You’re in a library, cracking open the latest Goosebumps “choose your own adventure” novel and you sit down ready to make decisions that will shape how your story unfolds that’s uniquely your experience. Fast forward to present day and you’re doing the same but now it’s a video-game; that’s the sort of feeling The Ballad Singer elicits.
The Ballad Singer
Developer: Curtel Games
Price: $22.99
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for preview
In The Ballad Singer you select one of four characters and proceed on a journey where you’ll make dozens of choices that can drastically change the journey you go on. The game’s four distinct characters are Leon the Magician, Ancoran the Ranger, Ancalimo the Assassin, and Daragast the Bard. Each of them have their own goals and motivations, but they’re all (at least at first) tied to a central overarching goal.
As you play through the fully narrated game you’ll be presented with various choices that can lead you onto new paths or perhaps you’ll walk in on a dragon. What surprised me most of the choices is how you can veer off the main path. Here’s an example of how you can diverge from the main “save the world” goal: there was a point when playing as Daragast where I was sent to find an old friend to recruit him into the resistance. When I found said friend he instead offered me to run off with him and be bards together. To my surprise that’s exactly what happened and instead of having battles against dragons we were instead having song battles with each other.
As in any proper “choose your own adventure” storybook there’s some story paths that will lead to your untimely death. Life can end just as swift and cruelly in The Ballad Singer as well and I found myself getting eaten by a cosmic being, stabbed a lot, and drowned by a water elemental. The death scenes are deliciously narrated and for the most part they mostly come because you didn’t pay attention to the scene the game sets up for you. Choosing to decapitate a hydra with a rapier will obviously lead to a quick death as your character dumbly slaps the creature with your sword.
Dying offers you two options: you can choose to continue the story as another character or spend a fate point and return to make a different choice. When you start a campaign you can choose to either play as two characters or all four (currently only the first is in the game) and supposedly choices you make as one character can affect the other. I didn’t quite get to see the play out when I went through various combinations. I chose to die as Leon, figuring it’d end any talk of the other characters rising to build a resistance to fight him off but they still spoke as if he was still alive. This is still an early build however so perhaps those elements aren’t in place yet.
On the subject of the fate system, it’s something I feel very 50/50 on. I like the sort of decision making of deciding whether to use a fate point on a current character or save them for the next, but as a person who wants to see the story play out all the way I’d prefer a mode that allowed you to play with infinite fate points. All of the current difficulty modes restrict you with a very limited amount of fate points and manual saves and I like having that level of “strategy” to the game, but I’d also like to sit back and enjoy the story. While on the subject of game mechanics, when selecting a character there’s a stat sheet for each one that shows things like starting alignment or notoriety, but it’s not exactly clear what these stats mean. There’s one that’s called “potential opponents that I *think* means if you’re more likely to fight humans or creatures, but I’m not exactly sure. Also the stat bars are confusing in that some fill in from the center out and others are the opposite. It’s just a confusing page that could do with some tooltips or maybe a visual reworking.
Still being an early game there are a few issues present in the current build. For example, narration would occasionally cut out and then continue randomly and one time when I had the choice between two paths to take I took the second but in the next screen the game reacted as if I had chosen the first. The game is also missing 30% of its content, so those expecting to be able to finish any of the four storylines maybe prefer to wait until they’re added in at a later point.
For those fans of visual novels, or anyone with a mild interest in the genre, The Ballad Singer is definitely something to keep an eye on. It’s out now with most of the content already, or you can wait for the full release that’s due next year.
