Last week I puzzled over my “review” of Lovecraftesque. The game is certainly well done, and it is an improvement over earlier games like Fiasco in terms of how it is structured and how it uses board game elements like a game board and cards and tokens. It’s also a Mythos game that uses themes and structure from Lovecraft’s work instead of literal elements of the Mythos, and so I was fairly critical in how it didn’t go deeper to some of the underlying themes below the surface-level stories of horrors from beyond comprehension. But the question in the back of my head while I was writing was “So what? The designers don’t owe me a deeper game.” This is true. And I’ve been thinking about it.

As a reviewer, I tend to look at games differently than if I was simply looking for a game to play. There is certainly crossover, as my main group who has been at the receiving end of my Cyberpunk Red ‘critique’ throughout one of our regular campaigns certainly knows. But overall, my intent with reviews and my intent as a player or GM are very different. That’s immediately clear with how I choose games to play versus games to review: I’m trying to put an in-person group together to play Urban Shadows 2e, but I’ve opted not to review it. In the case of playing the game, I enjoyed Urban Shadows 1e when I ran it and I’m genuinely excited about the rules changes in 2e. In the case of reviewing it, it’s the second edition of a game I’ve already written about and I’m not sure what I have to say. That may change after my campaign gets off the ground, but for now the two activities result in different conclusions.

In some ways, the emerging split between games I want to play and games I want to review is based on this idea of having something to say. A review of a roleplaying game should be and maybe even needs to be more than just a consumer review. There needs to be a little bit more than the mechanics, looking at the kerning and the table of contents, and considering if there are enough enemies or types of guns included in their respective chapters. A big reason for this, really, is that there are already a ton of RPGs out there. Even if at some level a review should report on whether the basics were achieved, the basics are, beyond annoyance at their exclusion, kind of meaningless. There are enough games out there that a game which doesn’t accomplish the bare minimum to be usable and fun can be ignored, and honestly, ignore them we do. Nobody at Cannibal Halfling wastes time reviewing bad games; I only do it when I review a popular, licensed game which turns out to be bad after I read it.

So if a game succeeds at the basics, then what? There are a number of ways a game can differentiate itself in the market. Does the game provide a new experience? Is there something about the game, be it rules, content, or even setting, that really makes me play it differently than other games? Alternatively, does the game have something to say? Is there an underlying message or theme which resonates through play? And finally, is the game just that good? Is there something about this game which is simply better done than its competitors, and what is it?

In the case of Lovecraftesque, the review was aimed at the notion of a new experience. Among the genre of the Lovecraft Mythos, a storytelling game is a new experience, or at least was when the first edition of Lovecraftesque was released. As I noted in my review the game uses a scene-by-scene structure to guide players alongside their one viewpoint character through a Lovecraftian horror story. That’s pretty novel, and it was executed fairly well too, with the board and the cards and the very consistent rules card usage. But even though the specific thing was technically novel, technically done a different way, it didn’t really look as novel when sat within the incredibly saturated world of Mythos gaming. A storytelling game using a board and cards does something kind of new, but it sits alongside Betrayal at House on the Hill and Arkham Horror as narrative Mythos board games, and then Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Arkham Horror (again) and many others as full-on traditional roleplaying games. Through almost no fault of its own, Lovecraftesque is harder to deal with than the board games, but more restrictive than the roleplaying games. So who chooses it, beyond a small cadre of specifically storytelling game fans? So then I looked towards what it had to say, and in the context of Lovecraft, well…you can go back and read the review for my thoughts.

This is the eternal problem with most roleplaying games, even if they’re in a completely unique, singular genre. There is always the question of why you would want to play that game over a known quantity. When that known quantity is D&D, that also means the known quantity has more players, more materials, more adjacent games, more tie-ins, more fans, and more, well, everything. And when you do step back from the dominant paradigm, you’re still in a crowded field. It’s not enough that virtually any genre you can think of already has an RPG, most genres you can think of have an RPG that’s at least thirty years old. Fantasy is obvious, as is space opera (Traveller, 1977). Cyberpunk too (Cyberpunk, 1988). Post-apocalypse has been around a while (Gamma World, 1978), as has military (Recon, 1982) and superheroes (Champions, 1981). When there have been thirty or forty years of continuing iteration on most genres people still game in, and when the underlying mechanical structure of almost all roleplaying games is largely the same, how is the next game going to stand out?

I don’t pose the question because it’s hard; this site wouldn’t have been able to go on for nearly a decade if we didn’t believe there were still amazing, creative things going on in gaming. And providing something new doesn’t always mean changing the formula; the Star Trek and Star Wars licenses are both riding high thanks to designers who understood the formula as much as any particular innovation. But, when you’re talking about a narrow genre without such limitations as a license holder, things are going to get crowded. Lovecraft’s Mythos is a perfect example of a narrow subgenre; within RPGs the only other one that comes close is Arthurian fantasy. And in both cases, each game slots into doing the genre its own way. The problem, of course, is that the more crowded a genre is, the more effectively dilute it is. Arthurian Fantasy has very few games within the genre. If we’re talking about games supported and active in the 2020s, it’s really just Pendragon and the upcoming Mythic Bastionland (which may or may not truly fit the description). In the Mythos…I don’t even know. I’m still not 100% convinced the Arkham Horror RPG and Call of Cthulhu aren’t the same game. There’s mecha Cthulhu, British Cthulhu, time travel Cthulhu, Roman Cthulhu…and yeah, storytelling Cthulhu.

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None of this really answers the question of whether games need a reason to exist. From a designer’s perspective, they absolutely do not. A designer should make whatever game they feel like, make the game they would want to play. The counterpoint to this is that while a designer does not need a reason to make a game, a player does need a reason to buy it, and that reason is inevitably weighed against the reasons for every other broadly similar game being examined at the same time. But how should that weigh in during a review? Unfortunately, the clearest answer I can give is that it’s complicated, and this goes back to another recent piece of mine discussing the social system of games. If you bring a game back to your group, what is it going to enable them to do? And in the case of Lovecraftesque, that was the difficulty. My group has played Fiasco, and would generally have fun with another storytelling game of the same ilk. That said, prompts alone aren’t going to elevate the game, not like something that would actually create investment in the template, investment in what it all meant.

Games do not need a reason to exist, no. Designers should create whatever they want. At the same time, gamers do not need a reason to buy another game, let alone another new game. That tension is where I find the most fruitful conversations as a reviewer. When you look at how people play, you’re looking at how they interface with games that even they personally may have had years or decades of experience with. When you try to show a game to someone with that much ingrained history, you need to show them that it does something interesting. That may be through design, it may be through writing and setting, it may just be through community and fan adaptation. But it needs to be something. And with so many designers designing, a game does need a reason for a reviewer to pluck it off the shelf and say “ah ha. This is interesting.”

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