Galaxy of Pen & Paper is a neat sequel to Knights of Pen & Paper with a more sci-fi focus, spaceship battles and planets to visit. Following the same meta-narrative of a GM playing a tabletop adventure with their buddies where you can level and upgrade both the characters and the players, I didn’t get too invested in this one, because like te previous game, I’m not the biggest fan of the way these games handle adventure and combat generation. Ultimately a neat little RPG with lots of heart, it just wasn’t for me.
After creating your GM and two characters, you’re thrown on a sand planet where the game teaches you the basics. You get quests, which will usually involve killing enemies, then you create your own fights by picking up the number of enemies you want to fight at once - with more enemies yielding more rewards - then go into turn-based fighting where you use items, class abilities and attacks then level up, get new items and equipment to do it all over again. Battle is fairly deep, with a regenerating shield system, resources for special abilities, status effects, a turn order bar, and so on.
I’m not a big fan of the ‘create-your-fights’ system, mostly because it puts the onus of crafting a good encounter on you. Adding too few enemies make fights feel cheap and unrewarding, having too much either makes it a slog or just too difficult. I understand that this is core to this game’s experience, but it’s just not my jam. It’s the same thing with the ‘create-a-quest’ system. You can wander around endlessly, completing procedurally generated quests of finding items, defeating monsters or doing space battles, but to what end?When should I stop and move to something else? Some other step in the main story?
The stuff around quests is pretty fun, the artstyle is neat, the little bits of decision making also adds flavor to the game. Space battles are turn-based and they work by building up AP every turn in order to attack, heal, or improve your actions temporarily while the enemies do the same, rolling dice along the way. There’s probably a lot to do and see in this game, but after attempting to craft missions that were too difficult a couple of times and fighting yet another stream of weak mobs, I just completely lost interest. That’s certainly a “me” thing so don’t let it deter you from the game too hard if you know it’ll be your jam!
