I'm deep in the Elden Ring pit along with everyone else, so to buoy me in my most frustrated moments with Miyazaki I'm playing games that are comprised of short, non-twitch reflexive mechanics that try more to inform a thematic gestalt comprised of bursts of rhetorical play and aesthetic cohesion rather than with traditional game worlds and narrative. The Shrouded Isle is that, very specifically indie, ethos to a fault - it takes maybe an hour to explore the ludo-narrative framing, though the game does have mechanical breadth enough to encourage the patented 'gamer get achievement' playthroughs 2-7, even if those runs take place in time well beyond after I-get-it button has been pressed, and the narrative direction is pathed nearly exclusively in the player interaction with the textual states of trans-iteration (meaning that the pathos of any game state is informed by a mechanical interaction/choice made by the player in different kind to the game's prompt). The general aesthetic is cohesively cruel: the eyes in all the NPC's portraiture are obscured, taking away the 'windows to the soul', reinforcing an idea that concrete and severe actions cannot inform a, happily built and maintained, holy intervention in place of democratic connectivity. The muted and washed colour palette paint a stark binary: you have complete black void or a sickly, gory, otherworldly pallour to bloat in. The text is short and opaque enough to make the choices feel tantalizingly uninformed but contain enough purchase to infer things worse than a more descriptive block would allow.

However, the game's best qualities are soon reduced to how they don't really nail their contextualization of the gameplay. Certainly, on the first playthrough, the ball bearings are scraping motion and every death feels either like a gruesome victory or a selfish, political assassination - but, on repeat playthroughs, after you know what vices are inscorned in which lose states, and how they tie in with the petty family squabbles which demand only a puppy dog level of attention to avoid, the literal meters (which, like, c'mon, y'all could've made a less spreadsheet like representation of these values) start to domineer over the flavour, and the pure number values of play overshadow all metaphor about religious superstructures. The incursion of 'illnesses', the promotion of virtues and vices, the staunching of rebellious cohorts; all the possible interpretations of the text become number go up and number go down button pressing even before a victory state is reached, and with so simplistic a play styling, I don't think the roundness of the text and art are able to be as penetrated as the devs would've liked.

This is an interesting resource balancing game, where you have to interrogate villagers to learn about how they change one of five resources when you perform an action with them, and then select the appropriate villagers to perform actions with as well as sacrifice so that none of the resources are depleted, all while managing how much the factions of the village like you.

This game ultimately feels like a Reigns but More. Kind of like a solo board game experience. I found it interesting and difficult, but ultimately it didn't feel like a GOOD board game, just an okay one.

"Chernobog" is an awfully strange way to spell "RNGesus." It's baffling that this game is tagged "choices matter" on steam because your choices do not matter. The game actively punishes you when you don't follow its rigid (and incredibly hollow) structure, then punishes you some more when you do. The lovecraftian setting is funny when you realise attempting a successful playthrough is the definition of insanity; doing the same thing each time, hoping the rolls go your way and it's somehow different now.

Though the Sunken Sins DLC adds a level of visual polish to the game, the mechanics are just as bare. There are a handful of event chain quests that you will likely never see through to the end because you're still forced to pick whatever result is most advantageous to keeping your stats above water, killing the chain's progression. And perhaps it doesn't matter since you probably won't make it past the first year. And if you do, you'll find your "choices" dwindling further, with less people to sacrifice either because they're dead now or they're quarantined with the plague, less people to proc letter events, all traits likely known to you so there's nothing left to discover. Seasons become worse than routine, they now waste your time as those very nice result screen animations can't be skipped and are now very annoying.

I got this game on sale and still think I paid too much. This game really doesn't want you to play it, so don't.