playingstory | The Nine Lives of Nim: Fortunes Fool

Name: The Nine Lives of Nim: Fortunes Fool
Status: Complete
Site: https://skybeargames.itch.io/fortunes-fool
Pairing: M/F
Description: A Shakespearean raising sim

This is a stat building raising sim where you play a cat spirit who has left faerie in search of your absent prince. While searching about the city of Verona, you run into a collection of interesting characters, all taken from Shakespeare.

The game is set up on a simple day decision loop. You have one month to find the prince before the door to faerie opens and you need to get back to court. Every day you can choose to do one of a couple dozen things that will boost stats or earn money, and in the evening events will happen based on who you've met during that time. Then you have the option to visit a number of locations around the city in search of your prince. On top of the stats affecting your earnings for different jobs or decisions changing your social standing, there is also a humors system, where having your humors weighted one way or another will affect the outcome of certain work. (For example, learning to fight goes better if you are in a Sanguine humor)

There are a lot of little plot lines running around beyond the main quest, though it wasn't clear exactly what triggered most of them. I think doing certain work or taking certain lessons triggered things most of the time, because there is where you will meet the majority of the characters that you end up running into in the plot lines. Increasing your stats to the right threshold also seems to be how you forward those plot lines. You can only max stats up to 100, but if you are dedicated to two or three over the course of a game you can get that easily. Inside those plot lines you do get some branching choices. And there are a various number of endings for your character, though there seems to be a big split between two major outcomes. Either you find the prince and go home, or you end up staying behind and then get an ending depending on what sort of career you ended up in. Meanwhile, the people you meet and the choices you make in their stories will end up changing their destinies from what is considered the canonical Shakespeare plots. For example, you can befriend Juliet, and if she trusts you she will ask you to make her a potion that will keep her conscious but make her seem dead. If you do this for her you will prevent the final fatal moment with Romeo from happening and the two kids will live happily ever after. If you don't engage in that plot line at some point your enchanted cat plushie assistant will mention that two kids of noble families ended up in some sort of suicide pact as an aside.

The game is short, and playable in one sitting, but it's also repetitive, as every day is basically the same set of actions. As long as you've got plot lines cooking in the evening it doesn't feel too grindy, but generally what you have to do is build your stats and wait for a story event to trigger. And if you make choices that don't synergize with each other it appears that the game can feel empty of content. My first run I ended up going through 4 or 5 plot lines and every evening at least something was going on. My second run I tried a different set of stats and felt like almost nothing was happening. The only thing you can be a little more proactive about is chasing the leader of the alley cats around the city and eventually make good friends with him, or, possibly, start a romance with him. At least that's what the game seemed to suggest was possible even though I ended up with a different ending.

I honestly haven't played that many stat building VNs, so I don't have much to compare The Nine Lives of Nim to. Even though there felt like a lot of down time at certain points I kind of liked the exploration involved in trying new jobs or learning new skills, meeting new people, visiting new places, and so on and so forth. And there are ample tracking elements to tell you what you've missed or what you might want to try for. There are dozens of story lines to pursue, and many different endings for Nim, so if you are an exploratory gamer you might find a lot to do here.