HyperMall: Unlimited Violence Review - RIB19
HyperMall: Unlimited Violence Review
Disclaimer: I asked for and was provided a review copy. Unfortunately, I’ve started up university again and am experiencing the busiest semester I’ve ever had. As such this is a mere overview, it’s my thoughts about the game after reading through the core book. I simply do not have the time to play sessions to an extent that is reasonable for releasing a thorough review, though I expect this to change in the coming weeks (hopefully). I’d like to extend my apologies to the creator for taking so long in writing this, as my intent was to help the associated Kickstarter campaign, but luckily as I’m writing this the funding goal has been met.
TLDR: This project is extremely unique, creative, and humorous. I think that if you’ve got the right people around you then it would make for an unforgettable experience. The art, aesthetic, and humor alone make this worth checking out, even if you don’t see yourself playing it. It’s not really for light-hearted individuals, though. Don't get me wrong, it’s pretty funny, but if you’re sensitive (you know who you are) you’d be better off staying away.
I don’t know how to describe this game’s aesthetics with words. Imagine being a schizophrenic living in a cyberpunk dystopia while making hating your boss a core part of your personality. HyperMall: Unlimited Violence is a TTRPG about killing corpos and bastards, set in a twisted blend between a city and a mall, where individuals are cursed to continuously resurrect so that they may serve their capitalist overlords for eternity. The lore background for this is actually quite amusing, as is the whole of this game with how steeped in cynicism the pages seem to be. From the first sentence calling you scum to the very last page comparing the HyperMall to a giant shambling corpse, HM:UV is dripping with Fight Club-esque disillusionment throughout.
The cover features bright colors and evocations of digital instability, with the logo for Rat Bastard Games (that’s a hell of a name) and the author, JD Clément, shown as well. The very first page contains all of the info you really need to set the scene, ending with a call to action from a fixer, to borrow the term from Cyberpunk 2077, aptly named MurderMommy. Character creation, or “Employee Onboarding,” involves picking a Background, Favorite Baseball Team, allocating stat points (the stats being Physick, Craveability, Thinkitude, and Savvy), marking your Thresholds for Debt, Stress, and Meat, then lastly picking your character’s passions. You can also choose to spend Debt on Gear, Psionics, and Mutations.
The game uses a pretty simple system for resolving actions, where you’re taking any number of d6s depending on your Stats, Skills, and relevant Passions, and then counting up your successes, which are how many 5s and 6s you roll. No successes are a failure, resulting in accumulating Stress. A single success lets the GM enact a tradeoff or caveat, while 2 or more lets you off scott-free with what you want to do. Triple 6s is a critical success, only resulting in a +1 on your next skill roll. I have to say, the manual instructions cover a lot of basics for someone who doesn’t have experience with tabletop RPGs, while also providing humorous examples that are written in the style of an in-world character trying to teach you, which I really appreciate.
In the materials I was provided, there are a total of, if I counted everything correctly, 39 backgrounds! 36 in the core book, 2 in the Valentine’s Day supplement, and 1 in its own supplement called the April Fool (and numbered at 69 for laughs). The backgrounds really cover all bases for what a potential player would want to be in this world, from walking monstrous bags of flesh, to all sorts of corpo positions, influencers, the “Mall Krampus,” all sorts of esoteric and cryptic techno-religions, baseball stars, you name it. Speaking of which, you’ve got to choose your favorite baseball team. Before we get to that let me just say, the art in here is really something to behold. Take a tab and flip through this thing, you’ll probably never recover haha. I don’t usually put photos into my reviews except for at the very beginning, but just look at this, I really think the art direction is hilarious and entertaining in its own right:
The Lover background
It’s totally possible that I missed this, but I wish the book explained why we need to choose a baseball team before you get around to picking one. There's plenty of room for comedy here and hell even just having this as a foundational part of characters is hilarious. Along with the team itself (whose names are as cyberpunk as you’d expect), you’ve gotta decide or roll for how dedicated you are to them, as well as your PC’s handedness.
For the stats, Physick and Thinkitude are what you’d expect, though there’s a subtle difference between Craveability and Savvy. The former, as I understand it, consists of the characteristics your PC has that makes them appealing to others, the latter is what your character actually does to appeal to others, the first is like their presentation and the second are their actions. Stats go to a maximum of 4, though in certain cases they can be higher. After character creation, the book has a page explaining that the rule of cool comes first (as it should) and provides some basics on the flow of tabletop roleplay.
The combat system is pretty interesting, and the game knows it. The section titled Combat and Thresholds literally has a subtitle stating, “The reason you’re here.” Combat is broken up into three types: Regular, Social, and Financial. Scenarios can call for specific ways to deal with a target, and you’ll have to get creative to get around the whole perpetual resurrection thing everyone in the HyperMall has going on, the book gives you a good amount of examples for how to do this. The system puts fiction first, so initiative isn’t a thing here, but you do get hit locations to roll for, so that’s pretty cool. It’s not that loose though, really the dice dictate how things are going to go for you and I can see things getting pretty tight in Regular Combat, which is the point since you can jump back into the fray easily enough.
Social Combat revolves around debates, rumors, those sorts of things. I’m a bit iffy on this because it revolves around stress, where all failed rolls get you closer to your threshold and failing a Social Combat roll lets your opponent get back at you, so really this mechanic is less like combat and more of a narrative tool. Creativity matters a lot here but honestly I don’t see a lot of players utilizing this to its fullest potential. It sort of reminds me of Persona, where to really make use of this you’ve gotta spread out going after the target in this way for days so that you can manage your stress and attempt to mentally break them. But really it doesn’t seem worth it at first glance. It has potential, I won’t lie, but it’s definitely better suited for a longer campaign than a one-shot, which is what this game is better suited for (though it would actually work quite well as a Persona type thing, if that seems engaging to your players). I might just be thinking of Persona so much because of the recent release of Metaphor though, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Financial Combat seems like fun, at least it looks like the biggest thing I’d mess with when trying to destabilize targets. It’s just like social combat, though you and your mark are fighting to damage each others’ finances. I feel like if this were a video game, it would be a little too easy to cheese, so your GM’s competency really matters here, and just like before this sort of stuff seems like it would take time to be meaningful without the GM fudging things in some direction. An interesting thing to note is that your PC has to balance all their thresholds through both daily activities such as working and eating, as well as how they engage in combat. This is really cool. Like I said before, it depends a lot on the GM though. This system really doesn’t seem conducive to solo-play, but if you’ve got the right friend group I don’t think very many things could beat a campaign centered around this system for the laughs it’d give you.
Let’s talk about skills for a bit. I counted a little over 40 to choose from in the core book. You’ve got all your typical ones covered, like Awareness and Climbing, but there are a few novelties like Asskissing, Cyber Karate, and Gaming. The Passions you choose for your character are much more loose. You choose a noun and decide if you Love, Hate, Crave, Fear, or are Addicted to it. To be fair, the core rules only use these states as examples, so you could choose something else to go along with your noun (remember, gerunds are nouns) but with the Passions you are free to really make your character unique.
Psionics are a part of the modifiers your character can have, they can be chosen at creation or be acquired later on. Some of them are strong attacks and some of them expand your perception, but all take a toll when you try to use them. Mutations work in much the same way, not much to say about those although before a certain point, they don’t take a toll on your body aside from changing your appearance.
The book goes on to talk about how you can slightly change from each resurrection, such as coming back with the wrong hair color or being replaced by an alternate universe counterpart with a different background until your next resurrection. I’ll be honest, I skipped over looking at the gear but you’ve got more than enough to take on whatever you need. There are a good amount of consumables and toxins, these are pretty funny, and the book goes on to give you more than enough instructions and examples for a GM to set up a solid scenario. Almost everything I’ve mentioned so far can be rolled for as well, so this system is really easy to get going quickly (although the PDF I’m looking at does not have hyperlinked chapters). There’s a lot more here as well, a whole other dimension called the Death Dimension, an omnipotent god called The Consumer, instructions for playing handlers (which I called fixers earlier), and then a solid 15 or so pages dedicated to the various enemies you might find in the HyperMall.
All in all let me say that this is one of the most creative TTRPGs I’ve ever seen in terms of aesthetics. I can’t explain why, but I think it appeals quite heavily to dudes who grew up in the 90s and early aughts (only individuals older than the Nintendo DS are real humans). I think I should take back what I said about solo play. It's true that it’ll be rough if you succumb to trying to cheese everything, but there’s enough here in terms of rolling for set-up and outcomes that you can probably bang out a nice experience with little hassle. I really wouldn’t play this with strangers because people are weird about certain themes, but if you’ve got buddies who’d enjoy this then I think it would be a great thing to enjoy with them. At the very least, I do recommend checking this out and flipping through the manual yourself, even if just for the presentation. It’s a really cool project and I hope you think so too.
Nikhil Saxena
Founder, Destrier Studios
Comments
Post a Comment