This game is an incredibly good idea, and I encourage everyone to try it on the merits of that idea alone: the entire game is you talking to people, however your conversations are abstracted as a card game. Cards have symbols that represent the tone of your speech, and you have to match the tone the other character is going for. If someone plays cards with a circle (meaning emphatic and observant), and you try to play a triangle (diplomatic, logical), the conversation doesn't develop in any useful way. And since you're a traveling salesman of sorts, getting on the good side of people is how you progress.
So that's awesome.
And I wouldn't even say the game is not awesome. It is. It's very charming, the soundtrack is incredibly soothing, and it does interesting things with its mechanics. For example, some cards have unique conversational properties such as allowing you to redraw your hand ("reconsider"), matching whatever symbols were in the card your conversation partner has just played ("accommodate"), or even to play the card retroactively in a previous point of the conversation ("clarify"). This is just the tip of the mechanical iceberg here, and I am not kidding when I say the game is remarkably industrious with how it unfolds.
However, some of the things it does, regardless of how mechanically creative, just rub me the wrong way.
For example: after every conversation, the game forces you to change one of the cards in your incredibly small 10-card deck for one that was used in the conversation you just had. At the start, these feel like upgrades to how much you can express yourself. And it makes sense: the more you talk to people, the better you get at talking to people — especially if they're the kind of people you just talked to.
However, as you go along, the size of your deck doesn't increase, but the number of different symbols you need to effectively juggle in order to being able to talk to people in new places increases a lot. At the start everyone just used the same 2 or 3 symbols, I could be sure to almost always have the right cards to ensure effective communication with all of them. But later on, there's twice as many symbols, but my deck still only has 10 cards, which means talking to everyone is harder — including those people at the start that used the first 2 symbols in the game. It doesn't make sense that the more I talk to people, the worse I got at talking to people, especially to the people I was already good at talking to!
This only happens because the game mandates that I substitute one of my cards for one used by the person I just had a failed conversation with.
Anyhoo. This relatively small thing was enough for me to drop the game. I'm not sure this means this "flaw" is that heavy (and I'm sure some people wouldn't even consider it a flaw) or that I'm just eager to drop games since I've been juggling so many at the same time, but the truth is it happened.
Creative, nice, and soothing as it is, Signs of the Sojourner failed at communicating with me.
So that's awesome.
And I wouldn't even say the game is not awesome. It is. It's very charming, the soundtrack is incredibly soothing, and it does interesting things with its mechanics. For example, some cards have unique conversational properties such as allowing you to redraw your hand ("reconsider"), matching whatever symbols were in the card your conversation partner has just played ("accommodate"), or even to play the card retroactively in a previous point of the conversation ("clarify"). This is just the tip of the mechanical iceberg here, and I am not kidding when I say the game is remarkably industrious with how it unfolds.
However, some of the things it does, regardless of how mechanically creative, just rub me the wrong way.
For example: after every conversation, the game forces you to change one of the cards in your incredibly small 10-card deck for one that was used in the conversation you just had. At the start, these feel like upgrades to how much you can express yourself. And it makes sense: the more you talk to people, the better you get at talking to people — especially if they're the kind of people you just talked to.
However, as you go along, the size of your deck doesn't increase, but the number of different symbols you need to effectively juggle in order to being able to talk to people in new places increases a lot. At the start everyone just used the same 2 or 3 symbols, I could be sure to almost always have the right cards to ensure effective communication with all of them. But later on, there's twice as many symbols, but my deck still only has 10 cards, which means talking to everyone is harder — including those people at the start that used the first 2 symbols in the game. It doesn't make sense that the more I talk to people, the worse I got at talking to people, especially to the people I was already good at talking to!
This only happens because the game mandates that I substitute one of my cards for one used by the person I just had a failed conversation with.
Anyhoo. This relatively small thing was enough for me to drop the game. I'm not sure this means this "flaw" is that heavy (and I'm sure some people wouldn't even consider it a flaw) or that I'm just eager to drop games since I've been juggling so many at the same time, but the truth is it happened.
Creative, nice, and soothing as it is, Signs of the Sojourner failed at communicating with me.