Thoughts on The Lost Hound by Palaverous

This is something that really should have come out weeks ago (what can I say, I am King of the Procrastinators!) but it's coming out now, so that's just how things are working out.

A couple of weeks ago, Palaverous released his first game, The Lost Hound. I, perhaps unreasonably so, utterly loved it. It had flaws that I know intellectually were poor design decisions, but the game struck a nostalgia bone in my body that made me either forgive them or actively enjoy them.

The reason why I like this game so much requires some explication. As a kid, my parents bought me a ton of Fighting Fantasy books, which, if you don't know, are like a D&D adventure in a book. A particular favorite of mine was the Island of the Undead, which I played pretty much obsessively, and when I actually started playing D&D with my friends I'd subject them to constant adaptations of said adventure.

Me: You wash up on an island.

Friend: Maybe an island... of the Undead?

Me: *groan*

When my family moved from my motherland of New Zealand ever-so-long-ago, I lost access to my beloved Fighting Fantasy books. For whatever reason, the books were scarce in the United States, so many years later, with the magic of the Internet, I still eat this stuff up. An illustration: one of the few phone apps I've ever paid for was Inkle's Sorcery series, and that's because my parents bought me only Part 4, ignorant that there were three other books in that wonderful series.

The Lost Hound just hits that spot in me exactly, except there's also sex, and well-written sex to boot, so Palaverous could write a game half as good as this and I'd still love it. That said, I think there's plenty here to love other than nostalgia, so I'm not saying that's the only good thing to the game.

My first playthrough was hilarious. I missed everything. The faerie, the tree house, the faerie queen, the monastery. Name an optional encounter, I missed it. Somehow, I stumbled into the fire world without landing on a single random encounter. I'm pretty sure this was obscene luck rather than a bug. I was really confused when I was getting crushed by fire elementals and the like.

My second playthrough I got the best ending. I really took my time, exploring and grinding like you really ought to. I bagged the faerie and her queen, and the succubus, Kimiko, and eventually Aura at the end. Getting the best ending was very rewarding and I really felt like I'd earned it.

The sex is pretty well distributed -- it comes as a steady reward for good exploration, you never lose interest from too little or too much, and every female interest has a different appeal. Aura is a great character -- vividly illustrated and just enough out of reach where you chase her like Pepe le Pew. I have a special weakness for bad ass ladies (which is why Taki was my favorite character from P:AF) so the fact she was at a demigoddess power level was only a plus for me.

I don't mind the random encounters, partly because they reminded me of the Fighting Fantasy books, except I would quibble at the level-up grindiness of it all. The point of the encounters in Fighting Fantasy books was to encourage resource management. Monsters didn't provide XP, a long encounter would just drain your stamina for the future, so it was better to avoid them if you could. Granting XP actively encourages players to find and hunt monsters... and in The Lost Hound, grinding is an absolute requirement if you want to get ahead. I don't like that, in these sorts of games exploration should be rewarded, not combat! So I would have preferred non-random encounters that could be avoided with intelligent play, and where your character becomes more powerful as they find items and powers, not levels.

I ended up enjoying the story, even knowing it was fantasy schlock. There are parts in Star Trek where they say technobabble that sounds vaguely scientific, like "We have to disable the fusion power cores or we'll have a resonance cascade scenario!", "But Captain, the fusion power cores helium coolants are at critical levels!" and my sense is that The Lost Hound does the same thing with magic. I don't have issues with this so much as I recognize it, and there's a lot of it. But the characters were enough to keep me interested even in the magic babble, and it just made enough sense where I could navigate it.

It was a little odd that the setting vacillated between straight fantasy and a Discworld-esque parody. I did find the God of Non-committal Good pretty fucking hilarious, I'll admit, and there's a lot of good humor and genuine laugh-out-loud moments that broke up the game. I'm of the opinion that a fantasy setting played totally straight is an unrealistic fantasy setting, since stupidly funny things happen in the real world all the time. That said, the humor didn't always mesh well with the straight-laced stuff, especially since the story touches on some serious themes of self-sacrifice.

The author calls his work "monumentally wordy". I don't really agree with this. Wordiness is something you get from bad prose, the feeling where your eyes start to glaze over because the writer is filling space with bullshit. Herman Melville is another author who is very, very wordy, but the man can write about gutting fish like it was poetry, so you don't care. I'm not saying Palaverous is on the same level as Herman Melville (fuck man, who is?), but like Herman Melville you don't get a sense the Palaverous is just trying to reach a certain word count. The only parts of the game I glazed over was some of the books, which really were short stories in and of themselves.

So... 10/10, and I demand a sequel!