Hey y’all! Sorry for the late post; I got caught up in some freelance writing last week about another game. Here, though, we have a really cute and robust Ren’Py RPG on Itch called Mushroom Musume.
Mushroom Musume starts with a prologue segment that turns out to be a narrative-driven character creator. You’re a hermit who gets visited by a witch, and the witch grants you your deepest desire – to have a daughter – after completing three tasks for her. The witch gives you a pot with a small mushroom inside it, and you raise that mushroom into your daughter over the course of months and (presumably) years.
When your mushroom daughter leaves home, that’s when the actual game begins, and how your daughter was raised will effect the stats she leaves home with. It’s quite a clever way to set up a player-character’s existence within a story.
Each story is itself fairly short, only a couple of chapters and a handful of decisions to make. The mushroom girl you roll will have to reckon not only with the consequences of decisions your hermit made earlier, like choosing to put off the witch’s debt, but also consequences of her own actions.
Each consequential decision’s success or failure is accompanied by a dice roll a la Disco Elysium, and whether you pass or fail certain checks depends on the stats you have, which can also be effected by things like injury or the passage of time. This combination of diegetic character creation and semi-procedural storytelling leads to a plethora of mushroom girls and scenarios to see. It’s eminently replayable and super interesting every time you start up a new session. It’s almost like a digital solo TTRPG, and I like it a lot.
Go check it out at the Mortally Moonstruck Games Itch page.