tasty and fun!
4 stars
Content warning spoilers? horror - dysfunctional families
It's so nice to receive this just in time for Halloween season! I'm not much of a LARPer, but I love roleplaying games and delicious horror and people trying to create weird and powerful narrative experiences (really sounds like ad copy when I put it like that, but I don't know how else to put it). And I do love horror about food and houses. This is a very fun collection of earnest LARPs mostly about food!
There are a couple of genuinely scary games in here, and a few more genuinely uncomfortable games, which is a good hit rate. I don't read a lot of LARPs so maybe I'm generalizing here but I think there's an earnestness in these, and a willingness to do things that might look silly, that probably a hardened LARPer is particularly suited for, and I aspire to it. It also makes these really fun to read and imagine. In one, a family's controlling father is optionally played by a mannequin at the dinner table. There's a set of ~~scary~~ bedtime stories & poems in the middle, which are scary in a like, unselfconscious cheesy campfire story way.
Beyond that, some of these LARPs take the opportunity to effectively evoke a very specific feeling and setting. The very first game is a solo game where you play a housewife hiding her alien features: putting on makeup, making dinner for two, hearing from her husband that he'll be late, eating one portion alone at a candlelit dinner table. I haven't played it (yet?) but the scene-setting seems completely effective. Not all the games are this successful, I think, but enough of them are, and I found all of them interesting - and there's quite a few of them. I also really liked the integration with some online resources, like soundtracks and a 1999 new year broadcast! And I have to mention the lovely art - every LARP has a gorgeous full-page horror illustration attached to it.
My wishes for this collection would be: - some more interesting rules? there were one or two places where you could feel the design very satisfyingly and the mechanics came together wonderfully with the scene, but I would have loved to see a deeper delve into mechanics, I guess bc that's what I'm really fascinated with. Maybe what I really want is a behind-the-scenes discussion about writers' design choices. I should see if they've done that! - a little more copyediting, there's a few distracting spelling & formatting errors and the wording of rules in some places is unclear - not to unplayability, but it takes you out of it a bit. - more recipes!