Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

The Horrors Persist But So Do Aye Aye (henceforth Horrors) is a 12 or so page solo journaling game by Megan Ramirez. In it you play an aye-aye with supernatural powers, seeking magical artefacts and consulting spirits to stem the destruction of your homeland.

Horrors is based on Carta, much as Moon Rings was, so it shares some similarities, particularly the deck of cards laid out in a grid. This is a roll and move game, so each turn you move up to 6 cards, which on a grid this size is pretty close to complete freedom (and randomness). You consult the prompts dependent on which card you land on, journaling accordingly, until you collect 4 seeds or uncover all of the cards, in which case you access 1 of 2 secret end conditions. Before you do all of this, you generate your aye-aye, and choose its supernatural powers. Simple, right?

Actually, Horrors has a few tricks up its’ sleeve. In most Carta games, you set aside the rest of the deck not in the 20 card grid and play without them, or perhaps refer to them occasionally. Here, you have an entire secondary deck, and that deck solely subsumes the original, meaning that the narrative evolves, opening new paths depending on your choices. Neat! In addition to that, both spirit and animal encounters are randomised, meaning that even within that sufficient amount of randomisation, we get even more surprises.

Horrors opens with 4 colourful pages of in-universe texts, messages and images, which set the tone in an absolutely magnificent fashion. The game mixes the absurdity of the premise and the terrifying horror of environmental destruction with humour and a degree of subtlety. Even when we get to the prompts, the writing is just lovely: “Just beyond the blurring lies a towering baobab tree, its crown of finger-likebranches rigidly arched skyward like a hand in rigor mortis.”

The layout of those first 4 pages is really nice, and it’s fine throughout the main documents, until you realise that there aren’t any prompts here. But Nova, you say, didn’t you say the prompts were great? I did, but they’re in a separate document. I tend to download the main rules, and so I had to go back to the store to find the majority of the game text, which is in word document rather than pdf format. It’s fine, but a perplexing choice, and the word document abandons the formatting of the main text.

I really, really like this little game. It’s clever in design, unique in its themes, and well written. It’s let down but some strange choices with its layout and product design, but that’s easily overlooked. If solo games, cosmic horror and cute animals are your thing, I’d check out The Horrors Persist But So Do Aye Aye.

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