Throne of Lies®: Medieval Politics

I don't like how every single review ONLY talks about the player-base, so I'm writing this review. Overall, the game is worth trying out. First up, yes, you won't find 100 random concurrent players at any given time. But the game does have a very loyal 20-something number of players who regularly play on Fridays and the weekends, every week at the same time (around 9PM CET). They're extremely forgiving with newcomers (to the point I literally griefed a game and they didn't really care) and are open to explaining how stuff works. Each class also has a "tips" section, which means it's quite beginner-friendly. It's honestly kind of nice for this to be a weekly rather than a daily thing for me, since it makes me look forward to it more. And, besides, the game's free. You're not spending money to have it stay on your backlog for a week, to then play it for 5 hours on a weekend. As for the game-play itself, well, it's a mafia-style game. There's not much to say. I will say the number of classes and different abilities gets quite overwhelming for me in 16-player lobbies. Each player needs to claim a role and write what they did the night before, and you root out the impostors through examining their logs, or using your class's abilities. This can also feel a bit too much when there are 15 logs to examine, and 15 players to test. Some roles are unique (meaning there's only one in the game - if two people both claim as that role, it means one is lying), others aren't (which means having three medics doesn't really mean anything); some roles are immune to having their abilities disabled (which means that if you're posing as that role, you can't say your skill got disabled); some roles have clear tells (meaning it's bad to claim as them) - basically, a lot to keep in mind if you want to actually be good at the game. It can also feel almost like cheating when you meet someone who's actually good at the game and who's been playing for years, able to sniff out you're the killer on something insanely subtle. Also, like any mafia game, getting killed Night 1 is simply an inescapable part of the experience, which remains to feel like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in every game of this style I play. Another thing I find overwhelming is that, unlike simpler games like Among Us where you can just "trust" someone is a crewmate and stick to them, in this game confirming a player is one of the good guys means nothing because the core mechanic of the game is that the Cultists convert Citizens into Cultists. Again, it makes it quite difficult to keep in mind that just because you confirmed someone is not lying Night 1 doesn't mean they're not lying Night 4. There's also a lot of stuff that messes with detection. For example, the Paladin class can find out whether someone is a cultist or not. But one of the cultist roles has the skill "Mindwarp", which makes it so the Paladin's investigation returns false positives. This means that even the most rudimentary, simple way of knowing whether someone is a Cultist or not still cannot be fully trusted. It's not even always the bad type of overwhelming, and I can definitely like it depending on the game. But it's important to know what you're getting into. So, yeah, for a free game it's pretty much a no-brainer for me, I definitely recommend trying it out. You won't find games on workdays 99% of the time, but the small community on Discord plays this game literally every single weekend. You play with the same people every week and sort of get to know them; it's a nice feeling. Also, since it's a small community, there's zero chance of finding cheaters; I don't really know what the other reviews are on about. The game has a lot of depth and is fun to me for that reason. I've played for 20 hours already and still have no clue what I'm doing.