Annoyingly, I accidentally skipped the benefactor’s identity option. Does anyone have the echo (just to confirm theories)
I played this yesterday and what I really liked was while it has loads of text - mainly from the various dialogue options - it takes relatively few actions because all the dialogue storylets cost 0 actions. It felt nice to only spend an action when actually doing something (ie during the matches) and mostly just sitting around talking to each other at no cost in between.
The pretty much total absence of any mention of football in London of all places during the past near-15 years of the game’s existence was always a noticeable void, and being someone who’s quite knowledgeable about the history of the various football codes I was a bit afraid to touch this one. It might’ve been hard to erase from my mind had it been totally botched. That said, I think it was done well.
The fact that London fell before any version of football was codified obviously gave the writers a lot of leeway in terms of how the game could’ve developed in the Neath and that without any formal organizations a hodge-podge of association football, rugby and hurling rules (as we would know them) would’ve been cooked together on the streets (and rooftops) of Fallen London makes sense. Plus, the opportunity to bring in the old Mesoamerican ballgame was there to be taken and duly converted. (As an aside, with the recent Coilheart Games and everything, I’m beginning to feel like no one in the Neath is having more fun than Tomb-Colonists.) And why not bring in some minor Red Science? (I’m sure in the future Shapeling Arts will have an influence too - goalkeepers growing extra-long arms etc.)
The matches and the rules were fun, but not over-the-top-silly - just your Neathy everyday madness - and the backstory with the Bishop (the War of '68 turning up again) wasn’t too distracting.
I did feel like the recurring characters were fleshed out well enough. There’s only so much you can do with a large cast in a single short story. I would’ve liked a bit more of a hint as to the identities of the members of the No Names Club, though.
The final third of the story still contained a significant amount of typos and some weird sentences making no grammatical sense whatsoever. From the comments above it appears this was even worse right after release. That’s disappointingly shoddy editing, I’m afraid.
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