Loved Burnout Reaper when I found it in a bundle, and this is a perfect successor. Sticks to the motifs of bodies and the violence society inflicts on them without feeling samey, and adapts BR's visual aesthetic in a way that reflects the subject matter. One of those games that aims to make you contemplate contemporary issues, not just entertain, and does it well.
This is going to be a complicated review because I think the line between smut and horror is really just what's to your taste---in the same way that the line between a good meal and a bad meal can be crossed in either direction by tossing in a ghost pepper.
Also, I think that smut *is* art, and therefore it should be reviewed and talked about with artistic audiences---audiences who are mature enough to handle that conversation.
Also also, for me this game is horror.
Anyway, Digital Angel is a 12 page campunk surreal science-fantasy ttrpg that is blaringly dressed in the iconography of sex. What does any of that mean? Hell if I know. It's HunieCam Studio by way of Va11 Hall-A by way of Burnout Reaper. It's Maid RPG, social pvp mechanics and all, fully recontextualized as economic horror. It's about a world where weirdos on message boards post bounties for cam performers to track down and consensually(?!) hook up with targets in a miserable cyberpunk metropolis. It's an anime from the curtained off section at the back of the Blockbusters, but really the animation quality is very high.
Digital Angel is loud, crass, earnest, exposed. Very exposed. You play as an angel that has been cybernetically modified and is now working on cam sites to make ends meet. The book positions this work as divine, mundane, boring, degrading. Sometimes by turns, and often several of those things at once.
The GM meanwhile plays as the crushing economic forces that surround you. And those forces are not "crushing" as in "oh no, pleeeeease~ don't exploit me <3". They're not in service of fantasizing about whatever you want to fantasize about. They're real world misery, lightly recontextualized by the weirdness of the setting.
When the game hits cyberpunk beats, it hits them in the same way you might apply a hammer to a kneecap. You're not guaranteed to feel good, but you are guaranteed to react.
"WILL measures a Worker's WILL TO LIVE. When WILL drops to zero they die" is how the first section on mechanics starts. Basically, you roll a dice pool and use it to assemble poker hands, but each time you fail you lose dice and eventually it becomes impossible to do any better than the minimum 1 Six hand for a complicated success. You can reroll dice based on your relevant stat, but any 1s are unrerollable auto failures. So the longer you roll, the more certain the odds your character will die. You can push things by sticking to low pools and prioritizing self-care---but if you want to see results, you're going to have to burn the candle of your lifespan. I think anyone in a freelance job can sympathize with this.
There *is* humor in the game, and some of the jokes are so bleak that they surprised a laugh out of me. You get random bonuses called Edges, and there's a completely obvious crass wink that the game ignores to make a way funnier crack that you have these powers because of routine exposure to Red 40 dye. That same page has the full "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" quote recessed into the background, nearly fully obscured by the game mechanics.
Digital Angel's layout is *smart*, and there's a lot of hidden information tucked out of the way, Cy_Borg style. In fact, I think I could call this game "gloomier, hornier Cy_Borg" without blinking. It's not hard to read (unless high frequency pastel pink hurts you,) but it's not plain or playing it safe either.
I think a point of critique I do have---and that I'm not sure is valid but we'll get into that in a moment---is that I would not describe this game as sexy, nor as a game I would choose if someone put a gun to my head and demanded a sexy ttrpg. Or actually, maybe it would be ludonarrative harmony to choose Digital Angel in that specific case? Either way, when Digital Angel is specifically talking about sex it feels rotely, loudly horny. Horny as a career. Horny as a minimum wage with college debts and a sense that the economy might one day get better, but never for you---career. Big Horny, but in the same scansion as Big Pharma.
The reason I'm not sure that my critique is valid is 1) not everybody likes the same stuff, so it is entirely plausible that people who are not me will find the game's whole setup hot, and b) a game about selling sex does not have to be hot to have something interesting or worthwhile to say. And I do think Digital Angel has a bunch of interesting things to say, or I wouldn't be ignoring my own reservations over ever talking about horny media as a brand and talking about it.
By the way, on a purely game design level, there are a lot of cool little flourishes in the system. All of the classes are named after heroines from stories, from Chang E to Tank Girl, and all of them recontextualize the way power flows in the game. Workers with high Beauty can steal Will from lower Beauty Workers---Cinderella gets a temporary Beauty increase for a Will cost, making her even more of a Will vampire. Generally you have to roll dice to succeed at things, but Eve has Good Girl, which lets her suffer and lose 1 Will to make a success without a roll. Red Riding Hood literally and with her jaws eats men and recovers a ton of will from it---probably enough to survive multiple scenarios if a Cinderella doesn't get her first.
I think minus the sex branding, this would be a really interesting system about being a twitch streamer / vtuber / digital personality in this modern era where basically every job is being rapidly eroded into freelance. It would stand out, as I don't know too many other systems that tackle this sort of subject matter (only Ryuutubers, which I haven't read yet.) However, this was built to be a horny game. Sterilizing it would cede space to the puritanization of the internet. Not everything has to be for everyone. Not everything has to be for me.
In conclusion, this review is concluded. Everything I've already thought I've said already.
OMG thank you so much for this amazing review (("When the game hits cyberpunk beats, it hits them in the same way you might apply a hammer to a kneecap." is a pull quote I'd love to use if you're comfortable with it!!)) and I definitely feel like this game is hitting all the right cords based off your reactions!
The good news is (especially because I want to run this with my less hornily inclined friends) this is just the start!! My plan (hope?) is to make a couple other of these zines over the coming months, specifically starting with a remake of Burnout Reaper (subbing in Horny for Gory) in this style, then moving on to one about delivery drivers (subbing in both the horny for pizza-lensed reflection on the samsara). Which is why it often uses "Worker" instead of "Angel" - My pipedream is you can use a handful of these zines to mash a bunch of these types of characters together in the same grim "far-future" world!
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Loved Burnout Reaper when I found it in a bundle, and this is a perfect successor. Sticks to the motifs of bodies and the violence society inflicts on them without feeling samey, and adapts BR's visual aesthetic in a way that reflects the subject matter. One of those games that aims to make you contemplate contemporary issues, not just entertain, and does it well.
Thank you so much!! I'm hoping to do a few more like this eventually so stay tuned >:3
<3 <3 <3
This is going to be a complicated review because I think the line between smut and horror is really just what's to your taste---in the same way that the line between a good meal and a bad meal can be crossed in either direction by tossing in a ghost pepper.
Also, I think that smut *is* art, and therefore it should be reviewed and talked about with artistic audiences---audiences who are mature enough to handle that conversation.
Also also, for me this game is horror.
Anyway, Digital Angel is a 12 page campunk surreal science-fantasy ttrpg that is blaringly dressed in the iconography of sex. What does any of that mean? Hell if I know. It's HunieCam Studio by way of Va11 Hall-A by way of Burnout Reaper. It's Maid RPG, social pvp mechanics and all, fully recontextualized as economic horror. It's about a world where weirdos on message boards post bounties for cam performers to track down and consensually(?!) hook up with targets in a miserable cyberpunk metropolis. It's an anime from the curtained off section at the back of the Blockbusters, but really the animation quality is very high.
Digital Angel is loud, crass, earnest, exposed. Very exposed. You play as an angel that has been cybernetically modified and is now working on cam sites to make ends meet. The book positions this work as divine, mundane, boring, degrading. Sometimes by turns, and often several of those things at once.
The GM meanwhile plays as the crushing economic forces that surround you. And those forces are not "crushing" as in "oh no, pleeeeease~ don't exploit me <3". They're not in service of fantasizing about whatever you want to fantasize about. They're real world misery, lightly recontextualized by the weirdness of the setting.
When the game hits cyberpunk beats, it hits them in the same way you might apply a hammer to a kneecap. You're not guaranteed to feel good, but you are guaranteed to react.
"WILL measures a Worker's WILL TO LIVE. When WILL drops to zero they die" is how the first section on mechanics starts. Basically, you roll a dice pool and use it to assemble poker hands, but each time you fail you lose dice and eventually it becomes impossible to do any better than the minimum 1 Six hand for a complicated success. You can reroll dice based on your relevant stat, but any 1s are unrerollable auto failures. So the longer you roll, the more certain the odds your character will die. You can push things by sticking to low pools and prioritizing self-care---but if you want to see results, you're going to have to burn the candle of your lifespan. I think anyone in a freelance job can sympathize with this.
There *is* humor in the game, and some of the jokes are so bleak that they surprised a laugh out of me. You get random bonuses called Edges, and there's a completely obvious crass wink that the game ignores to make a way funnier crack that you have these powers because of routine exposure to Red 40 dye. That same page has the full "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" quote recessed into the background, nearly fully obscured by the game mechanics.
Digital Angel's layout is *smart*, and there's a lot of hidden information tucked out of the way, Cy_Borg style. In fact, I think I could call this game "gloomier, hornier Cy_Borg" without blinking. It's not hard to read (unless high frequency pastel pink hurts you,) but it's not plain or playing it safe either.
I think a point of critique I do have---and that I'm not sure is valid but we'll get into that in a moment---is that I would not describe this game as sexy, nor as a game I would choose if someone put a gun to my head and demanded a sexy ttrpg. Or actually, maybe it would be ludonarrative harmony to choose Digital Angel in that specific case? Either way, when Digital Angel is specifically talking about sex it feels rotely, loudly horny. Horny as a career. Horny as a minimum wage with college debts and a sense that the economy might one day get better, but never for you---career. Big Horny, but in the same scansion as Big Pharma.
The reason I'm not sure that my critique is valid is 1) not everybody likes the same stuff, so it is entirely plausible that people who are not me will find the game's whole setup hot, and b) a game about selling sex does not have to be hot to have something interesting or worthwhile to say. And I do think Digital Angel has a bunch of interesting things to say, or I wouldn't be ignoring my own reservations over ever talking about horny media as a brand and talking about it.
By the way, on a purely game design level, there are a lot of cool little flourishes in the system. All of the classes are named after heroines from stories, from Chang E to Tank Girl, and all of them recontextualize the way power flows in the game. Workers with high Beauty can steal Will from lower Beauty Workers---Cinderella gets a temporary Beauty increase for a Will cost, making her even more of a Will vampire. Generally you have to roll dice to succeed at things, but Eve has Good Girl, which lets her suffer and lose 1 Will to make a success without a roll. Red Riding Hood literally and with her jaws eats men and recovers a ton of will from it---probably enough to survive multiple scenarios if a Cinderella doesn't get her first.
I think minus the sex branding, this would be a really interesting system about being a twitch streamer / vtuber / digital personality in this modern era where basically every job is being rapidly eroded into freelance. It would stand out, as I don't know too many other systems that tackle this sort of subject matter (only Ryuutubers, which I haven't read yet.) However, this was built to be a horny game. Sterilizing it would cede space to the puritanization of the internet. Not everything has to be for everyone. Not everything has to be for me.
In conclusion, this review is concluded. Everything I've already thought I've said already.
Minor Issues:
-Page 3, Edges, "Carido" instead of Cardio
OMG thank you so much for this amazing review (("When the game hits cyberpunk beats, it hits them in the same way you might apply a hammer to a kneecap." is a pull quote I'd love to use if you're comfortable with it!!)) and I definitely feel like this game is hitting all the right cords based off your reactions!
The good news is (especially because I want to run this with my less hornily inclined friends) this is just the start!! My plan (hope?) is to make a couple other of these zines over the coming months, specifically starting with a remake of Burnout Reaper (subbing in Horny for Gory) in this style, then moving on to one about delivery drivers (subbing in both the horny for pizza-lensed reflection on the samsara). Which is why it often uses "Worker" instead of "Angel" - My pipedream is you can use a handful of these zines to mash a bunch of these types of characters together in the same grim "far-future" world!
I could definitely see running playbooks from different games in this engine as being super interesting!
And yeah, feel free to use anything in the review as a pull quote!