So I just started up fallen london again after having given up on it before. This…game I guess you could call it, is just so vague and confusing. So I understand that the world is supposed to be very mysterious, but there is a difference between being mysterious and just being completely vague. One of the many things I’m trying to wrap my head around is something as simple as paying the rent. Normally trade works when you give me a thing and I give you a thing. I get a room and you get…secrets? What? Is that literally a secret because that’s what they make it seem to be. I am currently in ladybones road, or at least I think I am. I was but then traveled to my lodgings, which apparently I don’t have. So I am simultaneously at my lodgings and not at my lodgings. Or perhaps by being at my lodgings it means the streets since I do not have a lodgings? I don’t know and it doesn’t seem to matter. But then I get the opportunity to find a place to live. I can charm my way into someone’s home but I prefer my privacy. I could steal secrets…wait what? "Steal" secrets? The image of the choice is a man with a bag of loot so I assume 15 secrets must be some sort of currency. What exactly that currency is I don’t know. Perhaps it’s coins, or paper currency. Maybe they’re just really big rocks or bits of strings that are just called "secrets". But I’m certainly no thief so let’s skip this option.
My next choice is to…learn whispered secrets? Wait a minutes so they are literally secrets now? Like I don’t have anything physical to give you secrets? 15 secrets seems like a strange number too. How does the landlord determine the value of a room in a number of secrets? What use are secrets anyways? Is the economy based on people telling other people secret things they learned? It’s not much of a secret if it’s being told to so many people now is it? What determines if a piece of information is a secret anyways? Suppose I found out that Jim doesn’t like to put cheese on his burgers, is that a secret? If I told that to my landlord would he let me stay an extra week?What if it’s something they already know?
Finally I have the choice of earning Rostygold. Finally something that makes sense. It looks like some sort of red metal or something. I don’t care but it’s something that I can understand. I somehow get this rostygold and I can give it to the landlord and he’ll let me stay for a month. What does confuse me is what it means by how I earn it. "Rostygold is traditionally a reward for Dangerous work; thumping things, for instance, or being, in your turn thumped." I assume by "thumping things" it could mean wet work but that doesn’t make sense when it says that you are the one being thumped. What exactly are they trying to say?
It seems silly that the way the world and how you experience it is so different from the way you are supposed to experience it. For instance this whole secret thing. This shouldn’t even be a question as a citizen of fallen london, and yet it is. When it says I have a secret, since I can’t see it, and there is nothing to describe the secret all I have is this sort of vague idea of a thing that is referred to as a secret. Of course my character, or "me" would know fully well what it is they’re looking at. I’m having this constant strange disconnect where I’m trying to be this character in Fallen London, and yet I feel so detached from it. I feel almost, left out in a sense. I feel like the guy who woke up with amnesia, and whenever something doesn’t make sense the world is like "haha oh you were always such a kidder. Pretending like you don’t know!" Is this an issue for anyone else? How did you guys get through the game? Does it get better? Is it supposed to be this confusing from the get go?
edited by Major Squiggles on 2/11/2015