So! Duskwood. It's been sitting on my phone for ages and I finally made a push through the last episodes and finished it. (The big stumbling block was that the game is highly dependent on mini-Bejeweled games to advance the plot, and there were long stretches of time where I just shuffled it aside for something that wasn't going to regularly bottleneck game progress.) In a sentence: "I really liked it, but..."

If you're in the subset of people who would find this game appealing--i.e. you like visual novels and didn't throw all your electronics out the window when you read the words 'Bejeweled games'--I think Duskwood has a lot to recommend it, those periodic bottlenecks aside. It's an interesting premise, with engaging characters and an intriguing mystery, and they got some pretty good actors for the in-game video calls.

The big problem I have with Duskwood is the problem I had with "The Arcana" a couple of years ago: the individual pieces are strong and engaging, but when you take a step back and look at the full picture, you see the cracks. The problem with writing each chapter in stages is that over multiple chapters, keeping an internally consistent narrative becomes more difficult. I know this is going to be a hazard of any episodic format, particularly for a small indie studio, and...as with Arcana, I get the impression that the Duskwood team didn't sit down ahead of time and hammer out a hard and fast outline, which would have been a big help in reducing some of those problems as they went. From a writing standpoint, I found it not as satisfying as I'd hoped, in no small part because even allowing for messy human nature, several of those pieces just didn't add up for me.

But even if the writing wasn't polished to the degree I'd like, I still enjoyed Duskwood and found it left me with a lot to think about when it came to an end. I have no regrets on investing the time and money to play it. Probably a 3.5 out of my customary 4, but rounding up feels more appropriate.