Prime Games Bulgaria, $0.00
Horror, 2017
Transomnia is described as a Lovecraft-ian horror gamebook, which is always intriguing. Plus it’s free, so what’s the harm in trying in out, eh?
You are an author that is stuck with a crippling writer’s block and a wife that is slowly and painfully dying of a mysterious illness. Your day begins on a blizzard-heavy, fog-heavy evening, and while your wife may be dying, you are the one suffering the most as you just can’t imagine how she can leave you all alone in this miserable existence like that.
Contemplating the selfishness of your wife leads you to fall asleep… and you are then visiting your in-laws? What, is this a nightmare?
Well, it could be, because you are soon in the midst of creepy, spooky happenings and worse, as you discover an opportunity to cure your wife by heading off a place called Kingwich.
You are required to roll a few scores before you can start the campaign: HP, Sanity, Strength, Agility, Will… actually, the exact purposes of these scores are not fully explained, which can be perplexing as you soon wonder whether there is any difference between Sanity and Will. Still, it doesn’t matter, you decide, as you can just figure out things by trial and error.
The problem with this campaign soon becomes evident, when you are asked to make choices based on whim, and you run smack into bad endings that happen more because of Emmanuel Quaireau’s whim than any organic consequence of your decision.
When this happens, you have to start the whole thing again. That’s right, from the very beginning. The app remembers where you left off, so you can close it and resume the campaign later from the point where you stopped, but this is wiped clear the moment your character dies.
What this means is that you have to start at very beginning, roll those stats again, read the same passages again… ugh. This can become super tedious when your character dies, but you are eager to get back into the action.
The campaign is intriguing enough to get you to do this during the first five or so runs, but eventually, playing this becomes more of a chore than anything fun. You begin to notice how your character bleeds Sanity points for even the smallest and flimsiest of reasons—a silly jump scare moment, such as seeing an ugly face, can easily cut off 3 or more Sanity points, no save rolls allowed—and wonder whether this fellow would be better off tucked in bed at home instead of running around like this, since he is clearly of delicate mind.
In fact, the way the campaign just tugs you around and gives you very little agency makes you feel more and more like a puppet to be smacked around by the people behind this thing.
The story elements aren’t that refreshing or groundbreaking to overcome the tediousness of actually playing this thing, so eventually you just switch off and look for other more entertaining ways to commune with Azathoth and friends.
