Nihilation

I played this game on my stream (link below for those interested) and it was generally well-received. I think it's a game that really exemplifies why the indie TTRPG explosion is a beautiful thing. It's so niche and deliberately bleak that it's hard to imagine any publisher every letting it exist on their dime. Yet, it has such substance and creativity to its premise and its mechanics, that the world would have been poorer without it. It is one of those rare games that is committed to a parity between the feel of its mechanics and the experience of its world.

That world is one in the late stages of entropy and so its mechanics are brilliant constructed reflect that decay. I genuinely gasped when I realized that health is tracked by tearing pieces off your actual character sheet--losing whatever memories or features were written on that lost part. It's a game with no healing. It's a game that measures your progress in deaths. It's game that assumes you will play through many characters demises before reaching its conclusion. Put simply, it's a game that tells you to destroy something for real if its analogue was destroyed in the fiction of the game. I think that's a delightful ludonarrative symmetry between mechanics and story that persists into the game's many systems.

The one criticism I can offer is that the game was quite difficult for me to parse/learn/remember at times. I accept this may have just been me either overthinking things or resisting a certain reading of the rules because they were so unusual. However, I did find myself struggling to keep all the potential causalities of any action in mind. For example, when you use an EXPLORE action, that action will have three possible outcomes based on the value you roll. Those value ranges you roll in are listed once early in the book but then euphemistically referred to by words like "Gloom" & "Hope" from then on. So, Hope means you rolled 10 or above on the 2d6.  Then when you open up a new hex on the hex crawl with this action you have to roll 2d6 three more times, then--based on those roles or where this hex was placed--double check if it triggers a doom sign. A doom sign requires three more 2d6 rolls (well, doesn't require, but it's likely you will need it). Then, with the doom sign, you can take a DELVE action--which has three more outcomes, one of which is another action with three more outcomes. None of this is to say anything here is unreasonably complex or unnecessary--especially in the indie TTRPG space. It's just that getting your head around the game can be a bit frustrating at times. If you are a person opposed to this style of spiderwebbing, "if, then" mechanics, then this game is probably not going to vibe with you. You'll likely be more frustrated than immersed.

For me, however, it was well worth the learning curve because as much as I enjoy a rules-lite prompt-based games, I can find two dozen of those for every indie TTRPG with crunchy, creative, and meaningful mechanics tied to the game's immersion. Where this game sometimes abrades with its complexity, it more than makes up for with how impactful those complex rules become as they coalesce into an overall experience. In other words, it's a game that works in the gestalt despite its sometimes fiddly details. I recommend it if this sounds like your niche. After all, strange & complex is where indie TTRPG's really set themselves apart.  
 

Hello, love the idea of the game and would love to try it out, any community copies coming soon? Thank you!

I haven't got all the way through this but I can tell it's really good with lots of original ideas and flavour. Do you have any plans to have it printed?