The only game released in 2015 was the beta version of Spell: The RPG. Since I’m currently doing a separate series all about Spell, its history, development, and future, I’ll skip it for this review. Check out the Spell: The RPG dev log series here.
Deep Dark Deathlike
A quick note: these entries within 2016 are listed alphabetically, not necessarily in release order.
Deep Dark Deathlike was my loving attempt to shove some real cosmic, fatalist horror into a fun game. This game began its life as These Eyes That Won’t Unsee, which emphasized the theme of becoming traumatized by, and then obsessed with, the incomprehensible. The name Deep Dark Deathlike is pulled from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley:
I shunned the face of man; all sound of joy or complacency was torture to me; solitude was my only consolation—deep, dark, deathlike solitude.
To date, this game has probably my favorite mechanic: gameplay is divided into three sections. The first section is an interactive, collaborative character creation process. The GM runs the character through their life leading up to their ultimate descent into the unknown while the player builds the character sheet as they go. The players then hand in their character sheets to the GM for the next section. When the character acts, the player gambles against how well they know their character sheet—how well their character knows themself—with different results based on whether they say they succeed or fail and whether they actually succeed or fail. The final section is an epilogue.
My biggest design obstacle was getting the game to feel punchy. The sessions were quite long, especially if you wanted to hit all three sections in one go. Given the nature of the memory mechanic, the longer the group waits between sessions, the more challenging it becomes. This limitation slowed down initial development, but I got to have a lot of fun in the sessions that had room to breathe.
I’d been working on some horror projects with the artist Dave Youkovich at my day job at the time (that’s a long story for another time), and he did some extremely cool art for the release of Deep Dark Deathlike. The spooky, gross, atmospheric borders and textures fill each page with great horror vibes. I’m not the best typesetter in the world, but I was pretty happy with this game.
A little while later, conversations about sensitivity readers and safety tools came to the forefront on game designer discourse. I realized that I needed to hire a consultant and/or editor to make sure this horror game about trauma, paranoia, and losing yourself was considerate, compassionate, and safe. However, Whimsy Machine wasn’t financially self-sustaining at the time, so I pushed it off again and again and eventually this project fell off the backburner. I got stuck in my head that if I were to go back to it, I’d need to give it proper justice—including, most likely, a Kickstarter and print run.
By this time, I believe Spell was getting its reprint, and I had too many other projects in the works. I mostly unlisted Deep Dark Deathlike, feeling like it wasn’t particularly responsible to sell a game I knew I wanted a sensitivity reader for. It might be listed somewhere. I hopped online platforms several times, trying to find a digital homebase for Whimsy Machine, and plenty got lost along the way.
Deep Dark Deathlike is absolutely a game I would revisit. The dice-rolling mechanics themselves are straightforward with an overlay of aesthetics, admittedly a little clunkily worded in places. The player rolls 2d6 and tries to get the sum equal to or less than the value of the skill they’re rolling. However, the character creation process has more unique risk-taking and secret roll elements to it.
I honestly didn’t really realize it until now, but Deep Dark Deathlike’s first segment (“The Campfire”) is a great example of “tutorial” character creation that I wouldn’t consciously try to implement until the revised Fight Item Run some years later. I really enjoy the concept of building a character as you go, marking down skills only as you need or use them, and only introducing mechanics when they’re relevant. This borrows heavily from video game design, though I can’t say that was the inspiration here.
After completing my full reread, Deep Dark Deathlike is a solid game that requires quite a bit of investment. Some amount of that investment comes from the subject matter, but the format of the game itself asks the GM to shoulder a lot of note-taking and recordkeeping along the way. Speaking of, I noticed this game is heavy with an old power imbalance trope of mine, requiring GM “permission” and placing the GM as final arbiter on a lot of matters. Though, players do have significant agency over their characters through most of the game.
As with many of my games, there’s no distinct setting or example scenarios beyond a handful of suggestions. It’s not a long text, so that doesn’t surprise me, but I appreciate the value of examples more now than I did previously. Still, I’d want the actual source of the cosmic “Darkness” to remain up to the players instead of canonically predetermined. My final thoughts are that I would like to prioritize that sensitivity reader, clean up some clunky writing, write some scenarios, and then bring in a graphic designer to work more cooperatively with Dave Youkovich’s super cool art. I could see this being a Halloween treat in 2025 or ‘26.
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