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The Yawhg

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So you can buy this game on Steam now. I am definitely excited to check it out after all the good things everyone on Idle Thumbs has had to say about the game. I noticed in the description that it says it supports 1 to 4 players. Can someone who has played the game elaborate how that works?

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Haha I bought it off of the Steam app on my phone so I didn't even see that! Amazing/so weird!

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The thumbs play through is archived on their twitch screen and it shows what a multiplayer game is like. Basically, it's a lot like playing a board game where you pick a location each day, get an event there, and your stats and decisions influence the outcome of the event. Adding more people to that is easy, you just all take turns moving around the "board."

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I've owned this a while, and played it both just my wife and I, as well as in a group of four.  When we played, I was reading the between week scene text, and otherwise people were reading their own adventures out loud.  While you'll definitely see some repetition on multiple plays, there's a lot of content in there, and a lot of surprising stuff.  We saw things playing with four that my wife and I had never seen in the previous two or three games we'd played.

 

I would advise not playing it by yourself.  I mean, you can, but part of the good vibe I got from it was commiserating with someone about the crazy thing that just happened.  At the very least don't play it with only one character.  Part of the fun are the ways that the independent characters can inadvertently interact with each other.

 

Paid 10$ for it, and totally got my money's worth.  Local multi only, mind you.

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I really wish this game had a German translation, since reading out loud in a language you're not comfortable speaking is awkward.

Also, I hate it that pressing Esc immediately quits the game. That happened the first time I played it with two other people.

 

Overall, it's a unique and funny game. The mechanics are very simple, and yet they never have been implemented like this before. I like how you own your decisions. The colors are intense, the outcome of situations often surprising. One person found it to be depressing, though.

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Also, I hate it that pressing Esc immediately quits the game. That happened the first time I played it with two other people.

I think this has been changed in version 1.1. There is now a popup that says 'hold down A/Enter to exit'. HATRED OVER METHINKS.

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I think this has been changed in version 1.1. There is now a popup that says 'hold down A/Enter to exit'. HATRED OVER METHINKS.

 

A bit too late for me, but I'm ready to forgive.

 

 

Can someone explain to a non-podcast listener what this game is?

 

Gamezebo wrote a nice review about it.

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I'm sad to say this game ended up being a let down for me. None of the story bits really connected in any meaningful way, and there wasn't anything mechanically interested that allowed me to engage with what was going on. The whole experience felt shallow.

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Played through this several times this afternoon with my wife and daughter.  We all quite enjoyed it!  It's a fun little experience to play together as a group that is quite different from anything else.  I've got some friends that I'm curious what their reaction will be, so it will definitely get fired up the next time they are over.

 

I was quite pleased that

 

the character endings are divorced from the world ending. So even if you rebuild an amazing town, one or more of your characters can have a really shitty personal ending. Our magician had been a real trooper in our game. She had fought crime, prevented the escape of an evil demon baby and ultimately brought for a bounty of supplies for the town after its destruction. But alas, on the very first day of the game, she had been kidnapped by a hedge monster. She eventually escaped (obviously), but the monster returned in her epilogue and took her back to endlessly torment her. Our town leader, who whipped everyone into a mean machine of rebuilding efficiency, ultimately descended into a life of isolated alcoholism, steadily withdrawing from the rest of the community once the job was done.

It's just interesting to see a game where getting the job done successfully doesn't result in a happily ever after story for the heroes who pulled it off.

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My girlfriend and I played a round of this on the weekend. The comparison to Tales of the Arabian Nights, which we also recently purchased, are spot on.

 

I struggle with the disconnectedness between adventures in both games. This may be informed by my love of tabletop RPGs. You have to put active effort into constructing a cohesive narrative for your character, and it gets harder the more players they are. However, the epilogue week in The Yawhg goes a long way to rectifying this, as you can at least see your skills pay off in some meaningful way.

 

Weirdly, I find the Yawhg much too short and Tales much too long. I think there has to be room for some sweet spot between them that also links your adventures in some way. Tales has the concept of quests, of which a player will complete 1-3 before the end of the game. I can imagine a game where progress is defined in terms of quests completed, quests have some influence over adventures encountered, and quests introduce or pay-off in new mechanics which are character-specific instead of tweaking stats. But maybe I really just want to run more tabletop games.

 

I don't mean to come off so negative. I often focus on negative tidbits instead of broad positive experience. The Yawhg is still beautiful and the adventures hit the just right spot between familiar fantasy tropes and an element of the unexpected and unreal.

 

*edit* Reading Bjorn's spoilers surprise me a lot. I don't think we experienced any resurfacing narratives. I look forward to going back to the game, then.

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*edit* Reading Bjorn's spoilers surprise me a lot. I don't think we experienced any resurfacing narratives. I look forward to going back to the game, then.

 

We played through it 3 times.  Twice we played with one character each, and the final time we played with 4 characters and all together made the decision for what the extra character would do.  That's where the story in my spoiler comes from.  The magician was actually our fourth extra character. 

 

I don't know what all influences the character endings, but my impression is that it can be a wide variety of things, and that certain specific events will overwrite others.  We definitely spotted at least a half dozen different mini-storylines that can play out during the main bulk of the game, none of which we were able to see all the way to completion as we never had the right skills at the right time.  There's a ton of stuff going on. 

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My middle aged female friend REALLY enjoyed this game, as someone who "doesn't like video games." She wouldn't stop talking about how cool it was.

Its made me consider more the idea of collaborative local video game experiences. Can anyone think of other games similar to this?

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I haven't actually played the Yawhg yet, but if I'm right about the feel then maybe you could try playing the Walking Dead or the Wolf Among Us as a collaborative thing? The timer makes that a little harder but it's a fun experience to go through as a pair, reasoning out the choices together and reacting to the beats as you go.

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I hadn't realized until recently that Emily Carroll did the art for The Yawhg, which makes so much sense. She tends to draw lot of unsettling horror comics set in an indeterminate historical period.

 

78lfnzR.jpg

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She also did some art for Gone Home, which is how I became aware of her and The Yawhg.

 

I have a friend who also has it but we haven't played it yet. Collaborative multiplayer sounds cool, just wish I actually had people to play with.

 

Speaking of collaborative multiplayer, i've heard that it's an interesting way to play Heavy Rain, with different people playing as each character.

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My middle aged female friend REALLY enjoyed this game, as someone who "doesn't like video games." She wouldn't stop talking about how cool it was.

Its made me consider more the idea of collaborative local video game experiences. Can anyone think of other games similar to this?

 

I don't know if this could be run locally on one machine, but it is probably one of the most interesting collaborative story games is Sleep is Death. It's a two player game, one player controls the "world" (all characters, items, etc) and the other player is a guest in that world. It's basically a 2D pixel improve game.

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I've found two players each playing two characters entertaining if you only have one friend who is interested.

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