The Creature Comes For Us is a simple, indie, gm-less ttrpg centered around describing characters, the monster hunting them, what they’re doing to prepare for the monster, and finally fighting the monster. Before playing the game you come up with the very basics of the world, such as when and where it’s located, which can be anywhere from medieval England, to a martian colony, to a futuristic cyberpunk city like we opted for in the game I played and the very basics of a character: a name and pronouns.
After answering those basic questions, you can begin with Part 1 of the game. This part of the game focuses on players drawing cards from a deck, with each card corresponding to a question for the players to answer. Some are details about their character, some flesh out the world, and others describe the monster and what the players are doing to prepare. Those last two prompts serve a special purpose, with the monster cards adding an extra challenge the monster presents which must be defeated later and the preparation cards giving players a resource that can be used to give an advantage later on.
Once there are 8 monster prompt cards drawn from the deck, phase 2 begins. In this phase, the players go 1-by-1 through the deck of monster cards and describe how their characters are encountering the monster. They then roll a die to determine the outcome of this encounter; with three possibilities: success, resounding failure, and a close failure which counts as a fail but gives you a bonus to the next challenge. Additionally, players can chose to utilize one of the prepared tools from phase 1 in order to give a bonus to the roll in their favor. Players have to succeed on five of the eight monster challenges, or they fail to defeat the monster.
Overall, I found this game to be really fun and it led to a lot of fun jokes and “yes, and” moments between me and my friends. However, my primary complaint is that the game never really encourages you to be in-character. While you are asked to answer questions about your character, the game doesn’t encourage you to answer them in the first person (which might’ve helped us be more immersed but I hadn’t even considered it until later) and there are no interactions between players unless you decide to introduce them in the monster fight at the end. Personally, I would like to see some cards that give prompts for scenes that players can act out in character. My next issue may just be an issue with our luck, but it felt very difficult to actually defeat the monster. When rolling, you need a 10+ on 2d6 to succeed which is not amazing odds. While there are ways to get boosts to these rolls, they require you to draw them in part 1 which comes down entirely to luck. While there are surely times where players go into the final battle with a ton of resources, it definitely wasn’t the case for us and it left the final battle feeling somewhat hopeless. While that can still be a good story, it can still be a bit soul-crushing in the moment, and it’s hard to feel particuarly invested in a failure when you haven’t had the chance to become invested in the character in the first place (re: previous discussion on character rp).
