The Hunter's Journals - Pale Harbour

Senscape recommends this Visual novel. + Story + Characters + Graphics + Game length, many hours of replay value + It is a smart game, requires a mature vocabulary. “You are a hunter of beasts and monsters”. So begins our next quest in the “Hunter’s Journals” series. This time we are going to “Pale Harbour”. Pale Harbour has been overrun by sea monsters and you must save the townsfolk. It is all about choice; you determine your own fate. My fate was to die pretty quickly because I launched right into expert mode 😉. It sounded easy enough. Right? Wrong. This is a maze through a cornfield, you need to be strategic and think about your options. Luckily it was an easy reload and selection of a new story arc. I opted to die many times just to see how it would play out. Like its predecessor “The Hunter's Journals - Pale Harbour” is another rich absorbing story. You have a new basket of skillsets and weapons at your disposal. You will see no violence, blood or gore; combat is done by throwing the dice. This is a game you can take a break from and come back knowing where you are and what you need to do if you can’t play for a few days. The game mechanics and the world you enter are very clearly explained. Do take the time to read it all including the encyclopedia of monsters. Everything you need to know to play the game is explained; thank you for that! You have the usual set-up options. You can play in easy, intermediate, or hard mode. The game has an auto save feature or you can save manually. I like having both options available. The game ran seamlessly, and I suffered no crashes, despite my alt+tabbing, checking Discord and Steam. Thank you for yet another interesting read

[b]Without choices we're merely going through life on a never-ending elevator[/b] It's been so long since I experienced a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA), going back to my childhood days I found them fascinating because they were so simple in their design yet when you delve into the story there are a maze of choices to be made often with a grisly ending for any naive decisions. The choices were so quick to come by it meant the [b]real[/b] challenge was staying involved in the story while striving for any new opening that would branch you further into the plot but, with so many [i]trapdoor[/i] wrong turnings, it is easier said than done. [b]Grindwheel Games[/b] has presented a return to those quick-thinking CYOA's with [u]The Hunter's Journals[/u] which come in a trilogy (the third part of this series is due for release by Halloween!) featuring YOU as the Hunter who sets out to uncover the mysterious goings-on in the seaside coastal town of Pale Harbour in this first instalment. The foreboding adventure takes a Lovecraftian turn as the Hunter encounters a variety of Beasts to do battle with that are all determined by that purveyor of [i]Chance[/i] - a roll of the dice. The Hunter's stats are of Skill & Stamina and it is the combined roll of the dice + the Hunter's Skill that totals the Attack which is subtracted from the Beast's Stamina and vice versa for the Beast's Attack on the Hunter's Stamina. The Rounds of Battle continue until either the Hunter or the Beast's Stamina reaches 0. As the Rounds progress there is a percentage stat reflecting the success of the battle if you survive! Choices made within the story can have a positive (or negative) impact on Stamina while there are also areas in the story where you can find [i]medical packs[/i]. Equally important is at the beginning of the story where you have the choice of whether to buy items that may be of use in the Adventure. The Adventure has 3 settings : Easy, Intermediate and Hard and the differences are extreme in the same way games like Resident Evil would limit health packs, make battles harder and less items etc. The game interface works brilliantly by designing it in the style of a book, I particularly liked how there is a red ribbon that you use to Save and, keeping in with the theme, there is an encyclopedia alongside an art Gallery that unlocks as you progress. The music is well suited to this CYOA creating a shanty setting as well as sound effects and an optional VA that you can either keep active if you want to absorb the experience or deactivate in the Options Menu if you're seeking to play through at your own pace. Finally for a CYOA to be a success it needs to be well written and the Adventurer must easily absorb themselves into the plot without too much technical depth and, thankfully, The Hunter's Journal manages to achieve this comfortably. The biggest challenge for the Adventurer is to get themselves away from the maze of [u]dead ends[/u] and unravel the mystery to its conclusion and that is where the dedicated patience comes in for it is very easy to get caught in a loop when not using trial & error! What makes this equally challenging is there is only 1 Save slot ever used throughout the story so there are no opportunities to backtrack! [i]The Hunter's Journals[/i] features Achievements (for the Hunters!) that unlock through each game difficulty setting which means this is 1 Adventure you won't be playing once and putting aside in your Library to gather virtual dust! The design & thought process to this really does reflect in the detail, the originality and the gameplay experience. I am confident any fans of CYOA will be blissfully ecstatic revelling in the nostalgia of this genre and admire the efforts made by the Developers. ~~~ Liked what you see? You can find more at [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32839633/]Have a Word[/url] ~~~

Excellently written and narrated text based adventure. It's fairly difficult, so expect to die a lot. It's a very niche genre, text based choose your own adventure games, but as far as quality goes this one is at the top. The art is quality, and the voicing of the narrator is excellent.

So, you really don't need to get too deep into Pale Harbour to run into this issue. Writing-wise, it's fine. It's decently evocative. You have a good sense of the setting and your stakes, and your character has some personality to the way they move and interact with the world. But let's talk about infesting your gamebook with instadeaths. This used to be a style, with some books going all in on having one golden route and a TON of random gameovers hidden behind, like, drinking the wrong flavor of wine. This style hung around for a little bit, but progressively fell out of favor. And designers were correct to ditch instadeaths in gamebooks, because it isn't interesting. The consequence for "go into the field" -> "you die" is that the book has wasted your time. If you took damage or lost skill or lost money or lost medical supplies or got walled out of a later event or *something* with lasting impact, you would feel it for more than a moment. But if it's just a random insta that you had to read the developer's mind to predict---and especially in an *investigative game* where you're supposed to investigate stuff---it makes the book obnoxious to read through. Go into the field. Insta. Sleep in the pantry. Insta. Try to move the cultist's body so you can burn it. Insta. To the book's credit, there are also a ton of random "this was a bad choice and there are consequences" choices early on. So like, you learn not to go into barns (reason?) or talk to villagers (this is legit terrible because it trains you not to do a thing that the game then wants you to do.) But these choices are peppered in amongst the instas, which are already a minefield of meaningless run resets. I'll play further and change my review if I end up feeling differently later. But like, don't do this lol. There's 50+ years of gamebook tech saying not to do this. Unless your market share is people who unironically liked Hell House, what are we doing here. Edit: Your choice is five minute of clicking to get back to where you were, or savescumming. If you click, you can take a different path. This usually isn't worth doing, since the different path just ends in instadeath, but you'll need to do it after buying the diving weights bricks your run for reasons no human could forsee. If you savescum, you have to save/load every minute or so, which actually feels worse than five minutes of rote clicking. All of this would suck way less if every choice wasn't "do you pass by the big rock or the small rock," and then the small rock kills you because it wasn't rock, it was a rock lobster. Rock lobster Rock lobster Rock lobster Rock lobster Motion in the ocean His air hose broke Lots of trouble Lots of bubble He was in a jam S'in a giant clam Rock rock Rock lobster Down, down Lobster rock Lobster rock Let's rock! Boy's in bikinis Girls in surfboards Everybody's rockin' Everybody's fruggin' Twistin' 'round the fire Havin' fun Bakin' potatoes Bakin' in the sun Put on your noseguard Put on the Lifeguard Pass the tanning butter Here comes a stingray There goes a manta-ray In walked a jelly fish There goes a dog-fish Chased by a cat-fish In flew a sea robin Watch out for that piranha There goes a narwhal Here comes a bikini whale! Rock lobster Rock lobster Rock lobster Rock lobster

Disclaimer: This is not a technical critique. I'm a streamer and I will review based on whether I enjoyed games and how well my community responded to them. I hope there's value in that to some. This game isn't going to blow you away visually if you're used to 'flashy' games with 'action'. However, as someone who very much enjoyed the 'Choose Your Own Adventures' books in my youth, it was easy for me to see beyond the not-full screen. It's a book and as such would have looked odd if it filled the screen. It was easy to pick up what to do, and there were different difficulty levels to choose from. As someone who enjoys the 'journey' and to experience the stories rather than stress too much about having enough health to last the game, I elected for the easiest setting. In the old 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books, you could turn down the corners of critical pages and return to them if you made a bad choice - this game has a single bookmark - it adds an extra layer of thought - you need to decide where to place it - a wrongly located save could commit you to a 'death loop' (which happened to me). Something that I can't let go unremarked, is the art in this game. It is gorgeous. The dev is an utter sadist (meant in the nicest possible way) and some of the twists and turns that the story takes are sickening, exciting and surprising. The art ties in so beautifully with the eerie and atmospheric nature and despite the sometimes gloomy settings, adds vibrancy. The voice-over is there for those who want to leave it to the professionals, or you can elect to turn it off should you wish to read it yourself (which is something I do for my streams.) You have options. I'd recommend that streamers have a game such as this for times when their PC is struggling - it's gentle on my computer and I imagine that even the most humble of setups can run it fine. All in all, I loved the game's simplicity, the atmosphere and the story. It was dark, a little spooky - I'd say quite Lovecraftian and a bit gory in places. A lot of thought has gone into it and I can't give you any spoilers, but decisions you make early on in the game can make or break, or drown you. I enjoyed playing this on stream and my community liked 'helping' (i.e. making choices that sent me to meet my maker. For the price you can't really go wrong. I challenge you to finish it - I failed. But I had a huge amount of fun (and will return to it to finish it off later.)

A fun interactive story, similar to a D&D campaign, too simple combat mechanics as you have just about no options in battles but the game is more focused on the story choices, tread carefully! :) If you'd like to see what we're playing next with regular updates, or request to review a game, feel free to follow us at: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35688508-Ember-Works-Reviews/

Great gamebook for anyone who loved Fighting Fantasy as a kid! Encounters make a lot of sense and play to the idea of fighting with wit, as much as your character's skill stat. Might be a bit linear for some people, as the book leans more into the "one true path" style similar to Ian Livingstone's works. If you like the puzzle aspect of his gamebooks, you'll enjoy this. The game's world is also fairly fresh to what we're familiar with in Fighting Fantasy, adopting a vibe closer to Victorian steampunk and the Lovecraft mythos, that sits well with the game's style of storytelling and encounter design.