You'd expect a game called Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists to be on the depressing side, but this choose-your-own-adventure RPG anthology from the designers of King of Dragon Pass is an absolute tonic. It's a witty procession of Orphic descents, in which you assemble a crew of four garrulous weirdos and pitch them against quest scenarios that might involve talking trees, holy riddlers, and conduits of boiling blood.
There's an infectious, venturesome lightness to the game, which somehow persists alongside dire blunders and supernatural calamities that may see members of your party being cursed, punctured or unhinged. I've only completed a couple of the 10 heists across two hours of play, which makes me reluctant to call this an official review, but it's got my provisional recommendation. Come, reader - get thee to Pandemonium apace.
Thousand Hells doesn't harbour a thousand distinct hells; its variety comes, instead, from choice of party members and the canny reshuffling of story beats, which play out against handsome paintings of monoliths, bazaars, shorelines and catacombs. Each run starts with your character accepting One Last Job from some dubious power-broker in the "Byzantine-flavored" Eternal City. Perhaps you'll be looking into the untimely deaths of some princelings, or maybe you'll be escorting a murderer: either way, you'll need to trek down to an underworld that borrows ideas from Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia.
The opening interview also defines your character, as you pick from backgrounds, strengths and faults. Ho thar! I am Caroline, seasoned sailor and scout, with the bestest biceps this side of the Hungry Sea. My major shortcoming: I like to make jokes about gods.
Having created yourself, you then recruit a crew of similarly imperfect adventurers, spending Question points to decide how much you know about them to begin with. A big hand for Sethre: diplomat, pickpocket and shaman, dream-dogged and impulsive. A round of applause for Hemze: catfooted spymaster, who looks like a bull's derriere. The characters you choose will form loose relationships, reacting to each other's traits as the yarn wears on. These relationships are strongly shaped by the task at hand, which might see you keeping secrets from your colleagues, or deciding in advance that somebody ain't coming back from the Great Below.
The heist itself consists of a series of round-based encounters drawn from a pack of over 280, each with a mix of solutions depending on your party's skillset. In a pleasing tactile device that makes me think yet again of Ursula K Le Guin, encounters are resolved using bags of tokens. Each round, you pull up to four tokens from three bags. You get one bag for the character you've selected to take charge of the encounter (which means you'll be able to play more of their tokens), and one for the rest of the group. A third bag houses tide-turning boons and knowledge you may have acquired by, say, befriending a sorrowful spirit, or jailbreaking a god.
The tokens mostly reflect each character's traits, both helpful and hindersome – "Nerinai is knowledgeable", "Chisu is greedy", "Sethre has a troubled past", "Esanth knows lockpicking". You apply these tokens to one of three actions, corresponding to the scenario. You're navigating the rapids of Styx: do you focus on the rocks, or on the unruly dead crowding the stern? You're helping the Fates weave your very own destiny: do you throw the shuttle, or offer to cut the warp threads?
Other, more generic tokens might grant you resources and buffs, or rid you of debuffs. Show Some Swagger will improve a character's morale, if played successfully, while Get The Measure earns you Insight points, which let you visualise the odds of each token being successful. Any tokens and actions not used up in a round carry over to the next, so you might want to reserve any tokens that could fit several possible actions. Conversely, you'll need to figure out when to dispose of tokens that seem bound to fail. "Hemze is ugly" probably does have a use at some stage – I dunno, maybe Narcissus is working a guard post somewhere, and you can invite him to give Hemze a makeover? - but I'm not sure it's going to help me rescue some drowning merchants.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/bargain-with-demons-and-boat-with-the-dead-in-joyful-rpg-heist-quest-anthology-thousand-hells
