Blues Wanderer

You start outside Greenville and walk north on 61, through Leland and Cleveland toward Clarksdale, with Memphis somewhere past the end of it. Two acts, a map of nodes, and a run that ends when you do. Nobody on that road explains what happened to it. They talk about what they are owed, who came to collect, and what a thing turned out to be worth.

Every card belongs to a school of music, and the school is the system. Blues builds Resonance and spends it. Folk stacks Linger and holds a Stance that changes what the next stack does. Country gets meaner the closer you are to dying. Cards cost Breath, and you get three a turn to start with.

The wanderer's own rule is the twelve bar form. Count four cards and the fourth is free, and the last two bars of a chorus are both free, so a chorus ends in a turnaround. The count runs the whole way through a run rather than resetting each fight, which means a fight can open on you halfway through a phrase.

Some nodes are not a fight. They are a table behind a filling station, and the man across it is somebody off that act's roster, drawn and named, who says his piece before the table lets you act. It is real Texas Hold 'em rather than a minigame: the same tier that decides how hard a fight is decides how well he plays, and the hand evaluator is checked against all 2,598,960 five card hands there are. You are playing for run gold. Where everybody is counting what they are owed, a card table is not a change of subject.

One table is different, and you cannot reach it until you have lost a run. After that, a woman is waiting at every table you sit down at, and she is not playing for gold. Your chips are your health and hers are a fixed seventy five, so arriving healthy is the preparation. Beat her and she joins the roster. Lose and the run ends there, with her last word on the summary screen.

It is pixel art, it plays in landscape, and once it is installed it runs offline.

Some of this game is finished, some of it is a stub, and some of it has never been started. The mechanics board says which is which, so you can tell whether a missing thing is worth reporting.