This Book Is A Dungeon

Neat little game in theory, horribly frustrating once you actually play it. Navigating through the maps (even though they are pretty small) is annoying AF because instead of clicking on the room you want to go to, you have to walk through all the rooms between A and B, which just takes a ton of time. There is no option to save and when you die, which even the description says is "often", you have to start at the very beginning again. I usually like to explore every option but with BS like this i just don't have the patience to. I have died twice in the first chapter and am so annoyed and frustrated that i will likely continue on with a guide, if i ever decide to open this game again. I really like the idea of this dungeon crawler and am very disappointed that the exeution of this game is so poorly done. Edit: it took me 30 minutes just to click through the game with a guide so not having the option to save when every fourth decision will kill you is just cruel.

想要受苦，可以来玩这款游戏 比i wanna还要i wanna的地方在于它没有存档，6 就是个人喜好的问题，我不喜欢受苦，哎。 此外应该还是不错的，就是没有存档有违我的天性，太痛苦了

нет

<3

Y'a pas de sauvegarde, donc si comme moi on arrête en plein milieu pour recommencer plus tard, on doit tout se retaper :/Le problème c'est que l'histoire est pas vraiment originale, c'est juste une suite de descriptions glauques, pas de mise en scène, pas ou peu de suspense. J'avoue que j'ai la flemme de m'y remettre, tout simplement, vu qu'il n'y a rien de terriblement attirant et refaire 100 fois le même truc pas terros ://

I found This Book is a Dungeon (TBIAD) to be an overall positive experience. The gameplay of TBIA is mainly structured around navigating atmospheric spaces through Twine hyperlinks that are occasionally illustrated with pixel art. The main draw of TBIAD is its atmosphere; presenting interesting spaces that are reminiscent of a TTRPG one-shot with a horror theme. The author I think succeeds with the textual content the most; the writing (supported sometimes by the illustrations) present enough detail to let you imagine the space without being bloated and weighing down your brain. Additional reactive text that changes based on actions or retrying links are good details too. As some of the negative reviews note, there's some design/presentation issues that hinder the experience. While sound/music would enhance the atmosphere, that's not generally considered as pressing for interactive fiction. What drags down TBIAD's experience is unskippable textual effects and a lack of save functions. Either separately would not be too much of an issue, but I did notice the drag where a death restarts you in the middle "hub" of the book without accounting for any chapters already completed, so getting to an ending requires doing all chapters without a death at some point. A lot of interactive fiction either solves similar issues with saves or by just allowing entering unhindered strings of commands, but TBIAD has textual effects like waiting for sentences or dialog that feeds out a sentence at a time. These are evocative when first seen but slow down your experience when retrying a chapter after a death. It's not a major loss, but it injures the smoothness of the experience a little. This is easily the biggest issue I have with it (other than the combat being random and one-note; TBIAD would probably be better without them or making combats set pieces), though I agree with another point of the white background being a little much for me. That's subjective, but as a lot of us are staring at screens a lot these days, defaulting to a dark mode or maybe like an ivory-sepia type aesthetic wouldn't be the worst. I enjoyed the experiences presented in the game thoroughly individually, and some of the puzzles and additional flavor writing I thought were clever and appropriately mood-setting. In addition to the IF side of the game TBIA also provides links to its Development Diary, which is of particular interest to me. Small indie productions and IF are fascinating individual artifacts to me and seeing the end result followed by the guts that went on behind the curtain is incredibly more interesting/valuable to me than a game alone. I think TBIA is worth its price tag given that it's both a playable IF and includes documentation towards its creation in a 169 page somewhat-large-fonted (I presume to make it easily readable on E-Readers) PDF. Creators like this deserve support, in my opinion.

The game turns into a trial-and-error clickathon that forces you to keep repeating the same actions dozens of times to get back to the point where you get to guess which option to choose next to proceed. Would be ok as a free game, as this is clearly someone's first attempt at making a game.

tbh loving it so far — easy to get into, great buy.

6/10

this dungeon is in a book.