I got Diwata ng Manila‘s Into the Gloom back in November but only got around to playing this evocative fantasy storytelling hexcrawl yesterday. The game is played in a browser and it facilitates telling the story of a queen and her companion taking a journey through a dangerous woods represented with a hex grid. There are dice rolls and exploration of tiles, but the heavy lifting is done by the player imagining elements of the story.
The game was built using Story Synth, and is one of many games on the platform. There are a few rough edges, with repeated hexes and an interface that isn’t fully intuitive, but the game is fun and allows for some interesting storytelling.
For my story, the Queen and my character traveled the forest in search of a way to reverse a famine in her Queendom, with an ultimate decision to forego the comforts afforded both by their stations and make the right decision to transition to citizen participation in their governance and the end of the Queendom.
Into the Gloom is a dark solo-journaling game detailing your journey through the woods with your Queen. You are here to save your Queendom and to save each other, but the woods takes as much as it gives. Will you survive unscathed or will the love between you and your Queen fade during your journey?
Into the Gloom