I'm surprised that you didn't mention the most interesting (to me) design decision in the game: waiting in real-time between actions you take in-game. It's not superficially related to player agency in terms of the game's narrative resolution, but the choice of how long to sit in the dark in silence between the acts of the game struck me as particularly significant when I played it. Some of those decisions were based on the amount of time that I had budgeted to play the game, sure, but there's something sort of alchemical that happened with my experience of the game while sitting doing nothing as the timer ticked down. It really felt like I was one of the skeletons waiting for the tomb to be reopened
I think that by playing this as a journaling game, you take the lack of agency in stride. So many journaling games out there use dice or cards for prompt selection, but these elements of randomness have no influence on the actual outcome of the game. Even with journaling games as complex as a Wretched & Alone game, with dice, cards, and a jenga tower, none of that actually gives an opportunity for a meaningful choice to be made by the player.
If you had been playing this with more players, I imagine the dearth of decisions would have been more readily apparent.
You might find my game from 2019 an interesting one in a similar vein. A Cool and Lonely Courage starts at the end. You are women spies captured by the Nazis in WW2 France. The game examines your life and relationships leading up to that point. It is a narrative game, but uses playing cards to inform the emotional content of scenes which you recall.
>>> Yet it also has the almost infinite player agency at a micro level as you get to decide how to answer the questions, how to build the tomb, and what features it will have.
I'm not sure you're right here. Agency isn't about decisions, it's about meaningful decisions. Your decisions on decorating the tomb aren't changing the flow of the game, they only change subsequent descriptions. I don't think this can be called "agency"
I'm surprised that you didn't mention the most interesting (to me) design decision in the game: waiting in real-time between actions you take in-game. It's not superficially related to player agency in terms of the game's narrative resolution, but the choice of how long to sit in the dark in silence between the acts of the game struck me as particularly significant when I played it. Some of those decisions were based on the amount of time that I had budgeted to play the game, sure, but there's something sort of alchemical that happened with my experience of the game while sitting doing nothing as the timer ticked down. It really felt like I was one of the skeletons waiting for the tomb to be reopened
I think that by playing this as a journaling game, you take the lack of agency in stride. So many journaling games out there use dice or cards for prompt selection, but these elements of randomness have no influence on the actual outcome of the game. Even with journaling games as complex as a Wretched & Alone game, with dice, cards, and a jenga tower, none of that actually gives an opportunity for a meaningful choice to be made by the player.
If you had been playing this with more players, I imagine the dearth of decisions would have been more readily apparent.
You might find my game from 2019 an interesting one in a similar vein. A Cool and Lonely Courage starts at the end. You are women spies captured by the Nazis in WW2 France. The game examines your life and relationships leading up to that point. It is a narrative game, but uses playing cards to inform the emotional content of scenes which you recall.
>>> Yet it also has the almost infinite player agency at a micro level as you get to decide how to answer the questions, how to build the tomb, and what features it will have.
I'm not sure you're right here. Agency isn't about decisions, it's about meaningful decisions. Your decisions on decorating the tomb aren't changing the flow of the game, they only change subsequent descriptions. I don't think this can be called "agency"