Doubt Comes In
A downloadable game
Doubt Comes In is a two player game inspired by by Anaïs Mitchell's album Hadestown, made for the the Record Collection 2K19 game jam. It's a game of love, loss, and ultimately, whether or not you can live with uncertainty.
You can find the original album here
https://open.spotify.com/album/4E34mVDBUF21VATsoZNbdI?si=uDu-N-3jQNCWnMatiQ0Drw
Or the live album of its stage production here
https://open.spotify.com/album/5aNyKdMPAPihA6n5BXTkLX?si=z_eCRsqFTvyYWTMkS4Gajg
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $3 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Comments
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Got this in a bundle and played it online with another player. We had a good time overall, but explaining the ending-mechanic to my co-player proved really difficult.
This is a 4 page, two player, emotionally heavy game. It's got a tragic vibe, and riffs initially off of Orpheus (the myth, not the game,) but it's not a doomed story. You *can* win, although the game doesn't really prep you on how to do so unless you know the myth.
Doubt Comes In is primarily a storytelling experience, but it has a neat frame to it. You flash back and forth between your characters' lives as a couple, and their journey through / imprisonment in the underworld.
At no point do the mechanics feel complicated or intrusive. They posit interesting situations, and they definitely escalate in intensity and internal conflict, but they never take you out of the action.
Honestly, I think this might be one of my favorite pure storytelling games, and if you have a partner or friend that likes romance and trpgs and complex inter-character relationships against a backdrop of moody almost gothic atmosphere, I'd recommend grabbing a copy.
Minor Issues:
-Page 4, Together, "Why does they let The Lover go?"
-It might benefit from a "don't read all the way through when you're just skimming this, and only read the last section when you get there during gameplay" direction at the start of the game. That last mechanic is strong, but it hits a little harder if the players don't know how it works until the Singer has already made their choice.
Thank you so much! And that is a good catch, thank you!
Doubt comes in is an excellent two player game based on Hadestown, though knowledge or even life of the base material is not needed. You play as the lover or the singer and you descend into the Underworld to retrieve the lover, playing out scenes as you do and sort of taking turns describing how your relationship formed and worked. It's a beautiful narrative game, that we highly enjoyed with a truly interesting ending feature. Either you know the lover comes along with you, thus forcing them to stay in the Underworld, or you don't, and the ending is a bit unclear from there. If you enjoy narrative building games between two people then definitely pick this one up and give it a go! It's worth your time! We played it live over on Off the Table and really enjoyed it and what we built from it!
Thank you! It was so cool watching y'all play!
I played it with a friend today, and it was sublime. It hit all the notes we expected from being Hadestown fans, and the final choice was very impactful. We ended up compromising on it cause my friend who played The Singer wanted to know The Lover's answer really bad, so I used FutureMe to send it to her a year in the future.
It was a great experience, and we have plans to play it again.
"Doubt Comes In" is a two player game inspired by Hadestown (and in turn the myth of Orpheus' efforts to retrieve Eurydice from the Underworld). It follows a flexible but well-defined structure, with players taking turns answering questions and playing short scenes together to set up the relationship between the Singer (as in Orpheus) and the Lover (as in Eurydice). It all leads to an endgame with a slightly different but still painful choice for the Singer's player- a defined and familiar tragic ending or an ending that might be happier and might not but which they can never know about. Short, with minimal but functional layout. Definitely worth a look.
Rating: Recommended