Video Games have been in the hands of the general public for over 40 years, stretching back to the ’70s before I was a twinkle in my dad’s eye. Today, a constant avalanche of new games comes out every day, offering fresh takes on the tried and true genres we’ve all come to know and love (or hate).
Naturally, whenever you start a new game, almost all of them have this nifty little tutorial to show you how to play their labor of love they’ve been crunching on for the past three years.
The Origin Of Game Tutorials
It’s no surprise that video games need some form of teaching method. Back in the olden days, most games came with obtuse cryptic manuals that required a degree in linguistics to decipher and play your 8-bit game of blobs shooting blobs at other, different colored blobs.
Back in the pioneering days of games, there weren’t any formulas that developers could emulate. It truly was the wild west, with games of all types existing and confusing and scaring people away from games for years to come.
It was up to developers to figure out the best way to teach you to play their game. Standardized controls like today’s consoles didn’t exist back then. The A button didn’t always mean ‘Yes.’ Sometimes, you didn’t even have an A button, and you had this eldritch horror of a controller to learn.
It wasn’t until probably the Super Nintendo Era when console manufacturers had a consistent control scheme that game companies would use for almost all of their games. A is Yes, B is no, and so forth. As gaming grew up and genres became more fleshed out, games within similar genres would share the same mechanics.
We all know that in 99% of 2D platformers, you press A to jump.
In most shooters, the trigger button shoots, and the A button sprints.
There’s probably an attack button and a dodge/jump button in your typical action game.
So why, in 2021, do I need a lengthy tutorial to teach me the basic controller scheme of games that have shared the same controller layout for 30 years? I know how to jump. I know how to shoot. I can beat the original Mario in 20 minutes, okay mom?
I GOT THIS.
Many games nowadays have these boring, lengthy tutorials that drag on, ON, and ON. I don’t want to spend my first half-hour of the game learning just the damn controls and mechanics.
And you know, I get it. I get it. You want to show off your unique mechanics or concepts, or tell me how important this NPC that’s gonna hold my hand for the rest of the game is.
But I don’t want that. I don’t want your obnoxious menus and dialogue options to tell me that A is Jump, X is Attack, and Right Trigger is dodge. Just give me signs, or show me the damn controller layout.
Or how about the lengthy cutscenes and dialogue and worldbuilding that KEEP STOPPING YOU FROM PLAYING.
What Makes a Good Game Tutorial?
I was recently introducing a friend to Overcooked 2. As someone who speaks English as a third language and who is not into games all that much, she picked it up quickly. Why? Because the developers just gave us some simple diagrams to teach us the basics.
You already know the joystick will let you move around. Everyone knows that. The sign tells you the X button chops, and the A button picks things up and puts things down. Throw dishes into the serving area, and there you go.
As the game climbs in difficulty (and trust me, it does), new additions are included in brief signs before the level starts. There are no tutorials, no lengthy dialogue options, and no annoying characters telling me basic controls through a level that stops every two minutes to tell me about a new button.
It’s wonderful.
Arin Hanson has a great explanation of how the Mega Man games teach you about the unique features of the level you’re in by visually explaining it. You see an obstacle, and the game shows you the obstacle in a safe environment, then it puts you in a harmless version of that obstacle to get familiar with before you get deeper into the level. It’s great, it’s wonderful, it’s a decade old. Arin, I miss you, please answer my calls.
Another excellent tutorial is Valhiem, and it was refreshing to explore that world without spending ten minutes learning the keyboard.
You’re a Viking, you get dropped into purgatory by a big ol’ raven, and you gotta chop n slap things.
As you find cool stuff, another big ol’ raven comes at you, and you’re given the option to talk to him and learn the new information presented to you.
And it’s not a big lengthy scene, and the game doesn’t pause and focus on this dumb bird to waste your time while it talks.
You run up to it, punch the E key, it gives you a text bubble, and that’s it.
It gives you incentive to explore because as you do, you know you’re doing something right because the bird showed up and told you that you’re doing great, and it gives you a gold star and everything.
Bad Tutorials, Explained
There are probably ten times that many boring or terrible tutorials for every good tutorial out there in the world.
Let’s talk about some truly awful ones.
When I was a kid, I LOVED Kingdom Hearts. But I went back to re-play them a couple of years ago. It was almost pulling teeth trying to get through Destiny Islands, but having to do grind and do jobs on top of a new cutscene every five minutes to introduce new characters that you won’t see until near the end of the game is BULLSHIT. It’s why I refuse to replay Kingdom Hearts 2.
Pokemon suffers from a similar problem. The gameplay hasn’t changed much since Red / Blue / Yellow, yet each new game still makes me go through a 15-minute tutorial: Throwing a Pokeball and learning how types work. Sword and Shield only compounded that issue with an annoying rival character to explain new mechanics.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum…
Have you ever tried to play Dark Souls before? How would you like to be dropped into a world with almost no explanation of the game’s basic mechanics?
You have to learn by smashing buttons to figure out how to block, parry, attack, how stamina works, all of that jazz, reading bloodstains to figure it out. And you wanna explore? Good luck, the Asylum Demon shows you really quickly that this game is probably NOT for you.
How are you expected to know to go around him to a door on his left and run around until you can find some actual weapons and then yeet yourself off a cliff to deal a chunk of damage and start the fight properly?
Let’s not talk about the myriad of items you’ll pick up throughout the game that has wildly different uses, and the game barely attempts to tell you what they’re for.
Oh, and of course, there’s Crusader Kings 2. With its infinite layers of menus upon menus and their tutorial explaining complex mechanics that require a degree in medieval European law just to decipher how you can set up your kingdom to make sure your offspring take your land when you die.
They offer a tutorial to walk you through some of the more common parts of the game, but with a game as complex as most Paradox titles, they need to step it up to teach new players how to play.
How Can You Make Good Game Tutorials?
It’s up to modern developers to change how tutorials are made as we advance. I spoke to a few developers on Twitter about how they struggle to create tutorials and their intentions.
One of the biggest problems I saw was trying to match the competency of your players. You’ll never honestly know how experienced your player is when you’re making a game — You can adapt and adjust as they play.
Maybe this means easily-skippable tutorials. If a player has figured out how something works, just let them breeze through it. Heck, make tutorials optional and give them references in the pause menu if they need to. Or introduce them to the mechanics as they play. Illustrate how something works by feeding them small portions of it without the need for dialogue or menus.
Closing The Book
Tutorials probably aren’t going anywhere for a while. Designers can rethink how they can best implement it into the game without making it obtuse whether you choose to integrate them into the gameplay itself, giving the player reference documents or otherwise.
How do you feel about game tutorials? Do you have any shining examples of how they should be done? Let us know on Twitter.
I read an interesting article about the original playtest version of one of Magic’s most iconic cards from the original Alpha set.
It’s hard to imagine that this card would eventually become one of the Power Nine and arguably one of the most powerful effects you can take. Yep, this card would eventually become Time Walk, the first extra turn spell in Magic’s history.
I recently wrote a piece about Magic’s recent design problems and how they’ve been affecting the game over the last few years. While I don’t mention it specifically in that article, one of the more problematic cards in the current Standard rotation (aka the most recent few sets released) just so happens to also be an extra turn spell.
While the card isn’t nearly as powerful as its ancestor, it’s clearly not the first time Magic has printed a problematic extra turn spell.
What Makes an Extra Turn so Good?
Like in any turn-based game, players usually have the most fun on their own turn. Their turn is the time when they shine and get to do all the cool flashy stuff. When you introduce extra turn effects to a game, you’re stealing that time to shine away from other players.
Not a lot of turn-based games have extra turn effects. Monopoly allows it to a certain degree when a player rolls doubles too many times in a row. Games like Final Fantasy have spells that will enable player turns to come up more often, but usually not sequentially.
Taking extra turns in Magic not only takes away that fun from another player, but it also grants a more significant advantage to the player taking the extra turn. They get another card to draw, they get another chance to cast spells, and so on.
The Issue With Alrund’s Epiphany
Why is this card so good? It costs a lot of mana, and it exiles itself, so you can’t cast it repeatedly. What’s the big deal, then?
Well, the reason is there aren’t a lot of cards that can deal with it. The current pool of cards in Standard doesn’t provide adequate solutions to deal with Alrund’s Epiphany before it’s too late.
The color pie for Magic determines what each color can and can’t do. This is a fantastic design principle behind Magic’s process, and it’s been a guiding piece for most of the game’s life.
White-based decks can be aggressive and potentially kill an opponent before they can cast more than one, but this isn’t guaranteed.
Blue-based decks can run countermagic to stop big spells like this.
Black-based decks can’t always make the opponent discard the card because the Foretell keyword allows them to cast it from a special zone.
Red-based decks have no way to get around it besides “being faster,” just like White.
Green-based decks have nothing to do except hope they can “be faster,” like Red and White.
Now, this isn’t always the case every time. However, with the current pool of cards available to players, this is the current predicament. Most colors have no way to interact with big, flashy, game-ending spells.
Instead, players were casting several copies of Alrund’s Epiphany in sequential turns, paired with heavy-hitting creatures or even an animated manland. This means that a game that could have been one or two turns away from victory is suddenly gone, as your opponent takes three turns in a row with a 7/7 and some number of bird tokens.
Extra Turn Spells Have Been Constant Problems.
This isn’t the first time Wizards of the Coast has ended up with some problematic extra turn spells, not even within the last few years.
A few years ago, another extra turn spell hit Standard: Nexus of Fate. Not only could this spell be cast at any time, but it would also go back into your deck as it resolved so that you could cast it again. There was also plenty of cards that would allow players to reach that magic number of mana to cast Nexus of Fate quickly, with the biggest offenders being Wilderness Reclamation and Wild Growth.
What could go wrong?
For starters, it got banned in early 2019 for Magic’s Best-of-One format because of the inability to interact with the card. In November of the same year, it would get immediately banned in the newest digital-only format for Magic, also known as Historic.
Not a month would go by before Nexus of fate would get banned again in one of Magic’s other new formats, Pioneer. It was also re-banned when the Historic format added a Best-of-Three mode.
In more recent times, the release of Strixhaven and its “Mystical Archive” would add a bunch of new and reprinted cards to both Standard and Historic. One of those cards that would only be Historic legal is Time Warp, a reprinted extra turn effect.
A deck would soon arise that would allow players to cast Time Warp over and over and over again, with cards that could allow you to cast it for free from your library or graveyard. It became such a problem in Historic that five of the top eight decks in the Strixhaven Championship would be focused around this interaction. Every deck in the top four semifinals would be the same deck as well.
It was soon banned in Historic less than a week after the tournament took place.
Big Flashy Game Enders
Magic is a game where most of the ways to end a game are through permanents (aka things that stick on the board for multiple turns, like creatures and enchantments), or at least it has been for the last 30ish years.
One of the designers of Magic, Sam Stoddard, wrote a piece on how they intentionally add these “finishers” to sets to help with balance issues and give players different options. He even mentions how Planeswalkers have pushed out creature-based finishers in recent years just due to how impactful they are.
He highlights the next set’s new Blue finisher, a powerful creature that’s hard to remove directly and offers a lot of power if it stays on the field. He even suggests several currently playable cards that would be able to deal with said finisher.
But in the last few sets, players haven’t been given any tools to interact with this. Discard effects don’t work; there are no targeted card hate pieces like Surgical Extraction to remove them from an opponent’s deck. The only card that comes to mind is Curse of Silence, which really doesn’t stop the spell from being cast. It just makes it cost more.
The Vast Power Difference Between Extra Turn Cards
I do want to say that I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade and ban all extra turn effects. On the contrary, I find some of them to be pretty balanced when in the right shell.
However, there’s a pretty significant disparity in how balanced some of these extra turn spells are, with most of them being either unplayable or completely broken. It comes down to how many times you can cast them that becomes the real issue. Taking one extra turn is nowhere near as backbreaking as three additional turns.
Time Warp is a pretty “fair” extra turn card. It has a decent mana value, its sorcery speed, and doesn’t do anything extra. It’s so vanilla they remade it with a horse, and then printed it with a different name. This will be our baseline for any other extra turn spell.
The newest extra turn effect is Alchemist’s Gambit, which comes with a clause that we often see in the cheaper “unplayable” cards. The reason these cards are “unplayable” is that you can’t chain them repeatedly. You lose the game at the end of that next turn. There are five of these kinds of effects, all in Red’s color pie.
Expropriate, aside from being a mouthful of a card, is “fair.” I put fair in quotes because, well, it’s still usually a game-ending spell. It costs a lot, and regardless of how the votes are done, you’re most likely getting at least one extra turn or several in a multiplayer game.
Part the Waterveil saw some fringe competitive play in its day, and it’s probably the most interesting of the “fair” extra turn spells. Sure, if you pay extra, it can give you a big beater, but otherwise, it can’t be looped over and over because of its exile clause.
If you look at all the extra turn effects ever printed in Magic’s history, you’ll see the list is not very long. And out of that list, only a handful of those cards were ever problematic. Usually, they’re paired with significant downsides that make them pretty difficult to add to a competitive deck.
Closing Statements
It’s no secret that Wizards has had some balance issues in the last few years. And it’s never going to be a perfectly balanced game. There’s no way to catch every edge case in every format, especially with the volume of new cards released every year. However, it’s become clear that extra turns in most games aren’t a fun mechanic. Especially so when it comes to competitive games.
Somewhere under a lost and lonely hill of grim and foreboding aspect lies a labyrinthine crypt. It is filled with terrible traps and not a few strange and ferocious monsters to slay the unwary. It is filled with rich treasures both precious and magical, but in addition to the aforementioned guardians, there is said to be a demi-lich who still wards his final haunt.
These are some of the first words used to describe the setting of The Tomb of Horrors. One of the most iconic adventures to ever grace kitchen tables and strike fear into the hearts of unprepared adventurers.
Dungeons and Dragons is a game that has become one of the core pieces of the gaming world. Whether or not you’ve played the game before, it’s hard not to see its impact on games since its release in 1974. The game remains popular, with game designers bringing the experiences they had to shape the games we play today.
Start The Dungeon Crawling
Dungeons & Dragons is a Tabletop Role-Playing Game for those who don’t know. You, the player, would enter a high fantasy world filled with swords, sorcery, and treasure. Unlike video games, where the goal is laid out before you, you are at the whims of your Dungeon Master. This is another player who drives the world around you.
Through them, you grow your character and delve into dark dungeons, complex political situations, and even dealing with the gods themselves. If you’ve never heard of it before, you ought to check it out.
No, really. Go pick up a starter kit and some friends and play. It’s a blast.
One of the most popular ways to enjoy Dungeons & Dragons is through pre-made adventures. These are published resources for Dungeon Masters to run their players through without heavy lifting. These became popular immediately, with some of the most famous D&D settings today stemming from these “modules” (as they were called back then).
One of the game’s original creators, Gary Gygax, had been running a campaign for his friends. He felt they had become “experts” and wanted to not only give his players a challenge but to make them face what all living beings fear most: death.
Enter: The Tomb of Horrors.
Initially created for the very first Origins convention in 1975, Gary wanted to bring a challenge for players interested in tournament play for Dungeons and Dragons.
Sidenote: Is tournament play a thing? I’ve played for over a decade, and I’ve never heard of a D&D tournament in my life. Reach out to me on Twitter and tell me about your D&D Tournament stories.
Lawrence Schick would describe the Tomb of Horrors as “The dungeon of the demi-lich Acererak was, for Gary, a kind of thought experiment: If an undead sorcerer really wanted to keep his tomb from being plundered by greedy adventurers, how would he do it? The answer, of course, was to defend the crypt with tricks and traps designed not to challenge the intruders but to kill them dead. And furthermore, to do it in ways so horrific that all but the most determined party would give up and leave well enough alone.”
And that’s precisely what happened to players as they adventured deep into the tomb of the undead wizard named Acererak. The module has a mind-boggling 33 encounters in total, starting with players having to search for the tomb itself by poking around the dirt with spears or poles until they can find a tunnel to get inside. And yes, it specifies that they have to use spears or poles. They summon a demon if the players try to be cheeky and become astral or ethereal. So they can’t even phase through the tomb without causing trouble.
Once the players get in, they’re greeted by not one but two false entrances before finally entering the Tomb itself. Once they finally make their way inside, they are greeted by a riddle puzzle before moving forward.
Oh, and did I mention that this dungeon is filled with pit traps? Not just your regular run-of-the-mill pit traps either, ones that once again force players to poke and prod around with poles and spears, lest they fall into the pit. Plus, these pits have poisonous spikes at the bottom that kill you if you fail to evade the poison. Immediately.
Suppose they make it past the subsequent few encounters, including the famous “Face of the Great Green Devil. This is just a face in the wall that destroys you immediately if you jump in.
They’re presented with a room that has a false floor. If the floor opens, anyone inside is dropped into a 100ft pit that cannot be reopened unless someone else triggers the trapdoor. Meaning a party can quickly die right then and there in this room.
Naturally, once they’ve dodged the first ten encounters of the dungeon unscathed, they’re presented with something neat: a Magical Archway.
What does this do, you ask?
Any living matter that steps in gets sent back to the dungeon entrance. But non-living matter? That gets sent far, far away into the depths of the dungeon. It gets sent to the final room where Acererak is waiting.
Yup, if a player makes the mistake of stepping through the portal, they lose all their items.
Misery In The Depths
If you haven’t figured it out by now, this place is pretty miserable. I won’t explain it room by room, but here are some other fun ways players can end up getting a candlelight vigil:
A false crypt that has an illusion of the tomb collapsing. If the players leave the dungeon, the Dungeon Master is instructed to ask them if the dungeon was too hard.
A room named “Huge Pit with 200 Spikes.”
A door that leads to a fake wall that’s actually a secret door. It leads to a room full of sleep gas that has a chance to awaken a Stone Juggernaut that will immediately crush the players to paste.
Another Devil Face that will send players back to the start, naked and without any items.
A different Devil Face that instead teleports them to a room full of the skeletons of people who had tried – and failed – to escape. Even if the players manage to open the hidden door in this area to free whoever is inside, the swords of the dead adventurers will attack the players.
A door with a keyhole that shocks you if you put the wrong keys into it. If you put the wrong item into its slot, it can teleport you like the devil faces, or if you attack the door, it starts to bleed and can flood the room. Oh, and if you light the blood on fire, it turns to fatal poison gas.
A false treasure room that, if the players loot the money and items, will all disappear once they travel far enough away from the Tomb.
Once they finally traverse the 32 encounters within the Tomb of Horrors, they are in the crypt of the demi-lich himself. And naturally, once they use the keys to unlock the door, there’s a chance anyone at the back of the room gets smushed as the floor shoots upwards to reveal the crypt of Acererak himself.
Or what’s left of him anyway. Since he’s actually a demi-lich, aka a floating skull with jewels for eyes and diamond teeth. He can suck the souls out of players, killing them instantly and always starting with the strongest one. Even hitting the demi-lich is difficult, as you must know certain spells or have specific items even to harm him. And once you crush the skull, any souls trapped inside pose a risk of being gone forever.
And….that’s it. There aren’t any happy endings or heroes coming back to the village as kings. The module ends there, thanking the players for playing.
Overall, it’s a pretty crappy experience, right?
The Impact On D&D
So why does the Tomb of Horrors matter enough to stick around? It wasn’t a random one-off from that convention. It was fully published by TSR (the company that made D&D back then). Since then, it’s received updated versions for every edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It has some people out there who enjoy this hellscape dungeon of a module.
Many players consider this module to be a classic, something iconic and different from other adventures. In a world where most adventures are puzzle-light, combat-heavy scenarios where players get to have meaty action and combat sequences, Tomb of Horrors puts the entire game into a different perspective.
Acererak’s tomb does have a few monsters, but there’s only a handful of them, and they’re all singular enemies, no large groups. Instead, players are forced to use their brains to solve these complex, punishing puzzles that risk instant death if they provide the wrong solution, which is very uncommon for most D&D adventures. It also encourages players to stop and talk about what is going on and better plan their next move because they might not live past the next room.
Puzzles are an essential part of Dungeons and Dragons, as they not only break up the monotony of combat and dialogue but also serve to add atmosphere to the world. If your party is exploring a dark cave searching for a bear, but instead, you come across magical traps, your perception of the rest of the cave is altered. And the Tomb of Horrors is no different.
Sure, you might be told that there’s some great evil inside this tomb, but what adventurer hasn’t heard that before? But when you get there, and you start to see how dangerous this place is, the idea that there might actually be a great big evil that your heroic character can’t defeat begins to set in. Death in D&D is permanent. There are no extra lives or respawn points like in Dark Souls. You can’t learn from these deaths and move on, you have to avoid them, or you will fail.
How Does It Affect the Table?
The genuine threat of death is what I think makes this adventure truly unique. Playing the role of a Dungeon Master is a unique challenge of trying to keep your players motivated and engaged and make them feel challenged by the tasks they need to perform. Player death is always a possibility, but in my experience, it is usually challenging to get there.
Whether you, as a DM, soften up when players are close to dying or a timely roll keeps them alive long enough to rest, a fatality in your party is usually rare but very impactful.
Because the Tomb of Annihilation is designed to kill players – and really KILL them, not just inconvenience them with minor poison and little wounds that add up over time – Players are forced to see the world with a different lens where death is imminent. They need to overcome it to advance or leave.
This plays significantly into the design of Dungeons and Dragons. The game we know now is a much different beast than it was back then, a game of hacking and slashing and combat. Most adventures and groups are focused around combat – because that’s pretty much all the game was. The tools for players to explore the world and interact with it weren’t there yet. Roleplay was light, and there weren’t skills like “athletics” or “acrobatics” or “persuasion.” It was stat checks or nothing.
As D&D has evolved, We’ve seen a shift into a game that Better incorporates the ability to tackle different types of situations. Where previously, Players were forced to have a flat roll to escape a trap or dodge an obstacle, modern editions have broken the game down into Subskills alongside Specific Stats. One character might be more dextrous than another, giving them an advantage.
In the original D&D, you could only choose from one of three classes: Fighting men hit stuff, magic-users could use magic, and clerics could do a little of both. We wouldn’t see a drastic change in diversity until Advanced Dungeons and Dragons’ second edition in 1989, fifteen years later.
Because players were so accustomed to combat-centric games with the occasional puzzle, it made the Tomb of Horrors much more challenging. It forced players to communicate and figure out a real solution to these puzzles because one wrong move could end your character – forever.
How Does It Impact Modern Games?
We’ve seen this sort of game design slowly shift into modern games, mostly with games like Dark Souls. Games where death may not be permanent, but the risk of dying could be devastating. Soulsborne games have mastered the art of learning from your deaths, figuring out how to overcome it, and becoming better at the game overall.
At the beginning of the original Dark Souls, you are immediately faced with a massive Asylum Demon that blocks your path. You’re given nothing- simply a broken sword and vague instructions. Players who attempt to fight the demon usually fail hard.
But those who explore and learn will eventually realize there’s an unlocked door to the left of the Demon, where you can escape and find a checkpoint. You’ll collect some basic gear and come face-to-face with the Demon again, but you are equipped and ready to face the challenge this time.
I, for one, am terrible at Soulsborne games. I don’t have the patience to learn. I want to hack and slash my way around. I’ve only beaten Dark Souls 3 to date, despite owning all three AND Sekiro. I’m horrible.
However, permanent death isn’t something that’s explored in modern games. Sure, some games may have higher difficulty tiers, including permadeath, but they aren’t baked into the games themselves.
Modern Roguelikes come close, using death as a tool similar to Soulsborne games to help you advance. Unless you’re incredibly skilled at a particular game, you’re seldom going to complete the entire game in a single run. Instead, you’ll progress as far as you can, die, and then use the resources and knowledge you gained from that run to progress even further in the next run.
Other games that use permanent death are still roleplaying games, often inspired by Dungeons and Dragons. Fire Emblem and XCOM are great examples where characters risk dying in combat, which means they’re gone. Forever.
Fire Emblem takes this a step further still, with the chance that essential characters may die in combat and affect the game’s future. Some characters will become unobtainable, or side quests will be locked away. This forces players to think and plan their turns appropriately.
We don’t typically see how games can be flipped around entirely to be seen from a new perspective. Modern games rarely deviate from the norms, with genres mixed up occasionally but seldom experimenting with the formula. While the Tomb of Horrors takes players out of dungeon crawling into a heavy, life-or-death puzzle sequence, we rarely get an opportunity to see other games flip the script.
Could you imagine if next year’s Call of Duty entry took away the split-second reaction style shooter style for a slow, methodical exploration map? Squads have to carefully explore each doorway, hallway, and open area, fearing death is around every corner?
Or what about a visual novel/dating simulator about some book club in a Japanese high school that turns into a grim, psychological horror?
Waifus and Horror
Trigger warning: Self-harm, violence, and suicide. If you aren’t okay with this, skip the following few paragraphs.
Doki Doki Literature Club presents itself as a cutesy slice-of-life visual novel, blending in with the hundreds released every year. You play the protagonist, who begrudgingly joins his school’s literature club to appease his childhood friend after a time and some chances for romance with the other girls in the club.
The game suddenly ends with you discovering your childhood friend has hung herself. Then, the game resets. You’re back at the main menu with your previous game deleted, and you start the game again…
But it’s different. Your childhood friend doesn’t exist. Strange glitches begin to appear, and some text becomes unreadable. And the three other girls in the book club seem…different.
I won’t go any further into the rest of the game, but Doki Doki Literature Club was a massive change in the presentation of a traditional Visual Novel. It added real puzzles and intrigue to an otherwise simple, straightforward genre of “choose your own adventure” style games.
Returning to The Tomb
As Dungeons and Dragons has evolved, the Tomb of Horrors has also evolved. It’s appeared in every edition of the game, with its most recent printing being included in Tales from the Yawning Portal, a compilation book. In its newest iteration, plenty of warnings are given to the Dungeon Master, so they know the experience they will be putting their players through.
Wizards of the Coast would eventually return us to Acererak’s evil games through a new adventure called the Tomb of Annihilation. With this, we were given a more comprehensive look at the world Acererak calls home (known as Chult) and a thoroughly-vetted adventure to ensure it did not become the meat grinder its predecessor was known for.
While the adventure has its issues, it’s been widely praised for being a great module. Heck, it was one of the most playtested modules they’ve ever worked on, according to Wizards themselves. Also, Pendleton Ward, creator of Adventure Time, was one of the collaborators. Weird, right?
Finally Out Of The Dungeon
Whether or not you have had the unfortunate experience of delving into the Legendary Tomb of Horrors, it’s an experience that has shaped the Gaming world. The Demi-Lich’s tomb Still finds its way into the eye of pop culture, inspiring the 2007 game “Icewind Dale and a major part of the book ” Ready Player One.”
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear the module has also inspired countless RPG designers as well, taking it as a lesson in how to expertly craft a dungeon. Or perhaps how to NOT Subject players to the kind of torture you find in the depths of Acererak’s lair.
Have you been brave enough to challenge the Tomb of Horrors? or perhaps you’ve mastered the art of running players through its corridors. Either way, I want to hear about it. Tell us all about it on our Discord!
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