Salutations, my curious congregation. Today we're going to be talking about a phone app, because for those who don't know I was sick for like three weeks with sinusitis so bad I couldn't sit up at my keyboard, but I can bring the phone to me and in my search for something to do, this is what came up.
Duskwood is a kind of mystery game with a hacking mini-game that is basically just bejeweled. A woman from this town, Duskwood, was kidnapped, and you have to figure out from your phone what happened to her. Like, the entire thing is framed through texting and sending files and stuff, which I've seen happen before but never played personally. And I'm going to ramble about that. So buckle up.
TWs: Mention of kidnapping, depression, possibly murder, and the sheer audacity of me playing a video game on my phone.
So Duskwood in a nutshell.
This group of friends from a small town where weird things happen (idk if I've ever told you all this but I love small towns where weird things happen) text you, the player, out of the blue. You get a message from this guy Thomas, whose girlfriend is missing, and he quickly adds all his other friends to this group chat message, telling you that his gf Hannah messaged him your number and he thinks you might be a lead.
So you start helping them investigate.
Other players on this stage include Jessy (adorable, into horror movies, game was really trying to push a romance with her hard for some reason but she's a bit too bubbly for me), Richy (Jessy's boss, owner of the junk yard, car doctor, kind of as interesting as watching paint dry), Lilly (Hannah's sister and kind of a wangrod), Dan (definitely shops at Hot Topic and has big 'Junior in High School that's into metal' energy), and Cleo (likes to go on runs, very nosey, Hannah's best friend).
Oh, and the Hacker. That's all you get to know about him at first, he uses he/him pronouns, he's a hacker, and he's very invested in making sure that Hannah gets found. I'll spare you the spoilers but I've learned a few things about him and this is the character I want to romance if romance is a thing in this game. Listen. I like mysterious and dramatic. I also like power and your first introduction to this guy was him just suddenly being in your phone like 'hey, here's Hannah's cloud help me get things out of it'.
Anyway, if you took the nametags away from all these characters (remember there are 7 of them that you talk to regularly) you would still know who you were talking to because each one has a distinctive typing style without it being intrusive. That's rare enough on its own. They also have some pretty consistent characterization.
This is a phone game, so it's pretty much lazer guided toward making you spend money (a lot of the interactions you can have are premium content and at points the characters send you frowny faces for not being able to open the shit they're sending you because you didn't pay for it and you only get so many tries at the bejeweled puzzles before you have to wait a half hour to try again sort of stuff), but for what it is, it's very well written and I've been enjoying it. To the point that I'm feeling much better now and still playing it because I'm invested in figuring out who took Hannah.
There's a kind of dark tone, you get to change the backdrop of your screen with experience points (mine is kind of geometric and stuff), there's a town map that was obviously made on the city map generator at watabou.itch.io. Pictures of all sorts of stuff even if you're not playing premium which is pretty cool.
The downsides are that there's a lot you don't get if you aren't playing premium and like, look I'm poor. And also there are only two gender options but the gender of you the player comes up so rarely that practically doesn't matter (It's come up twice and I'm on like Episode 5 {Editing later on the evening that I wrote this because I've been playing through episode 6 and it's come up a few more times since then more significantly.}). You can also change your name whenever you want to. It does, however, have that problem where sometimes it gives you dialogue options and you have no idea at all what you're going to end up saying but all in all I've been able to keep up fairly well.
This game is literally just puzzles and dialogue options. I am more or less the target audience for it. So if you like shit like that, consider this a recommendation.
Also this is going to go up at 8 in the evening several days from now but I'm writing it just as I'm waking up so I'm gonna go get breakfast.
Fortune Favors,
Robin the Red
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