LordMortis wrote:Also, to Daveman's review. In the original edition it was apparently fairly quickly that much of the game is puzzle solving and much of the puzzle solving is truth table/logic puzzles. You are balancing combats and sanity with gathering clues that allow more cracks at the logic puzzle to get to what an objective you have to learn.
I can't speak to the update.
Not spoiling much, and as far as I know things might have played out differently based on our choices, but puzzles only came up once in our intro scenario, near the end. It was a Codebreakers-like puzzle that had 5 characters, 5 choices per character. As an action, a player at the location could make X attempts at it, where X was your characters Observation skill level. That was entirely run on the app. You would enter a guess, and the app would report how many exact matches you made, and how many symbols were correct, but in the wrong position. From the rules there are a few other types of puzzles too.
We're in the middle of the 2nd scenario and puzzles haven't come up at all. In both there has been a lot of exploring... situations where you use an action to roll so many dice and input how many successes you rolled. You have no idea how many are needed, the app simply says you didn't find anything interesting... but if the explore icon remains then you're able to keep looking until you hit the magic number of successes. Both games have been a blast and very different in how they play out.
Combat is largely handled by the app and it's been pretty fun. If you're in a position to attack an enemy you select it from a list of spawned enemies and select "attack". You're then given a list of options and you choose one that fits whatever items you have and want to use. The options are heavy weapon, bladed weapon, ranged weapon, spell or unarmed. The app then gives a DM-lite explanation like "You swing your weapon in a circle before bringing it crashing down on your target" while presenting you with a skill check to see if you hit or miss. I'm not sure how much of it is random or if there's more under the hood going on. I had a really hard time evading a flying snake monster which makes sense since it looks like a fast, slippery opponent, while evading a Cultist was much easier.
Sometimes the skill check it gives you doesn't work out so well. In our current game my son went to use a spell hoping it would ask for a Will check, but it asked for Lore instead which he had a low score in. The next spell I cast asked for Lore. The funniest "attack" I made was an unarmed attack against a cultist. I was expecting a Strength or Agility check but instead the app said "You put up your hands and challenge your opponent to fisticuffs." and asked for an Influence check. I passed and the result was something along the lines of your offer confusing/puzzling the cultist so you use that chance to sucker punch him!