This is a charming little throwback MUD! And it's surprisingly lengthy; I had expected something more miniature.

I'm still fairly early with a character at level 10 just after reaching Bigtown, collecting new quests, and starting to figure out my next steps.

Population is sadly very low. I chose to play today because Sokpop suggested a communal return to the game so that everyone interested could benefit from a boost in player count at the same time. I caught the tail end of that event and never saw more than 3 players online. However, the multiplayer element seems like it can just be ignored; I'm treating this as a single-player text-based RPG for now and not worrying about whether anyone else is around.

In addition to being a satisfying (albeit grindy) little RPG, Chatventures has some sharp ideas at play. You can act as quickly as you can type, so you'll get attacks off more frequently than enemies if you're fast. After an early quest, you get an ability called Repeat that, for a mana cost, lets you just type "repeat" to--obviously--repeat your last command, which can be simpler and faster than typing out commands in full. When you fight slimes, you'll find your text input field obscured when they attack you, so you have to type blindly without being able to see typos. Also, I wandered into an area that is currently too advanced for me and fought a pair of harpies that seemed to hit me with a confusion effect, and everything I typed just turned into a random string of characters. This willingness to play with text and limit (or enhance!) the player's ability to make input infuses the game with cleverness and whimsy, leaving me intrigued to press on and see what other tricks it has in store.

Right now I'm feeling a 3.5 stars out of 5.

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I kind of rewrote some of the above more concisely for Twitter, and I'm going to leave it here in case it comes in handy when I go to write a review:

I started playing Chatventures by
@sokpopco. I'd expected a throwback mini-MUD, but it seems to have more length on it than that. There was a short planned event today, a call for its community to return, but population is still very low. That's okay! It's fun as a solo RPG.

On top of being a satisfying lite RPG, it has some clever ideas going for it. Action occurs in real time, so you can attack as quickly as you can type. You can learn an ability early on that lets you type "repeat" and spend a bit of mana so you don't have to retype full commands.

When you fight slimes, their attacks obscure the text input field (pictured above), leaving you typing blind, unaware of typos until after you hit enter. And I ran into some harpies that inflicted confusion on me, which caused my inputs to result in random character strings.

This willingness to play with text and limit (or enhance!) the player's ability to make inputs infuses the game with whimsy and pushes you to keep playing, curious to discover what other tricks it has in store.

It's a $3 game, by the way, and will probably get a 40% discount in a few days when the Steam sale begins.