Dark Souls: The Journaling RPG. You're an "Echo" wandering a place destroyed by some unknown catastrophe. You draw a card that generates a location, you roll dice to see how many times you get sent back to the bonfire how dangerous it is to explore, repeat until you've gone through the deck and mapped out an entire soulslike worth of content, complete with powerups, boss fights, and cryptic NPCs. It's a creative concept, and the writing captures the melancholy mood of a soulslike quite well.

However, it's also a rather long game. It's designed to run through the entire deck, and each card requires you to answer a number of questions - the place, the dangers that lurk within, how the Echo fails and succeeds against those dangers, and possibly some facts about the backstory or the world that you're exploring. You might lose interest before finishing the game, especially if you draw many number cards in a row. (Number cards are "dangerous paths," the equivalent of Undead Burg or Forgotten Crossroads. Important to the gameplay, but not really a story beat.) It's a long time to immerse yourself in such a melancholy game.

Also, the setting of Mnemonic didn't really grab me, which is a problem for a game about exploring a world. There's a lot of high-level detail about the setting - it's a world where memory has power, there was a war with dragons, you're a living memory in a city that was destroyed in the war, but when I try to put myself in the Echo's shoes and say "Okay, what does this next room look like?" I don't have anything to work with. Like, the very first card I drew told me "The Echo has been in this place before," and I was like "Literally all I know about the Echo is that they have a cloak and a staff, and now I need to decide where they used to live?"

 Version 2.0 is much better about this - it includes some evocative names to get you started with generating locations and hazards, and is just easier to read in general, but it's still the game's main weak point. This game asks you to not just make up a location to explore, but a history - what happened in the calamity, who caused it, how do you stop them - and that can be pretty challenging.  A good writing exercise, one that really understands the games it's riffing on, but I would have liked more help coming up with ideas.