Sprinting Owl Reviews: Dreadfarer
It is a nebulous time in the 1800s. For reasons of poverty, arrogance, hope, or cynicism, you have voyaged to a newly discovered Pacific archipelago in order to fill a small journal with pictures and stories of its contents.
Should you die in the process, your journal and your mission will pass to whoever discovers your corpse.
This is the premise of Dreadfarer, a solo (and limited multiplayer) journaling TTRPG recently published by NeonRot and Eduardo Valdés-Hevia.
I was gifted a copy by NeonRot, and wrote an initial review on Dreadfarer’s itchio page. That review is still available to read and focuses on the game from a more technical standpoint. In contrast, this review is for the vibes.
NeonRot has a substantial body of other work in the rpg space, with an art style and aesthetic that focuses on low res presentation and murky, complex layouts that require a lot of visual work from the reader. ChoroGaiden is bit-crushed and tinged in contrasting colors. Fukuzatsu is an abyss of neon incoherency and blaring color. BDSM: Below Dwelling Sewer Mutants is sludgy and slick with chemical shine. And Webworld, the most staid of the group, relies on a kind of implicit emptiness to land the notion that the only thing scarier than seeing a giant spider is seeing an environment where you expect a giant spider to be.
Compared to these other works, I think it is fair to say that Dreadfarer’s visuals are more soothing. There are certainly smudged faces, meat geodes, rock formations with leprosy, and other horrors, but the tone is ominous, not stressful.
Similarly, the rhythm of play is gentle. You arrive in Lemuria with the clothes on your back, your character class, some money, and your journal, and you slowly voyage out to different regions of the archipelago, rolling on random tables to see what you can sketch.
Each string of rolls does produce a danger—and you can die—but the game wants you to sit and draw the things you see, journal about them, and build an artifact of play as you do. It rewards a patient approach, and lets you continue the same journal with another character after a death.
On my itchio review, I highlighted that I think this game will appeal most to people who enjoy works like Tim Hutchings’ Thousand Year Old Vampire. You can churn through Dreadfarer, but what adds the most to the game is your interpretation and illustration of its prompts. And it does have plenty of atmosphere to soak in.
The art and writing are well paced. Rarely is a paragraph or a photo trying deliberately to scare you. Most often, they are inviting you to look deeper until you find something that unsettles you.
On page 99, a pair of masks with distorted features sit in monochrome. On page 74, a sepia monument in a crumbling plaza depicts a giant human hand with birds perching atop it for scale. On page 208, an open mouth reveals brain matter instead of teeth. The layout ties these images together in a way that balances contrast and sludginess, brightness and distortion. It feels appropriate for a book that you could find tucked amongst some old expedition’s journals. It is either NeonRot’s safest work, or most complex.
And as for Eduardo Valdés-Hevia, if that is not a name you recognize then perhaps the phrase “human evolution experiments” alongside a carcinized skeleton will make the connection. Eduardo specializes in body horror, unreality, and image alteration. Pupils growing so wide they eclipse the eyes and face. Spindly insect grandpa posed for a photo in sepia with a human family.
Compared to how Cronenbergian Eduardo’s work can get, I would say that the pieces in Dreadfarer are more placid. The cover depicts a cyclopean skull being unearthed from a dig site, its brow eye open and staring, and this is roughly as far into the ick as any image pushes. I don’t think this is a negative, as I think sharper horror would have an influence on the player’s journal—it’s harder to be creative when you are in an active fear response.
To that end, I do not think that this is a game that I need to recommend to only a small audience. If body horror, imperialism, and cosmic insignificance are not dealbreakers, and if you like journaling games, Dreadfarer is worth checking out.
To find it check Dreadfarer’s itchio link, as well as the link to its physical preorder!