I really love this game! I'm no good at habits, so I've been coming back to play a day or two of my playthrough over the last few months. I think so much about this game incentivises thinking a lot about character, personality, what information each character has and what impact that has on all their relationships... it's the kind of writing heavy lifting I usually have no motivation to actually do but this game makes it not just fun but necessary! I need to know what's going on in Pantaleon the assassin-jester's head here and why, and how the revelation of a particular secret might affect them...!!
Kumada said it better below, but I love how the rules here kind of trap you into interesting story, make you build your own cage to react to, to calculatedly go with or push against. The mechanical choices you make feel both important and precarious, you're carefully managing resources in a way that makes the elements of chance very dramatic. This kind of invitation to participate in building a complicated trap for yourself is absolutely what I want from a solo game! And it's hard to find such a game where you can trust the system to match up so well with the kind of story you're telling. Ah, it's really smart.
I'm rooting deeply for my Protagonist to become a love interest, but the current situation - in which the villain's only really romantic scenes are with the protagonist (who lacks a heart meter), so all the relationship benefits of positive scenes must mechanically go to a watching or involved LI (with a choice of a) bitter murderous ex, b) time travelling political agent from rival kingdom, or c) guard so convinced of the villain's evil that the game is bending around the power of his hatred) - is so interesting and so perfectly captures the tension between System and reincarnator (through productive tension between game rules and me!). I love how this makes the twists genuinely uncertain even to me, because they rely on multiple interconnected systems. It's very possible the Protagonist never gains a heart meter, and the reincarnator's desperate efforts to secure their survival by cosying up to them comes to a tragic nothing, a near-inevitable playing out of the original story's beats. All this in a game about trying to escape your narrative fate... it's so good! Thanks for writing :)
I'm currently at Day 11, and my play log is... longer than any one thing I've written since my dissertation........ If I ever finish the game, I'll be sure to share it. Thank you for writing!