Let's get this out of the way: This game is hard. It is intentionally balanced so that you will be  heading for a cliff from the start. It's a game where you're fighting cosmic horrors; you go into these kinds of stories knowing that you are purely a tiny speck. This is a feature.  

So, why do we play these kinds of games. The story, for one. December has created a logical, if terrifying, backstory for MERGER and looking at 2026 and realizing she wrote this in 2021 makes  me want to ask her for lottery numbers. With the desperate push for genAI to own all our data and sell it back to us, looking at these corporations as shambling eternal horrors instead of organizations trying to make money is all too easy.

I expressed the difficulty of the game. Is it impossible? No. And that's the draw. There is strategy here. Victory is not completely out of reach. It may be a matter of luck. Failure is punished harshly, yes, success is dangerous but if you can just get lucky a few times, you'll have the gifts you need. So you keep trying to see if this time is when the stars align.

I was born and bred on 1st Edition D&D, so I love "Here is a random character, make the most of it." If you're not, that might be a downside to you. I think it's fun to be looking at the first encounter  with your character sheet having skills that, from a story perspective, are perfect for the situation but are overall weak, and later the same encounter sees you with skills that are incredibly strong but, from a story perspective, completely useless. (I mean, you can crowbar anything together in a solo RPG, but "dark rites and an ancient mystic tome"  doesn't completely work for union busting... oh, wait, what's this article about Wizards of the Coast demoralizing their team by deadnaming all their trans employees...)

The point is that this is one of the most "for me" reviews I've done so far. The randomized characters are fascinating  for me. The near impossible start until you run into a burst of luck is fantastic    for me. But, again, this is about a tiny cell trying to take down the entire body,  it's not supposed to be possible. And yet, maybe this time, it will be.

I am a hobbyist TTRPG streamer, and I played MERGER live on stream on June 5th, 2026. If you are interested in seeing that,  you can find the stream on my YouTube page, which you can find in my bio.