Missing Month

Missing Month is a wistful card-based storytelling fantasy game.

You could compare it to isekai, but if so you'd be reaching for Escaflowne and Narnia and Terabithia more than the modern power-and-comfort face of the genre.

I think it's also maybe fair to call this TV-Glow-core.

The PDF is 30 pages, with a gorgeous hand-drawn cover and ornate, well-organized, and readable interior pages.

Setup-wise, this is a pretty simple game to prep for. You need a stopwatch, cards, and something to write with.

As is the case elsewhere in the genre, you pull those cards to generate prompts. The prompts build your character and give you tasks.

What is different about Missing Month is that it gives you a total amount of time to play for (2 hours 30 minutes) and that it has you take breaks between play sessions in order to forget things.

Yeah. The overarching premise here is that you can visit another world, but that you forget it while you're in ours, so the structured breaks are used to create intervals where your real actual self will start forgetting things.

This creates an interesting gameflow.

Up until the end of play, it's easy to focus on what you're doing in the other world, what problems you're trying to solve, and the game's short timers and cards encourage this. With only three minutes to answer a prompt sometimes, you have to stay in the moment and think fast. But in the last 30 minutes, that rapid fire structure stops. Instead, during your last 30 minutes you know you're going into the other world for the last time. And you have to decide if you want to stay there.

While you're playing, there are also prompts that ask you about your life in the real world. What you're neglecting. What you're hiding. What gets pushed aside while you concentrate on your fantasy adventure. They nudge at you, a reminder that daydreaming is a choice, and choosing one thing excludes another.

Do you give up the people you know for a fantasy?

I don't think it's fair to say this game is mean, but it has teeth and it uses them. You can absolutely hurt your emotions on it.

At the same time it's deftly written and well structured. Contrary to its name and themeing, you'll absolutely remember playing it.

I would strongly recommend this to people who like journaling games, feeling things strongly, and facing the world as it is. It's well made, a brisk read, and if you're inclined to writing you *will* get a solid narrative out of this.