This Book Is A Dungeon

I found This Book is a Dungeon (TBIAD) to be an overall positive experience. The gameplay of TBIA is mainly structured around navigating atmospheric spaces through Twine hyperlinks that are occasionally illustrated with pixel art. The main draw of TBIAD is its atmosphere; presenting interesting spaces that are reminiscent of a TTRPG one-shot with a horror theme. The author I think succeeds with the textual content the most; the writing (supported sometimes by the illustrations) present enough detail to let you imagine the space without being bloated and weighing down your brain. Additional reactive text that changes based on actions or retrying links are good details too. As some of the negative reviews note, there's some design/presentation issues that hinder the experience. While sound/music would enhance the atmosphere, that's not generally considered as pressing for interactive fiction. What drags down TBIAD's experience is unskippable textual effects and a lack of save functions. Either separately would not be too much of an issue, but I did notice the drag where a death restarts you in the middle "hub" of the book without accounting for any chapters already completed, so getting to an ending requires doing all chapters without a death at some point. A lot of interactive fiction either solves similar issues with saves or by just allowing entering unhindered strings of commands, but TBIAD has textual effects like waiting for sentences or dialog that feeds out a sentence at a time. These are evocative when first seen but slow down your experience when retrying a chapter after a death. It's not a major loss, but it injures the smoothness of the experience a little. This is easily the biggest issue I have with it (other than the combat being random and one-note; TBIAD would probably be better without them or making combats set pieces), though I agree with another point of the white background being a little much for me. That's subjective, but as a lot of us are staring at screens a lot these days, defaulting to a dark mode or maybe like an ivory-sepia type aesthetic wouldn't be the worst. I enjoyed the experiences presented in the game thoroughly individually, and some of the puzzles and additional flavor writing I thought were clever and appropriately mood-setting. In addition to the IF side of the game TBIA also provides links to its Development Diary, which is of particular interest to me. Small indie productions and IF are fascinating individual artifacts to me and seeing the end result followed by the guts that went on behind the curtain is incredibly more interesting/valuable to me than a game alone. I think TBIA is worth its price tag given that it's both a playable IF and includes documentation towards its creation in a 169 page somewhat-large-fonted (I presume to make it easily readable on E-Readers) PDF. Creators like this deserve support, in my opinion.