Fallen London

[Jubal]

Anyone else play? I know Spritelady does.

For those who don't know, Fallen London is a browser-based game which is at https://www.fallenlondon.com/ - you can play for free, there will be various options and storylines locked with Fate, a purchasable currency, but it's fun enough and there's tons of content without that. Essentially, it's set in Gothic-silly-fantasy London and you play through a lot of written storylines selecting and clicking options. There are a ton of different items, including lots of non-physical items like "a memory of distant shores" or "a whispered hint" or "a touching love story" all of which can be bought, sold, and traded just like anything else. Devils, fungi, men with the faces of squid, they're all there: it's mostly just enjoyably silly, though the action economy sometimes makes the game a bit slow.

You can also add other players as acquaintances via your lodgings: I am JubalBarca as in most places, should anyone wish to do so.

[psyanojim]

Yep, its amusing so far. I'm trying to be shadowy which seems to involve chasing cats around to train myself.

[Jubal]

Yes, the cat chasing is very good fun

I basically tend to like FL in so far as it does that sort of quirky stuff, I love the stories with the urchins and rubbery men and bohemians and the fun Victorian murder mysteries and things, whereas I enjoy it less when it gets into the "cosmic horror and constant nightmares" end of what it does, but I think that's just my natural genre preferences anyway: when I'm playing games I almost always want to feel I have a sense of agency and an ability for my character to work out what's going on - false choices or intentionally obscured choices tend to grate on me in most games. I feel like that's where my few frustrations with it tend to come from: there's definitely bits of the game that pitch you quite unexpectedly into more of a true horror environment where that sort of unclear choice mechanic and the resulting unsettling reduction in agency is much more the point.

Lately my character has been training as a duellist, in order to hunt down whoever killed his brother (I picked the Nemesis ambition line, so working on that). I've also been doing some bits of the Feast of the Rose, though some part of that started pitching me into the early content of a particularly infamous storyline which I didn't actually want to do at all and which has taken days of gameplay and numerous points of menaces to clear to get myself freed of again, so that has been a bit annoying. I've been enjoying the University content anyhow.

[Spritelady]

I'm currently working on seducing the Barbed Wit at the Empress' Court. This mostly involves raising my 'Fascinating' score by wearing daring fashion around the court. It's a little grind-y but the Barbed Wit interactions are quite fun.

I've become fairly good at persuasive as a result, and have sold many scraps of silk and bought myself some new lodgings and a nice new dress.

[Jubal]

I continue to play - I've been working through the Labyrinth of Tigers a bit, and sort of vaguely pursuing various storylines. I will soon complete A Person Of Some Importance, but I have a few things I want to try and do first. I've got to get 2000 drops of Prisoners' Honey for my Ambition which is a lot, I've got a ton more expeditions in the Forgotten Quarter to do in order to build up my archaeologist and complete the Firebrand and Missionary story, and I want to progress with A Name Signed With A Flourish which I thought I was about done with but have now discovered I need to spend a lot more time at court to progress with or something?

[Spritelady]

I've sadly not had too much time to play lately, although it is open on my phone whenever I open my Chrome app and it really shouldn't be that hard to click onto it and play every now and then.

Hearing about the various exploits that I've yet to get involved with has certainly rekindled my interest though!

[Jubal]

I just reached the Person Of Some Importance status. It seems like there are a lot of fun things to do as a result, though also a lot of resource-grinding needed for many of them... I am trying to work out how get a zubmarine and it appears to be Complicated.

[Jubal]

I finally broke through a bit of a barrier recently after some near infinite feeling grinds: I unlocked the Laboratory, the Lab route to Parabola, and the Bone Market, which are giving me a significant number of new areas to work through. OTOH that means I'm now rapidly flatlining all the resources I'd built up, but oh well.

[Jubal]

I finished my Ambition! The Ambition is I guess the closest thing FL has to a "main quest" - it's far, far longer than most other stories, including both some big grinds and a lot more direct story content, and takes you from an early-game start through to some very high powered late game content. I thought the resolution of my Ambition (there's a choice of four, mine was the investigation and vengeance tale "Nemesis") was interesting, I'd probably have liked a more... victorious ending I guess, even though I know Fallen London has that horror vibe and nothing is ever entirely for the good, the ambition is such a long story and big deal that it would've been sort of nice to have a firmer recognition of the achievement. But it was a good set of ending scenes, all the same, and I felt I made the right final choices for my character and who they are.

I think I'm a bit tired of FL after this: I also had to do various bits of content I'd been skipping in order to do the Ambition, which frustrated me because I'd been avoiding those for RP reasons and FL's tendency to force you to complete almost all of its paths eventually and not give a huge amount of sense of your choices and who your character is can be frustrating. Effectively dying after the recent estival event was also annoying to me as I'd been explicitly never doing that as part of this playthrough: having an event that just arbitrarily sets you straight to Wounds 8 felt like the game taking a cheap shot rather than something that had been earned story-wise. That said, I'm sure I will go back and work through the rest of the railway and the Evolution plotline, both of which feel pretty interesting as things to complete. But first, probably, Dr. Jubal Barca (and Balderdash (Blemmigan)) deserve something of a break. Along with their companions and menagerie, which now comprise nearly eighty different possible companions. There is a lot of game in this game.

Where does one go for a summer holiday in the Neath? Quiet jaunt to hang out in Craithie, or one of the outlying islands? It's sort of surprising nobody's tried opening a spa on the Elder Continent yet...

[Jubal]

I have subsequently done the end of the railway and, as of today, the end of Evolution.

The Railway is quite a good part of the game, albeit one which suffers a little from FL's late game grind tendencies. The Tracklayers' City section at the end is an interestingly weird but very Fallen London way to end the story, and the mysterious... antagonist I think is the wrong term, perhaps just "obstacle", is a genuinely fascinating enigma. You pick up a lot of new locations with their own side-stories along the way, each of which is very different and some of which open up a lot of new opportunities elsewhere. That's all great, but it can sometimes be tricky to keep track of, especially with FL's huge proliferation of item types and, at times, lack of clarity in how to find and use them. I do think it's a good part of the game, anyhow, but it's a slow and very large thing to explore and whilst it has some overarching plot elements, they're a little sparse except a few big moments later in the sequence. I'm looking forward to seeing what Tracklayers' City content evolves in future, though the TLC does seem like it's a bit of a wish-fulfillment of "Fallen London is big and horrible, what if you could just build Nice Socialism Town according to your personal ideological preferences?" But that said, I'm not going to turn down that chance if offered it.

Meanwhile Evolution is a really nice story and one of my favourite of the big late-game content sections, in part because it's a pretty clear and effective narrative and in part because it isn't too grind-y. It might have been worse if I'd completed it earlier, as I think you may be meant to do, but there are few really big resource grinds involved which means the story continues at a good pace. There are also some of the best narrative moments I've hit in Fallen London in there: the game manages to make the dive (and I won't say more about it than that) very atmospheric, and some of the confrontations are genuinely well done with an effectively thoughtful adventure-horror that fascinates and appalls rather than just sickens. The end could maybe have done with a little more oomph, but it was well written and felt earned and the new location available at the end is really interesting.

I don't think I've got much big plot stuff to do now, but I have got a lot to explore which feels a nice state to be in for a patch of reduced occasional poking at Fallen London. I'd like to do more in the Khanate, I've still got some bits to do to tie up loose ends in Evolution, and I've got bits at the later railway stations to tootle along with.