Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found On Itch.io…The Positronic Library

 A leveless dungeon by Yochai Gal and Francesco Zanieri
Written for Into The Odd
Oh boy, time to get back in the reviewing saddle with an ItO joint written by a couple vaguely familiar names. I don’t have high hopes anytime I see “Into The Odd”, and I wasn’t sure why…I think it’s actually because of the setting. The game is written with a weirdo post-apocalyptic scavenging scenario in mind, which certainly seems to be an impetus for adventure, but as is often the case with nihilistic settings it means that ultimately everything is meaningless, like with Murgleblurk. Dream-like, pointless, meandering, no level-ups…it’s not something that appeals to me personally, of course, but from what I see it doesn’t appeal to anyone long-term. Nobody’s playing a deep and meaningful ItO campaign over the years. So, we just get occasional pop-ups like this, made for artsy 1-hour one-shots. Crushing.
Information is also terribly organized here, just bullet points under room names.
In this particular case, we have the single most standard sci-fi scenario known to man, “ruined facility where the controlling AI goes mad from Some Kind of Art”, this case a library where music plays that addicts machines and kills people. Otherwise, we’re mostly in the “weirdo experiment rooms” here, not really leaning into the whole library thing. The map is isometric, so it sucks, but there’s an attempt at a second ingress point with vaguely-sketched “tunnels” beneath the library.
So, what I liked. Well. I do like that the Voltaic Sheet Music deals 1d4 CHA to living beings. On CHA 0, head-explosion. That’s kind of charming.
What can be improved is the whole rest of the dungeon. First, it’s a library, so maybe lean a little bit into the concept of a knowledge repository? The experimental rooms are classic “random stuff to mess with and die or mutate”, but there’s not a lot of benefit there and there’s not a lot of hinting. Yeah, don’t touch the swirling orange vortex, we get it. For a system where all character progression is based on items, you should have some more interesting items…instead of a scattergun and a one-use lightning gun.
Also, “bullet shells”.
I’m scraping here for a best use case. Map isn’t anything to extract, the ideas aren’t innovative, the monsters are dull, the story is trite, and the music thing is hard to translate. I guess grab the trap idea of music that makes your head explode? Mining deep in the squishy warm stuff in here for our single nugget of dubious quality.
Final Rating? */***** with a demoralized nod of fully-met expectations. In the end, this Into The Odd needed to be a lot more odd.