy setting where you'll find yourself adapting to new events, or to scramble your memory on how to handles ones that you might re-encounter. The gameplay takes mostly the form of a text based Choose Your Own Adventure, where multiple events need to be tackled in succession. How successful your attempts are depends on the physical and mental stats that you've started and gained (or lost!) during your play session. In addition, your occult ritual takes place on the Apollyic Table, where 16 tokens lie on top of it, each representing different layers and aspects of reality. Every turn you can shift a number of these tokens around, to a multitude of varying effects, ranging from making certain skill tests easier (and others harder!), to allowing/preventing certain events from showing up, to applying fundamentally changing effects upon the gameplay. To give you an example, one of the tokens, representing Death and its role in the cycle of Life, can be shifted in such a way that prevents players from dying where they otherwise should have... Though fiddling with it can have interesting consequences... In addition to all the above, you will find that the game has items (and allies) in your inventory, that can provide you aid in key moments where you really need their boosts in many different aspects, be them in the shape of a passive bonus, a one-time consumable boost, or a bonus that cools down after enough events have passed. Besides completing your main objective of your ritial, you'll often find yourselves running into events that are marked with a potential unlock. Doing so will allow you to start future rituals with new tools, invocations, and even characters to play as, which offer not only different distributions on your starting stats, but also many unique properties and abilities (though the starting character has quite unique bonuses of their own) ... But this can only take place if you DO manage to make it out alive of your current session, in order to secure those unlocks, adding tension and deliberation on whether to keep going with your main objective or to cut it short and avoid risking what you've just earned. Finally, but certainly not least, the game can be played with 1 to 3 players! If you happen to have friends to tackle the ritual along with you, you'll certainly be able to further choose which of you has the better stats and character to take certain risks. Maybe one of you has better Agility, and another of you can more safely accomplish a dialogue option that you suspect might require high Willpower. Maybe one of your characters will be sneaker, while another might have healing properties for the entire group, or be better suited for dealing with demons... Just try to spread the skill tests between players, as one player taking the spotlight for too long can accumulate some skill test penalties. Me and my friends have shared some good laughs at our mishaps, and at some of the ridiculous choices one of us might have risked to pick, and have similarly had tense moments trying to finish a ritual with everyone alive but clinging dangerously close to death. An absolute blast that I heavily recommend (I might have a soft spot for their art style and the music in-game). Feel free to play either on your own or with a friend or two alongside you who is willing to face an adventure riddled with a mysterious system that you can learn to master the more you play.

As somebody who enjoyed Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours, this game is far too esoteric even for me. The gameplay consists of moving various tokens on your table to one of eight positions, each causing somewhat different effects that you can look up in your journal. These moves are limited to three a turn, and tokens sometimes get moved by events you encounter. So what's the issue? The issue is that many negative events in this game cannot entirely be avoided, meaning many scenarios run on a timer where your stats at whittled down over time until you lose. This on it's own isn't a game-breaking problem, but the issue is that how progression events are rolled isn't obvious, and even if you encounter one, you may not be able to succeed (either due to RNG, or due to not having some pre-requisite). Let me use Talon as an example. If you listen out for rumours, you are told of a shady group in the worker's quarter of the city. An interesting and obvious plot point, except travelling to the worker's quarter does...nothing. Even if you have heard of these rumours, it's unclear what dictates wheteher or not you meet this group. Same issue travelling around Talon in general. Frequently you will click on one of the four districts to travel to, only to go nowhere and end up back in Talon, choosing one of the four districts to travel to again! It won't be explained why you somehow failed to travel, or what you've done wrong, and even when it succeeds and you get to try some form of choice/event at these locations, you won't know why the game has even allowed you to make this choice when previously you couldn't. All this is to show how the layers of RNG make for a frustrating experience. There are simply too many levers to pull with the tokens, influencing so many layers of RNG, that when combined with the game's lack of information on why you succeed or fail, leaves you no closer to your goals even after losing runs for a full hour. I can't really recommend this game because even comparing it to something notoriously hard like cultist simulator, the failure states over in that game are clearly defined and explained to the player. Running out of money makes you starve, being too sad leads you to be consumed by despair, etcetc. Whereas in Apollyon, travelling around a city leaves me...travelling around a city? It isn't made clear what went wrong or why my actions failed to lead me to events. Overall, this game feels like a 4/10. An interesting idea held back by poor gameplay and guidance. Maybe the gameplay was simply underbaked? It's hard to say, but I hope I eventually have a reason to return and retry this game.

RNG plays a part in most actions. If you fail, you might lose the scenario and have to restart the same scenario and hope that RNG goes your way this time. There is no strategy guide, and very few youtube videos with tips, so you are on your own. Either you do trial and error until you succeed or you give up and play another game.

The new tutorial helps, I was a bit daunted by the sixteen tokens and their effects when I played before this update, but having the new tutorial really helps. I like what I see but am still learning the impacts of all the tokens so I think I will start a new play through to better get the gameplay. I'm focused on wanting to "win" so learning through experimentation means multiple play throughs for me, lol. However, the story seems to lie within the cards themselves and I am looking forward to discovering the story through all those beautiful cards so maybe I'll stick to this play through so i can get into the story.

Start the single-player campaign by moving to the second screen and selecting the first mission, then proceed with the tutorial. After a good bit of reading, settle in to a storytelling experience with strategic gameplay. Don't be afraid to lose your body; you can find it again. Mouse over the stakes on the 8-pointed star in the Lore on Themes; think of the order and angle to which you Banish the Bad 6 (Beware the Typhen, Limoseht, Z, Stygia, Narhiim, and Kaligara!) before you open your third eye to Sartova and the Torfield; otherwise, use your judgement on whatever you need to strengthen for the current challenge. Some small UI improvements would help this game serve its well-designed meal on a more accommodating platter: windowed mode, more of the typically adjustable settings, a quick start to get right into the tutorial. Haven't tried the multiplayer yet; not sure how that would work based on what I've done so far, but I'd be glad to see it grow!

An incredibly deep ritual set in a beautifully dark fantasy world... Apollyon is a storytelling game that lets you carry out rituals in a finely crafted world complete with tons of world building, branching paths, unlockable characters, and intricate mechanics. Though esoteric at times, it rewards experimentation by shifting the themes and dimensions around in your favor. The motto "f*ck around and find out" is more than accurate here, and the only way to be a better player is to do just that, leaving you with sometimes hilarious or terrifying results. Its rougelight gameplay loop works well for 30-minute-ish sessions alone, or with up to 3 players. I look forward to seeing how the upcoming update adds tutorials and helpful information to ease in new players. Definitely give this a shot if you don't mind a learning curve and enjoy detailed storytelling.

Pretty niche, but overall fun was my last review, but I think this game deserves more effort for this. This game is a very complicated game, similar to cultist simulator in certain mechanics, but very clearly its own game. It's a shame not many people know about it, because it's overall just a fun game to play. It might look complicated, and it is, but you can slowly figure it out as you go, and it doesn't force all of the knowledge onto you immediately. If enough played to get servers up, I think it would be a really interesting experience. Altogether, this game deserves more of a presence online.