OK so I had to come back to this one because the developer reached out on my previous post to let me know that the issue with recognized controllers interfering with the UI had been fixed. Since this was one of the more unique demos I had downloaded, and because I wanted to act in good faith, re-downloaded The Guiding Spirit and took it for a spin this morning.

This game has a lot going on, which wasn’t exactly what I had expected based on the screenshots. As stated previously, it’s a narrative RPG, heavy on the narrative as the UI is presented in storybook format. I originally likened it to Ye Olden Steve Jackson products, some of which have been translated to digital format as well.

The Guiding Spirit starts off asking me to either create characters by hand, or generate a random set of at least six to complete a party.

I ran with the “Roll Character” option to get some pre-mades, but I did try creating one manually rolled character and…there’s a lot going on here. Characters are insanely complex, and I thought that this could be what a slice of life from Dwarf Fortress might be like with a different approach, different UI, and different mandate.

There are maybe…12 different steps to go through? Each one builds the various aspects of a character that will be used in the game not just for rolling dice, but to determine how characters interact, the chances they have to bust a move, and, most interesting to me, at least, the things that they talk about and how they talk about them.

When it comes time to “do something”, a small popup appears. It will display the character portrait who is acting, the number they need to exceed in order to succeed, the values for a critical failure and critical success, any bonuses they may have due to skills, abilities, or attributes, and the d100 that is rolled (actually dice are rolled on the screen so you can see devastating failures in real time!).

On occasion, there will be an opportunity to divide the party. In the example above, I could have sent some members left, and some members right. Later, I had the option to send some party members hunting, some gathering, and others doing other things (or nothing). I kept the party together as everyone went to the left, but when given the chance to send the party to different tasks when they encountered some villagers, I got several different branches for each group’s story, and that was pretty cool and unexpected.

One thing I found interesting is that the party roster is displayed along the bottom of the left-hand page. If a character is speaking, acting, or is receiving something through narrative (damage, XP, whatever) then their portrait is highlighted in a kind of rainbow blue. There are also three modes for displaying the portraits: current HP/damage, motivation, and relationship scores. I’m not entirely sure how two of those three play out in the game, but it’s a cool way to display them.

I am extremely glad my badmouthing of the demo got the attention of the developer, although I always feel bad whenever that happens; I write posts with the expectation that no one will see them, and my style can be kind of flippant and disrespectful sometimes. You’d think I’d know better that with today’s Internet tools, some people might be setting up alerts for when their products are mentioned. While I’m sorry I was such a jerk, I am very pleased that I got the attention of the dev who kindly let me know that my issue was addressed, and pleased that I got to experience this demo, because I really enjoyed it. I will say, though, that I blew through a lot of the narrative — there was a lot of narrative compared to the amount of interaction I experienced — in an attempt to get to certain situations like combat (which is handled using the same dice rolling method mentioned above).

This one is now definitely going on the wish list. I didn’t want to actually read the story in the demo because I don’t want it spoiled for when it releases, assuming that the demo is a piece of the final story and not designed for this taste of what’s to come.