The Shrouded Isle is a really neat game set in a village worshipping some ancient god where you must manage villagers and take decisions in order to avoid an untimely end, a bit in the vein of “Reigns” where you balance resources, but with an extra layer of puzzles and characters on top of that. It wasn’t my cup of tea, because I felt that I really struggled to figure out the right way to play the game and lost my starting runs without being sure what I could’ve done differently.
At the beginning of a season, you select advisors from each house, houses are comprised of a bunch of characters with minor and major virtues and vices, and these impact how well the house produces one of the aftermentionned resources that you need to balance in order not to game over. At first you don’t know what the characters are like, so you use very limited “Inquiries” to learn a few things and attempt to pick the right advisor. For instance, the house producing fervor won’t be well-served if you pick someone lacking it in the first place.
Then you choose between 1 and 3 advisor to perform their duties, you’ll get some information about what this will do based on the information you have (so you’ll know that one resource will go up or down, but sometimes you won’t know the specific amounts), and see the results. At the end of the season you sacrifice one character, which can give or take more resources away from you, depending if you have a good reason to choose that person. All of this was pretty hard to manage for me, and I inevitably ended up with a few resources under the threshold.
When that happens, you have the rest of the season to fix things up. I’m not sure if it’s always possible, but I’ve only managed it a few times; Otherwise you get a game over. Sometimes the game will spice things up with special events, like a plague, or a villager asking you a question, or a special villager that you need to find to avoid misfortune, and you also must deal with that. In my (short) experience, these are also an occasion to lose more resources. There was no “panic button” or no easy way to recover. So I kept losing fairly early on.
Ultimately The Shrouded Isle is a neat narrative woven around fairly difficult puzzle mechanics - or were they luck mechanics? I’m unsure if there would always have been a way to get through what the game threw at me or if there was a part of luck that I just couldn’t overcome, and that made me drop the game. Maybe you’ll have more luck or skill than I do!
