The Shrouded Isle has an interesting premise and a really cool style and atmosphere, but the mechanics really failed to land with me.
You play as the leader of a group of families on an island, worshipping some sort of Dagon-like Old God. Your task is to keep the family members from rebelling and turning on you while sacrificing individual members to this god. The set up is cool and the atmosphere and stark graphics sell it really well.
There are a few problems mechanically that prevented me from having a good time with The Shrouded Isle. The game is basically about managing the families' sentiment towards you and various resources on the island, like Ignorance, Discipline, Fervor, etc... Villagers get assigned to tasks which they will improve or erode based on their specific traits (usually negative), and at the end of the day, you pick one of the villagers that participated in a task to sacrifice (this is important, and bad), removing them from your pool of villagers permanently and making their family angry.
Initial assignments and sacrifices are essentially random, since you don't have enough information to make an informed decision about which villager you don't want. There is nothing to tell you if you made a good choice or a bad choice, so it feels pretty bad.
Once you start investigating, you don't know if a villager is awful until you fully investigate them, since bad stats are twice as bad as good stats (the one good stat you know can be offset by a bad stat you haven't discovered yet). This prolongs the number of random guesses that give you no feedback.
Once you find a good candidate for sacrifice (someone with completely awful stats) you have to send them on a mission, hurting your village's current status just to have the opportunity to sacrifice them. It is like a weird sub-optimal play you have to opt into in order to get what you actually want (sacrificing the person) later. It feels really bad and strange.
Even once you start being able to make meaningful choices about who to sacrifice, it just feels repetitive and uninteresting to inspect people, choose the most optimal task candidates, then sacrifice one of them.
This game is about finding information and using it to your advantage, but the information is not satisfying to find out, the advantage you gain is minimal, and the results are fairly ambiguous. This game has a lot of potential, but it definitely didn't come through for me in the end. Even if you are extremely drawn to the theming and style, there just isn't enough here for me to recommend it.
You play as the leader of a group of families on an island, worshipping some sort of Dagon-like Old God. Your task is to keep the family members from rebelling and turning on you while sacrificing individual members to this god. The set up is cool and the atmosphere and stark graphics sell it really well.
There are a few problems mechanically that prevented me from having a good time with The Shrouded Isle. The game is basically about managing the families' sentiment towards you and various resources on the island, like Ignorance, Discipline, Fervor, etc... Villagers get assigned to tasks which they will improve or erode based on their specific traits (usually negative), and at the end of the day, you pick one of the villagers that participated in a task to sacrifice (this is important, and bad), removing them from your pool of villagers permanently and making their family angry.
Initial assignments and sacrifices are essentially random, since you don't have enough information to make an informed decision about which villager you don't want. There is nothing to tell you if you made a good choice or a bad choice, so it feels pretty bad.
Once you start investigating, you don't know if a villager is awful until you fully investigate them, since bad stats are twice as bad as good stats (the one good stat you know can be offset by a bad stat you haven't discovered yet). This prolongs the number of random guesses that give you no feedback.
Once you find a good candidate for sacrifice (someone with completely awful stats) you have to send them on a mission, hurting your village's current status just to have the opportunity to sacrifice them. It is like a weird sub-optimal play you have to opt into in order to get what you actually want (sacrificing the person) later. It feels really bad and strange.
Even once you start being able to make meaningful choices about who to sacrifice, it just feels repetitive and uninteresting to inspect people, choose the most optimal task candidates, then sacrifice one of them.
This game is about finding information and using it to your advantage, but the information is not satisfying to find out, the advantage you gain is minimal, and the results are fairly ambiguous. This game has a lot of potential, but it definitely didn't come through for me in the end. Even if you are extremely drawn to the theming and style, there just isn't enough here for me to recommend it.