Perdition's Mouth: Abyssal Rift

EvEvanstar4.6

The rulebook on this game is really tough, but once you get through it this is a diceless fully-co op dungeon crawler with some interesting mechanisms. First, players block each other's movement, and line of sight. Second, friendly fire is on for any sort of area of effect attacks. Third, you are choosing what you can do by spending action points to move around a roundel. If I had never played Myth or Gloomhaven I'd have been totally blown away by this game. That being said, how much time do I want to invest into my third favorite euro influenced diceless fully co-op dungeon crawler? Not helping it's case is that the rules and components have many issues. One example is on the action selection wheel, there are attack icons in three places, but all three attack actions function differently. There are tons of rules exceptions throughout the game. The rulebook repeats itself a lot, yet manages to leave things unclear. It also takes a very long time before it even gets around to telling you the basics of what to do on your turn. My perfect example of how this unstreamlined this game is, is the mechanism where each turn you get X action points depending on how much health your character has. Then you MUST spend 1 or more action points to move around the roundel, not paying an action point for occupied spaces. What this means is every turn you have X-1 action points. Why not give me one fewer action point and then have the rule be 'move around the roundel paying 1 AP per empty space you skip'. Simpler, and then I don't have that extra X-1 math equation greeting me at the start of every single turn. It's not that it's hard, it's simply an example of how this game doesn't do you any favors in terms of how the rules treat you as a player. Everything feels like it has just one awkward aspect that really should have been resolved during playtesting. I know it's laughable for me who loves Myth, despite the fact that Myth was unplayable with the original rulebook, and difficult to understand without the 2.0 cards, to come down on PM:AR for having component and rulebook problems, but Myth was the first of it's kind when it landed. Since then we've gotten the fixed rulebook and cards, and we've gotten Gloomhaven, so it's really hard to look at a game that isn't as exciting to play as either of those games, which then also doesn't learn from their mistakes. ☆ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment