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

[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.