Yessss
- I love love love that this is orientated around such a strong central mechanic (the receiving and unloading of burdens). A powder keg of drama and conflict that ties everything else together. No need for any laboured contrivances or relationship webs or whatever - wind it up and let it rip.
- Each of the four ‘monsters’ plays a specific role that supports the above - and feels like it would be fun and straightforward to communicate this in play from their appearances and context clues
- The map is fire. Looks great and neatly does everything it needs to do to support running the thing.
The room descriptions pack so much flavour into so few words, but I had to read a few of them of them a couple of times to parse what’s actually being described. To my taste, the basement is perfect - set the scene, key point of interest, complication in the detail. Snappy. Others like the Sweat Room and Paradise Bound are evocative scenarios poetically described, but feel less digestible as room descriptions.
I think this stands out more because all the moving parts - the burdens mechanic, sinking temple, the map, and the monsters - are all so clean and intuitively useable without sacrificing theme. Maybe that means you can get away with a little razzmatazz in the room descriptions.
Either way, this is obviously a great piece of work. Committed to its core ideas, bold, fun to read, surely fun to play. One for the "to run" list.