Echo Bazaar

So, I've been playing a lot of Echo Bazaar lately. (If you haven't, go check it out! You need a Twitter account to play, but chances are you're planning on getting one anyway.) I've come to the conclusion that it's well-written, fun, frequently hilarious, staggeringly huge, frighteningly addictive, and very, very poorly designed. I'll get into that in a moment, but first let's talk about the game in general.

The first thing you see when signing up for Echo Bazaar is the newspaper headline "London Kidnapped by Bats!" London has been changed. It's sunk into an abyss and now seated next to Hell, and you play a newcomer to this "Fallen London." After escaping from prison, you are given freedom to roam throughout the city, raising your four skills (Dangerous, Watchful, Persuasive and Shadowy) and gathering wealth. The writing is, and I do not say this lightly, fantastic. It's imaginative and witty and in nice little clumps. I found myself hoping I would fail a challenge just so I could see what they wrote about it.

The mechanics of the game are similar to Mafia Wars and all those other browser/Facebook-based games. You have a limit of ten actions; these actions recharge at a rate of about one every seven minutes. You spend actions by... well, doing stuff. Pick a challenge, click "Go!", and you'll either succeed or fail, but either way you spend an action. The harder the challenge, the higher-level skills you'll need to complete it.

Now, here's the bad part. If you fail the challenge, you get one experience point. If you succeed, you get two. This is completely independent of the challenge's difficulty level. If you succeed a "straightforward" challenge (you will never fail a straightforward challenge), you get the same two experience points you'd get if you succeeded on and "almost impossible" challenge. This is, and I don't say this lightly either, bad design. If you take a bigger risk, you should get a bigger reward if you succeed.

Frankly, that's my only problem with the game. It's a free with premium content, but it doesn't force you to pay to actually enjoy the full scope; the writing is fantastic; and it's a great way to take a two-minute break from working or reading or whatever you're doing. I've been checking it every now and then while typing this. Even if you're not into video games, you'll like it; it doesn't require any prior skill or knowledge of the medium. Plus, it's by a small startup company who clearly enjoys what they're doing.

So, in conclusion, if you like stuff that is nice you will like Echo Bazaar. Go play it.