A sci-fi survival TTRPG in which you must explore ruined spaceships to seek parts, both to sacrifice to the planet's AI overlord and to eventually fuel your escape - if you're lucky.
Close Encounters does a great job of setting the tone - it's bleak, but not devoid of hope, which makes the uncertainty of survival all the more stressful.
The core dungeon-delving, loot-gathering gameplay seems well-thought-out and the mechanics for basic stats and moves are easy to pick up. I personally found the three-level harm system a bit much upon reading it over, but perhaps it would feel more intuitive during play.
I really like the conceit of stress recovery being tied to social scenes through using memories of better times as a coping mechanism - it fits the tone extremely well, though a little more in the way of prompts for scene ideas could have been helpful.
The default PDF has a few unusual formatting choices that may throw off some readers, mostly in the form of diagonally shifting line starts. Also, at 22 pages of content, it would have been more user-friendly to have a bookmarked PDF for greater ease of navigation.
EDITED: Fortunately, there is a plaintext option available - and the dev is very receptive to constructive criticism regarding accessibility, so if you have feedback then it's well worth reaching out to see if an issue can be resolved.
Overall, Close Encounters is well worth checking out if the premise appeals to you. The plaintext version does its job well, but if you request any adjustments to it then the dev will likely oblige, which is awesome. 4/5 stars - excellent.
You're welcome, and thank you! It's lovely to get such a positive and prompt response.
There are still a few formatting quirks that could be improved, if you're interested - details below.
For example, the smaller text describing the function of Skills is not ideal accessibility-wise (some people struggle to read anything below size 12).
There seem to be various instances where the between-paragraph spacing hasn't applied - I suspect you may have used soft returns, which don't trigger it like hard returns do, but a 'find and replace' may resolve this. You can find some examples in the Inspirations section and Skills section.
There are also a few cases where indents have remained (see, for example, the bottom paragraph under Skills) - my guess is that these were manually applied using the tab button or spacebar, and will probably need to be manually removed.
Finally, additional spacing below a section heading would ease the reading experience slightly.
Thanks again for taking the time to make edits, it's awesome to see a dev take accessibility seriously! :)
Thank you very much for making these edits, this has massively helped my reading experience! :D I'm going to be able to add this to my folder of 'to be played' TTRPGs now, which is awesome!
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A sci-fi survival TTRPG in which you must explore ruined spaceships to seek parts, both to sacrifice to the planet's AI overlord and to eventually fuel your escape - if you're lucky.
Close Encounters does a great job of setting the tone - it's bleak, but not devoid of hope, which makes the uncertainty of survival all the more stressful.
The core dungeon-delving, loot-gathering gameplay seems well-thought-out and the mechanics for basic stats and moves are easy to pick up. I personally found the three-level harm system a bit much upon reading it over, but perhaps it would feel more intuitive during play.
I really like the conceit of stress recovery being tied to social scenes through using memories of better times as a coping mechanism - it fits the tone extremely well, though a little more in the way of prompts for scene ideas could have been helpful.
The default PDF has a few unusual formatting choices that may throw off some readers, mostly in the form of diagonally shifting line starts. Also, at 22 pages of content, it would have been more user-friendly to have a bookmarked PDF for greater ease of navigation.
EDITED: Fortunately, there is a plaintext option available - and the dev is very receptive to constructive criticism regarding accessibility, so if you have feedback then it's well worth reaching out to see if an issue can be resolved.
Overall, Close Encounters is well worth checking out if the premise appeals to you. The plaintext version does its job well, but if you request any adjustments to it then the dev will likely oblige, which is awesome. 4/5 stars - excellent.
Thanks for the detailed review!
I've updated the plaintext PDF with larger leading and spaces between paragraphs, and have removed the leading indents. Cheers!
You're welcome, and thank you! It's lovely to get such a positive and prompt response.
There are still a few formatting quirks that could be improved, if you're interested - details below.
For example, the smaller text describing the function of Skills is not ideal accessibility-wise (some people struggle to read anything below size 12).
There seem to be various instances where the between-paragraph spacing hasn't applied - I suspect you may have used soft returns, which don't trigger it like hard returns do, but a 'find and replace' may resolve this. You can find some examples in the Inspirations section and Skills section.
There are also a few cases where indents have remained (see, for example, the bottom paragraph under Skills) - my guess is that these were manually applied using the tab button or spacebar, and will probably need to be manually removed.
Finally, additional spacing below a section heading would ease the reading experience slightly.
Thanks again for taking the time to make edits, it's awesome to see a dev take accessibility seriously! :)
Thank you for taking the time to point out where I fell short here.
Just did another round of passes on this one. Cheers!
Thank you very much for making these edits, this has massively helped my reading experience! :D I'm going to be able to add this to my folder of 'to be played' TTRPGs now, which is awesome!