Steam Highwayman 12+

Disappointing 😞

I’m fairly choosy about the games I buy but I really liked the sound of this and I love the game-book format. The set-up is fairly engaging with choices that affect your stats and your story. Unfortunately, it all goes a bit awry after this. The game comprises of mainly choices about where to go, (North to Oxford Road?, South to Marlow Bridge?, down Ham-hock lane?) A map is provided but it is needlessly detailed and complex. No real sense of where you are coming from or going to. You aren’t prompted with any local or inherent knowledge the character might already have, instead you are just plopped onto a Velo-bike with apparent amnesia desperately trying to have meaningful engagements in situations and places which are largely a hiding to nothing. And the events requiring dice rolls are definitely glitched. ‘Roll the dice to see what you find here’ -‘Roll more than a 5’. I roll a 7, nothing happens, just head back down the road. On my first play I ended up at a passage that ‘has no content’. I had to start all over again. Then there is the combat dice rolls. For example, you take on a guy driving a steam-coach. I have a sabre and a blunderbuss pistol. I have roll more than a 6 to land a blow. Driver has a tire-iron or something similar he has to roll a 3?? Highwayman sounds like the wrong career choice lads!? I’ve rolled the virtual dice hundreds of times now, never seen a six. Not once. Are the virtual dice 5-sided?…

‘You can stay at the inn for £2 a night’. Why? Does it heal my character? Does he need to eat? Sleep? Apparently not?… Why then.

‘Return to where your boat is moored’ Brilliant, i have a boat! And helmsman! …Any options to talk to him? To learn more about the world? Our circumstances? The value of the boat or options it gives me? No. ‘You can put some freight on it if you like’… Great. So, now I’m looking for logistics opportunities? Any presenting themselves??… No.

Maybe this game takes hours of learning the English place-names and undeveloped characters and piecing the whole lot together into a game with some semblance of immersive qualities but I get about 30 mins phone-gaming a day, I can’t pick up a game where I’m constantly wondering where I am, what am I doing, why I’m talking to people who have apparently nothing to say and I can’t ask them anything, just keep steaming around the maze of towns and lanes and hope that at some point I can actually establish a purpose of some sort…

Unusual that the narrative for a game-book would be so underdeveloped. Great potential here but so many flaws. Hard to see the value in it…