fallen off london

[jazzfish]

My love affair with Fallen London lasted almost exactly two weeks, in the following stages:

• Oh, it's free on iOS, may as well check it out.
  
• The writing is kinda fun.
  
• I'll throw a little money their way, support people doing cool things etc.
  
• The app is frustratingly slow for something that's just displaying text and still images.
  
• Yay, an app update fixed much of the slow!
  
• ... which serves to reveal the grind-y underbelly of the game itself.
  
• Bored now.

Verdict: the writing is fun but the gameplay is annoyingly focused around doing the same thing repeatedly. Reading the same fun snippet for the nth time sucks much of the fun out of not only that snippet but the ones around it.

Comments

[okrablossom]

>> Reading the same fun snippet for the nth time sucks much of the fun

Given the names I've heard associated with this, I would have expected them to know that before building the game mechanic. So, just, wow.

Hmm. Or maybe all the names I know associated with this are writers and therefor probably not in control of the game's cyclic nature.

[jazzfish]

That seems likely. :7

My main prior exposure to the game came a few years ago, when I couldn't log on to Twitter without tripping over Starveling Cat doggerel. Presumably it was posted by players who got extra in-game actions for advertising.

... in retrospect that's the kind of scummy games-industry behaviour that I prefer *not* to support, and now I feel icky about having given them any money. I am not a student of advertising, I am the target of it.

[okrablossom]

Well at least you got a cute blog post out of it? :)

[jazzfish]

Small favors. :)

[aamcnamara]

I wander over to the Fallen London website once in a while when I need something to do on a slow circ desk shift, but that's about it. For a clicky-game that you don't need much brain for, it works well! Sometimes I can grind specific skills or I can wander off and do tiny stories. But I can see how it would not reward any serious investment of time.

[jazzfish]

Hrm. I could believe that it would work as a once-in-awhile thing... but that is very much not how I engage with most things. When I find a cool thing I am generally all YESSS I WANT EVERYTHING EVEN TANGENTIALLY RELATED TO THIS GIVE ME THE FIREHOSE.

[thanate]

I tried it briefly pretty early on and never quite got past the "what the heck am I doing, anyway?" stage of things. Also I think they wanted your twitter log-on to play? I don't recall, but it seemed a bit sketchy. The worldbuilding was interesting, but I didn't get what other people were obsessing over in the game part; this may be why I haven't tried checking out Sunless Sea yet, either.

[jazzfish]

It took me a bit to get through "what am i even doing" as well. Which surprised me: I think of myself as a fairly savvy reader/player, but in FL I think I made some choices and emphases early on that I wouldn't have made if I'd had a bit more understanding, and that probably contributed slightly to my general dissatisfaction. Oh well.

I was tempted by Sunless Sea when it was kickstarting, mostly because one of the writers (Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan) has done excellent tabletop-RPG work. But it looked like very much Not My Thing, and I think time has borne that out.

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

I've seen people talking about Fallen London, but haven't heard any specifics about it.

[jazzfish]

It is ... sort of a roleplaying game and sort of an interactive-fiction game, where you do various tasks and test various stats to unlock interesting bits of story, and by story I mostly mean "landscape," though there's a sort of overarching plotline that you can attempt to follow. In practice, after awhile you do the same kind of thing a lot to raise stats so you can hopefully get to someplace more interesting, only it's the same kind of place.