Cheating Death
How You Will Die in This Place.
Two Moments of Honesty
Hi reader, this is Brad solo again.1 Now, before you put on your waders and get ready to hear me whine, I want to be honest with you, First, you need to go and read You Will Die in This Place by Lhuzie; otherwise, you are only getting part of the discussion. Second, it is equally important to note that this isn’t a normal Split/Pary critique… Because much like my braver companion before me, I don’t know if I can actually do that with this game. As a last girding measure, you need to remember that I am hard on solo games, while I will always respect their design, I don’t think they are always for me, and usually skip them.
When it comes to You Will Die in This Place, I am thrilled I did not.2
I also want to be clear with you: it is impossible for me to talk about this without pulling back its curtains and revealing things about it to you. Go play the demo, support it however you can, then come back and walk with me.
What is You Will Die in This Place?
To tell you the truth, dear reader? Genius. But it’s also ostensibly a solo ttrpg about crawling into a nihilistic hellhole that you will never escape. You design your character by rolling stats or choosing an array and assigning them to the World’s Most Popular Statline. The class selection is the first place where the game surprised me, cause reader none of these are the sorta thing you expect! Play Poker, or move one die around for a variety of actions, maybe manage heat in a cursed mech, or build a being to be your buddy! A game that slams in the face of trying to make classes equal and instead focuses on making them as interesting as possible.
Then you enter the dungeon, each floor lovingly described, with a combat system including tracking miniatures and a huge bestiary, a megadungeon that is in fact a love letter to both of those words! Reader, it drips cool; it makes you inhabit a gross and painful world as you read notes from previous adventurers.
Then you die. I suppose you should then rebuild a character and take another run at it. This is where I thought this was going to end, then I’d write up a cute little article and demand an explanation about what’s so fascinating from Lhuzie… But I have a question?
Who Is Charlotte Avery? Who is Samantha Little
Huh? You bought this game from a person named Liz, right? Well, the book opens with a foreword from someone named Samantha Little, who explains that You Will Die in This Place is actually the work of their late friend Charlotte Avery, and that they did their best to finish it, edit it, and release it.
The text is also peppered with notes, essays, maybe? From these two, in addition to occasional notes from their beleaguered editor and reader, KC. These show two thoughtful girls, obsessed with game design, who are intrigued about the very bones and beasts of this art form that I find myself in regular, obsessed conversation about.
These points seemed interesting, but that was the problem, wasn’t it? The game was a brutally hard but interestingly designed romp, but I had become even more curious about what lay in the text behind the text. For a moment, I assumed I was going to have to roll up another character, play it again, and try to get further this time…
That’s when I had the first thought about what I was working with, closed the game, threw the entire article I’d been writing away, and took a second shot at it.
What is You Will Die in This Place?
You Will Die In This Place is the game that every mystery box game has dreamed of being. YWDITP is where the ultimate craft of solo RPG and choose your own adventure were cross-bred and then raised in a sewer by the most hideous monsters of horror metafiction.
YWDITP is the game that actually understands the role the artist plays in the art, and reaches into your brain to help you do the same. I’m not gonna rehash my cowriters’ work; she already told you that these women have different design philosophies, and you can see that in everything in the text.
You see, because I became as concerned with the meta-narrative as I was with the actual narrative, I took a second run at the dungeon and died two floors later than I had previously, and began to consider what I would do next, should I build four characters?
It was then I realized perhaps the most important thing You Will Die in This Place could say.
But Who Plays Games Anyway?
This is a common joke you will hear if you are adjacent to his hobby. No one really plays games, people buy games, they read games, they plan games! But do they actually play ‘em? No.
YWDITP has something to say about this. The very first of Charlotte’s perspective pieces ends with this truth.
“This is the paradox of the indie roleplaying game. Countless hours of creation with the purpose of being played, only to sit on a shelf, read but unused. So why even make playable games?”
This is such a point of contention that I don’t care to reproduce thousands of hours of discourse. But for a moment, it seemed odd to me, why would you include this line at all, in a lean, mean book that clearly has something to say! Every word has meaning, and so I realized the smart thing to do.
I Cheated.
That’s right, dear reader. I went back, and instead of participating in any encounter, I simply did what many of us have for dozens of indie RPGs and adventures.3 I read the whole book, ruining the surprise for myself and finally understanding what the hell this whole thing was about. Then I threw out my second draft of this article, walked away for a week, and marinated on my thoughts.
What is You Will Die in This Place?
It’s everything else I said in this article, and also a metanarrative tale that left me genuinely in tears. It’s a story about grief, about the connections we make on every angle in this hobby of ours, it’s a story about change and transition and how art helps enable those things. It’s also a story about the bitter work of making art, how painful and difficult it is to make something that will not just show the world your vulnerability but has to be acceptable to be enjoyed, and about how this imperfect communication will have to do for all of these things.
And above all else? It’s the story of how You Will Die In This Place.
I am going to be vulnerable here and mention that this narrative connected very deeply to me. The person who introduced me most deeply to this hobby and took me from a stinky teen who only ever played The Dragon Game4 died a couple of years ago, after we had fallen out of contact. They showed me what this hobby could be, and led me here, so maybe I’m just the exact person this game was built for. They are the first person I thought of sending a signed copy of our book to, and I will never get that opportunity. 5
This narrative haunts the game; it makes it a two-point narrative, about the deep melancholy horror of the dungeon you find yourself trapped in, and the deep sense of loss of connection, but the hope that the connection existed at all will make this suffering worth it.
Is It Worth It?
Yes. If you read this whole article and needed to hear that, then absolutely. You Will Die In This Place is a titan in this art form. I’d say I can’t put how I feel about it into words, but here are about 1,400 words on it. I rarely struggle to conclude things like this, but in this case, you’ll have to indulge me in doing something simple. Pick up a game on your shelf and play it, and maybe introduce someone in the hobby to something they wouldn’t normally play.
Are you getting tired of them yet?
Some of you may note that there are several more truths here than two. Perhaps that’s intentional.
in my case, hundreds of adventures.
Fourth Edition, so y’know, still better than most people’s starts.
But hey, if that anecdote brought a tear to your eye you should buy a copy.