Well, no, I knew it was a preorder and I knew I was “just” paying for some in-game stuff. What I really wanted was to support their move from a game like Echo Bazaar (or Fallen London, I guess, forgive me my habits) to shorter, more focused narrative experiences. Echo Bazaar has grinding in order to keep people from blazing through content faster than they can create new stuff. The idea behind Silver Tree was, I thought, to tell a story in that universe without being restricted by poor design choices in EBZ.

Too bad they replaced these design decisions with worse ones, and the start of Silver Tree is nowhere near as engaging as than the start of EBZ. Every time I play, I want to quit, but after a few days I decide to give it another chance (which makes me hate it again). The fantasy elements of EBZ are in there, somewhere, but they’re hidden behind a veil of mundane drudgery that actually forces you to do more grinding than EBZ does. The UI is sluggish and organized in a way that makes sense for the story, but forces the user into needless clicks, further compounding the feeling that I’m wasting my time. It certainly doesn’t help that it’s never very clear how to progress down most story paths, because they decided to hide most locked story options from you. This makes sense since a given card could have a dozen locked stories (since it may represent something as large as a palace), but it leaves me feeling constantly lost.

Grinding in Silver Tree

So, let’s talk about the grinding in Silver Tree. There are two aspects to it: the Trust qualities, which are your main currency for advancing the story, and the random chance of receiving opportunity cards that are actually useful. In Silver Tree, you have different “decks” of cards from which you can fill your hand at a given time. First you unlock the Official Business deck, then the Secret Business deck. Some of the cards have very low changes of appearing - today, I went through five hands of Secret Business cards before getting a brand new card which finally allowed me to continue one of my story branches. The rest were all grinding, or at least, only grinding options were open to me. Three guesses as to how much I enjoyed those fifteen minutes.

Because they hide most locked options, there are a lot of cards that are useful, but aren’t useful to you right now - but you can’t know which are which. When you get stuck, and no further stories are open to you, you don’t know if your Trust qualities are too low or you just haven’t gotten any interesting cards. From my perspective, as a player, this is important because I want to know what the hell I’m supposed to do next. I don’t give a damn about having drinks with some character the first time, and I don’t give a damn the sixth time - but I’ll do it if it will move the story forward. If I’m just digging for a random chance card, I’d like to know that.

So that’s my issues with the whole Deck aspect. Now, the problems with Trust qualities. Since you don’t know how to progress the stories you’re working on, you spend 95% of your time in Silver Tree (if not more) slowly grinding up your Trust qualities. You gain 2-3 usually from most opportunities. Once you hit a certain threshold, usually between 10 and 20 (possibly requiring the trust of two characters to be in that range), you’ll unlock some new thing (somewhere, but hey, you’ll find the right card eventually). Here’s what happens when you accidentally reach the threshold that allows you to do something interesting:

“You are having weird dreams (unlocked by Trusted by the Khan 10, Trusted by the Princess 15)”

“Blah blah blah text of you having a dream, nothing else happens, no character interactions with Khan or Princess”

“Your Trusted by the Princes quality decreased by 10, your insert story branch went up by 1, got some Secrets”

Riddle me this, Failbetter: why did the Princess go from complete trust in me to barely tolerating me - when there was absolutely no interaction with her in the story text? Literally, this story card says “you have a dream, now your friend thinks you’re weird”. Perhaps the Princess is psychic and could tell that I’d had a weird dream? Or perhaps this is just a really bad design decision that makes the experience of playing Silver Tree continually frustrating.

Somehow, the second one seems more plausible to me. So that’s why I’m quitting Silver Tree and mourning the sunk costs of my Kickstarter backing. For their sake, I hope Failbetter’s other StoryNexus games don’t suffer from the same problems.