First Impressions - The Wretched Solo RPG [some spoilers]

The Wretched - a zine based solo journaling RPG

I picked up The Wretched on impulse when I saw it on a Kickstarter notification. It was inexpensive, seemed to have got good feedback and even came with a soundtrack. I was also intrigued at the idea of a solo RPG that I could play myself.

TL;DR: The Wretched is a small, simple, solo RPG in zine format with a feel very like the film Alien. It is a journaling game, with the journal taking the form of audio recordings. It works well, but has limited repeatability. I enjoyed it enough to make the audio recordings.

Physically, it's an attractive 28 page staple-bound zine, with a distinctive cover. The layout is very nice, simple single column done attractively.

The game set up is that you are the last survivor of a salvage ship, The Wretched. Your engines have failed and your ship has been attacked by a hostile alien life form. You went full Ellen Ripley and ejected it through the airlock, but somehow it survived. And it's trying to get in.

You (or your character) spend the game trying to fix the engines, nurse life support along, get the distress beacon going and boost the range of the transmitter. The zine starts with a trigger warning about the themes, recognising that the themes of isolation, fear and struggle may not land well with some readers. The game cites John Carpenter (music and films) and Nine Inch Nails as influences. The soundtrack shows this.

Survival can only be achieved in two ways; activating the distress beacon and then surviving long enough for someone to hear and rescue you. Alternatively, you could fix the engines and leave the creature behind. 

Set up and ready to go.

Mechanics of play are simple. You have a pack of cards with the jokers removed, a single six sided dice, a Jenga tower and ten tokens. The game recommends that you make a recording with a camera or microphone as you complete each day. I didn't. I recorded the cards and the outcome on Google Docs and then made a recording afterwards over a couple of days. I ended up with 31 minutes of recorded material and notes which you can find by using this filter.

Each day, you roll the dice and draw that many cards, and resolve their outcomes. These are clustered by suit - ship systems (hearts), ship structure (diamonds), crew (clubs) and creature (spades). Aces are good (they result in things like the distress beacon being fixed). Kings are bad, and drawing all four will end the game as the creature will find and kill you. Most other cards pose questions about situations, and result in blocks being drawn from the tower.

It's quite immersive, and as the cards draw down, you can feel your doom approaching. The creature is implacable. The ship is wounded. The engines damaged from the collision that brought the creature onboard. The signal from the beacon has a long way to go to get a response. 

I'm dropping a jump break in now as the next part of the review contains spoilers.

My character died. I managed to get the beacon online, but it's pretty much inevitable that you will run out of cards before someone finds you. That or collapse the tower, representing a catastrophic failure of the ship.

Failure in this game is a design decision. It's about the journey and the journal. The recorded log represents your character's struggle. Only one of the defined solutions can work, and the second is designed in such a way that you are never going to get rescued. Once the beacon is working, you roll a dice at the end of each turn. If it is a six then you can remove one of the ten tokens. You're drawing 3 or 4 cards on average from a 52 card deck each turn, and fail on drawing all the Kings or collapsing the Jenga tower. Once I read the text for the beacon I knew (as a player) that my character was doomed.

It's a deliberate choice that the game is built like this. And it works well for the first run through. However, it means that this game is a one-trick pony. It's not really one that you'd play again, yet it could have been. The game could have been built so that the distress beacon stage was hard, but there was a better chance of surviving. That would have made the game more palatable to repeat, but as it stands I have no urge to play it again.

Clearly, I liked it enough to be bothered to do the audio recordings. I'm just disappointed that there's no repeatability in game; a less harsh design decision would have had me playing this again. Yes, I could hack it, but I think that this should have been there from the start.

It's all about the journal. But this isn't a repeatable game, like Thousand Year Vampire is. The record of my character's death rests on this blog and in Soundcloud. The wreck of The Wretched drifts on, it's beacon calling out for rescue which will most likely just lure others to their doom.

The End...

In conclusion, I enjoyed this game. It's evocative and hits the emotions well (especially when you write and record the audio). It's just not repeatable with the same effect. Once you know the way it's designed, then you know it's all about the journal, and there's no redeeming arc or hope in the game.

It's available on DrivethruRPG.

10 January 2021