The Fernweh Saga: Book One

I expected a choice of games horrorgame. I got none of that. This has been a huge waste of my time. This game is basically a novel and from that novel just the 600.000 word long prologue. Nothing important happens for the most of it, you have a short climax that just raises more questions and then you are forced to stay in town for the sequel. That isnt even a spoiler, as you are so heavily railroded that it does not come as a surprise at all. Most of the wordcount is just overly long discriptions. This game is a novel where you get to choose how your character reacts. The only choice that matters is who you spend the most time with. Said character will then be your romance, no argument. Nothing else matters. Sure, you have a lot of reactions, but they all lead to the exact same outcome. For example, you can get asked to open a door. You get six different reactions that all end with you opening the door. At other point your choices are ballantly disregarded. You dont want to attend the funeral? You get guilttripped offscreen in attending. You dont want to go into the dark forest at night when someone has just been brutaly killed there? Your "friends" drag you there anyway. There isnt even a suggestion that they go and you stay. And onto the slow-burn romances every other review is raving about. They are not bad and well written. I would be a lot more forgiving if this was a Loves-choice game. Romance in the forground, the supernatural as the setting. Instead the entire game is focussed on the romance (you dont get a choice if you do not want to romance someone) and the supernatural is largley unexplored. It also doesnt help that all romance-option are constantly schoved into your face and always tack along(expecially Reese - you can choose to hate and ignore the guy and they just keep inserting themselves into the thing). To the horror. Its just "something is not right here". FOR ALL 13 CHAPTERS! Even the climax gets in on this. You fight a Monster and everyone is like - "wait, this isnt conected to what we have been investigating - something isnt right" YOU DONT SAY! Nothing else! No explenation, no "Why" no leads at all. Apperently that is to happen in a sequel, wich i will not be buying. And for the last possible thing: The implication that the railroading is part of the supernatural force in the town, delivered via interface screw with some choices. THIS IS THE WORST OF IT ALL! The game basically smugly taunts you about yor lag of choices! And even if this is directet at the maincharacter it feels as if it is actually towards the player. If you want a story about someone beeing deprived of choices - dont make it in a choice of games game! Write a novel! Do not buy this. Even a sequel can not save this, as it might be well written - its in the entirely wrong format for what it trys to tell or do.

This CYOA is pretty good, has a good atmosphere and the characters are written well and made distinct. Definitely recommend it however there are a few issues, I'll try to keep it spoiler free to detail some. 1. The pacing is VERY slow to start, the first 10 or so chapters take a while to build up to the moment and this may turn people off from it because of that. It tries to keep things interesting but at times it feels like you set out to do something and achieve nothing. 2. The latter half of the story goes way too fast, its weird its either one extreme or the other. But the last few chapters feel very rushed, like the creator had a time limit and was quickly running out so churned out the finale as fast as possible. It really hurts it, especially during the big fight scene as the characters do not seem at all perturbed by what is going on even when an enemy is charging them. Seriously they stand there and talk for an unusual amount of time as though they are under no threat and then just walk off. Its really weird and jarring. There's no build up either it just sorta...appears. 3. The 600k words feel less than that, a lot of the writing looks copy pasted with very little variations in them, not all of them mind but enough to notice. For example one lot of choices have the same paragraph with one word/sentence changed or added, but a majority of the text is the same. Its a little weird as they could've had it set differently so the additional text that's added because of a stat or choice could've been put into a variable to show it with the paragraphs rather than having the ENTIRE paragraph copied into the choice to just have the additional text in it. But because its done the other way it feels like artificially adding up the word limit to make it bigger. 4. Spoiler territory so I'm gonna use the words the game uses to keep it vague enough. So you have these 'Skills' that you choose at one point in chapter 6 or so that dictates what you main 'Skill' is. Then when a scene comes up the 'Skill' comes into play. You know how many times that skill comes up? Once. Yep, only one time in the entire game as far as I can tell. You'd think something this important would come up frequently, even if it doesn't add much but nope. It feels like its just set up for the later games but it really needed more here, like maybe at the start it has the different skills show up in minor ways, to give a glimpse of them. So when chapter 6 comes up the player is like 'Ohhh so that's why that happened!'. I can only hope the next book uses them a lot more. Now in spite of these negatives I still really like this game, I'm just frustrated that it could've been great if a little more care or time was put into it to really get it going. The latter half really dampens the experience but I still can't wait to try the next book, which I hope has things refined and amped up. Especially considering as not much was explained in this one and everyone seems perfectly fine with what they do come across even though its a completely alien concept. Regardless I do recommend this game. Overall score: 8/10