Continuing my xmas break backlog marathon of finishing 1-2 games a day, cleared two games about getting murdered constantly.
Long Live the Queen
This game is kind of great, but also frustratingly flawed. You have 40 weeks to survive and every week you can train stats, do things that affect your mood (modifier for stat learning) and make choices as they come up. The events each week are fairly set and there's constant skill checks.
The game is cool in that the runs are pretty short after the first run with dialogue skipping (~15-20 mins) and it's really addictive to try to go different directions and build towards certain skill checks.
But it's also frustrating in how tight the skill checks are and how all the events and skill checks of the story are mostly set in stone at certain weeks so you very clearly need to build towards certain skills and other skills are mostly useless. There are so many freaking skills, it's a shame a lot are mostly useless. Also the first couple of runs are tough until you get a feel for what skills are actually important.
The game also doesn't give you #s on the skill checks so even when doing a new run you don't know whether you need to waste another week getting Lore to 90 or if Lore at 60 will be enough to pass the check. It makes the trial and error of it annoying after a point.
Here is an example of an hour I wasted:
Week 27 - I go to a party with a character and they tell me about a castle in a forest
Week 28 - We go to the forest to explore and we get tentacle attacked, we die because my HERBAL KNOWLEDGE was not high enough
Attempt #2 - (reload a few weeks back and focus on getting herbal knowledge up), this time at week 27 I don't get the trigger to invite the character to come over to go to the forest because my lore isn't high enough to know about the castle in the forest.
Attempt #3 - (reload further back and get lore and herbal knowledge up), I pass the skill check to invite the character to the forest, I use my herbal knowledge to defeat the tentacles. Alas! It only buys time, now I have to run and there is an athletics skill check which I fail because my athletics are 0.
Attempt #4 - Start over from scratch, focus on getting my Lore, Herbal Knowledge and Athletics up. Get to week 27 to go to the party and get attacked by bandits on the way to the party and die before even getting to the party. Turns out I needed my Intrigue at <40 at week 18 to have a conversation about assassination and hire guards but I'd neglected my intrigue to spend time on my lore, herbal knowledge and athletics.
Attempt #5 - Start over from scratch and focus on Intrigue, Lore, Herbal Knowledge, Athletics. At week 18 hire guards to prevent assassinations, at week 27 make it to the party, have the conversation about the castle in the forest and invite the character, week 28 the character comes over....but there's been a civil war because I've neglected raising the town morale enough and so instead of the forest adventure options my only two choices are to use the character who came over as a hostage or let them go and skip to the next week.
At this point I completely give up on trying to make it out of the forest adventure alive. The skill checks are just brutal and layered and layered in the game. Though to be fair apparently this is one of the harder challenges to make it through.
Because there are so many stats and skill checks there's a lot of branching and a ton of ways things can end up going which is neat. The quickness of the runs, the silliness of the story and constant death, the challenge to try to make it to week 40 and be coronated as an actual queen, the satisfaction of passing skill checks all add up to a pretty engaging and fun game. But yeah, if the skill checks weren't so tight, if more skills were useless and if it told you numbers for the skill checks when you pass/fail them it'd be a great game.
I also think it would benefit from some RNG in the scenario to change the order when skill checks are so you aren't always focused on building certain skills quickly because you need them for a check in week 5 or 8 whereas other skills you can backend because you don't need them for checks until week 35-30 or something.
