Public Access is Not What You Think It Is (A Review)

Looping forests. Creepy basements. Crawl spaces whose darkness can't be pierced by your flashlight. Wouldn't it be great to have a game that preys on your fear of the unknown? That evokes that which you most fear? This is the promise of Public Access and the results are... mixed...

I've read the game cover-to-cover, read most of the adventures, run the adventure the game talks the most about (The House of Escondido Street) and to quote a player during our debrief, "I don't think any of us liked this game, but this session was great." Public Access has some great ideas, and evokes some excellent moments. However where Brindlewood Bay is the counselor who teaches you to swim, Public Access is the counselor who throws you in the deep end and trusts that you'll figure it out. It was earnestly a fun (if frustrating) challenge for me as a GM to try to live-salvage the session from problems I was finding, smoothing the needless friction the game was injecting into the fiction. But overall, my feeling on Public Access are mixed at best, and I left the table assured in my disappointment in a game that could've been so much more...

CARVED FROM GREATNESS

To quote the game itself; "From the makers of the cozy-yet-suspenseful hit mystery game, Brindlewood Bay, Public Access promises a journey through a nostalgia-soaked world filled with eccentric characters, eerie settings, and downright terrifying dangers. Public Access takes inspiration from analog and found footage horror, as well as 1980s-90s American pop culture, creepypastas & other internet folklore, and vaporwave aesthetics. Using the innovative and collaborative mystery system popularized by Brindlewood Bay, players help shape the world of Deep Lake as they explore it, while its Powered by the Apocalypse-inspired mechanics keeps the emphasis on building an exciting narrative."

This is the promise, at least. You play a bunch of 20 somethings in 2004 who met on a forum before renting a house together in Deep Lake, your home town, in an effort to investigate TV Odyssey, an old public access channel you remember from your childhood with uncanny shows that seems to have totally disappeared. While you scrounge for Odyssey Tapes (VHS recordings of the original show), you solve other weird mysteries and supernatural happenings around town. The overarching premise feels ripped straight from 1999, though in execution it feels a lot closer to The Scooby-Doo Project.

When I'd first heard of Public Access I'd written it off, as I did Brindlewood Bay due to its "Theorize" mechanic: Essentially each mystery has no prewritten solution, but rather a bundle of clues that players then try to connect and contextualize to make a roll and see if they were right. It's a pretty neat idea that ensures the game never really stalls out, though it's one that I think is much more at home with Public Access' preying off the fear of the unknown. In fact it was Public Access' aesthetic leanings to more surrealist horror that made me realize "Oh a mystery with no prewritten solution is perfect for characters diving into mind bending cognito hazard filled mysteries isn't it?"

This mostly worked in practice, and I'm really happy to say I was wrong for writing off the Theorize mechanic and it can be a lot of fun for a table that wants the experience of collaboratively crafting a creepy capper. It is a bit clunky in practice as the roll ends up feeling mildly anti-climactic (because you not only discover that you're right, but also this success carries you into an opportunity to resolve the mystery). I think if I ran it a few more times I'd get a better feel for how to smooth this out, however I do wish there was a bit more guidance for GMs in terms of how this ought to play out and what guiding the players through it looks like.

Likewise, the game is "nostalgia-soaked" in a way that I think is clever and resonant. The game seems to push players into making maladapted burnouts who are still stuck in their childhood, desperately clinging to their nostalgia for comfort. I think the game could've leaned more into how these are characters that never grew up (negative) but overall I think the "keys" one turns (to improve rolls, thus causing a flashback) are pretty effective and part of what initially excited me so much about the game. I still have mixed feelings about The LA Riots being on the nostalgia pick-list next to the Care Bear Stare (something we only discovered when a player picked it prompting a "what??" from everyone at the table as we tried to find it), but overall I like art that is provocative so it's a big swing I can appreciate.

Character generation overall is a delight, especially the part where each player gets their starting inventory defined by the rest of the party (a highlight at our table being a character who was given a blackberry, then a nokia, then the removed landline phone from the rental house). It took us about 45 minutes to make characters, but we took our time, established details, and were eating pizza (as feels intended for this game), so despite it not being innately fast it was very satisfying. 

Mechanically filing down Apocalypse World into a universal resolution mechanic is... fine. I'm a slut for universal resolution so it worked great for me, but I do wish more moves (especially the move that lets you look for clues) had better advice on narrating a "miss." We ostensibly ended up exclusively using the universal resolution mechanic (especially for finding clues) due to one deadly effective flourish that made the whole game sing: When a player is does something risky they say what they're most afraid of will happen if they lose their nerve or fail (which we further expanded into the broader "what are you most of afraid of will happen.")

This included everything from a VCR biting a player's hand (which led to a deliciously Evil Dead slapstick scene involving another player declaring that if they failed to help them once the hand was bit, the other player's hand would get eaten, which it did) to being confronted with a long forgotten corpse. It gave the players so much control over the mood and texture and I can confirm that people are right when they say "trust your players, trust the process, it just works." It also made a lot of encounters a breeze to run as a GM - I never had to set the stakes, just feel out the vibe of when stakes need to be set then put the ball in the players' court. It's truly unlike any other GM experience I had and the reactivity was incredibly refreshing.

We also loved The Big Man, Public Access' enigmatic mascot(?), as I'd frequently quote the GM advice "The Big Man should delight the players" (and when he showed up as a result of players all turning a key to solve the mystery with a crit, they were in fact delighted). 

QUIRKS AND BLEMISHES

Now most of that is Public Access refining Brindlewood for its own flavor, honing a good idea into a razor sharp instrument of haunting horrors. But what about Public Access' original content? This, in my mind, is where the game really starts to fall apart. The Starting Character Moves are fine, certainly enough to play with. The Keys of Desolation (which, when all are turned, the character is retired) felt... off? The second to last option essentially keeps the PC around as nothing but a ghost in a way that I truly would have no idea how to run. The adventures though? They're really rough. I'd say of the 8 adventures I read, only the Deep Lake Lurker (haunted summer camp) and Xxxagrius (haunted arcade) felt meaty enough that I'd want to run them should I ever return to Public Access. Part of this is just how dull the clues can be for a game whose scaffolding relies on interpreting them.

The House on Escondido Street (a haunted house whose family disappeared without a trace 10 years ago) has 4 clues that are simply a vague item "in an unusual place" - Which let me tell you had me sweating as a GM as I tried to cherry pick the good clues (compare "A Copy of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in an unusual place" to "A family photo shows a third child" the latter of which was infinitely more specific and interesting than any other clue on the list). A favorite clue that I simply had to use on my players for how out-of-left-field it was (for which they reacted with pure confusion and dismay) read "A Candyland board featuring characters you don’t remember: the Toffee Duke, the Ravenous Sugarpig, the Licorice Beastie, the Peanut Butter Sphinx, and more." I had to add the details of "It looks like it's been thoroughly and recently played" to bring any kind of bite to it.

Bad clues are met by clunky set-ups. For example; the game says the mystery is open ended before the adventure tells the GM "The house is also utterly evil. The nature and origin of that evil is for the Latchkeys to discover, but a few things are definitely true: the house is aware of the people inside it and can read their minds; the house can manipulate the physical environment with a power that is like telekinesis; and the house can make people see things that aren’t there." - The idea that the house itself is the evil, without any means of firmly establishing this in a game where players are meant to flesh out the mystery was something I mostly abandoned behind the scenes as my players theory crafted about an extra-martial child who died young (an emergent plot that was fun to explore and hear about!) To a degree going your own path is surely within the design's intention, but it felt like I was cutting more stuff than was meaningfully being added by the adventure.

I'll also say I had a bit of difficulty figuring out where and when to bring in certain Side Characters, but this feels like it could've been easily remedied with my own prep and perhaps some visual aids to point the player towards certain options. The NPCs themselves didn't add a whole lot, but I'm confident that the NPCs in adventures like Xxxagrius would feel far more dynamic and involved.

Another thing I'm not a huge fan of is the way the game wants you to split the party. This (mostly) worked well in our one-shot where the party all explored different parts of the same house. If someone fixed the switch-box in the basement we could diegetically cut to the night-light in the kids' room eerily flickering on with another character, while yet another character watches an Odyssey Tape. Where this would've felt more clunky is if that distance had been greater, or worse (as the game recommends) the table had been split between different simultaneous mysteries. Some people seem to love this component, but when I brought it up with my players they universally agreed that they would not be interested in playing in that way.

The Odyssey Tapes themselves are remarkably flat in their writing, even as compared to the adventures. Of the 12+ Tapes both me and another player read through it's telling that we both agreed they were all fairly middling (and independently concluded that "BLAM!" was the exception to this rule). While a game can't make you feel anything, I was hoping for a little more teeth from this horror game, as opposed to most Odyssey Tapes which are largely mundane or dryly "scary" in a way that feels more like a challenge to bring the uncanny rather than an invitation to unsettle.

It's a game that asks you to follow the vibes, crafting a story together and being ready to improvise off the rails at a moment's notice - And this largely works despite these blemishes. In fact I found that the scaffolding that felt weak (like the clues) was far more disruptive than when the game gave no scaffolding at all (like "what's in the basement?" the answer is "play to find out") - I think this is heightened and exemplified by the excellent "Pain the Scene" mechanic where players are asked to bring in details about the environment (a dark crawl space, skid marks in the hardwood, a table of festering meat) through leading questions (ex "what makes you think the kids were scared to come down into the basement"). "Paint the Scenes" were electric, and earnestly I want to play more games that involve this level of room-to-room anti-canon world building. The rest of it though? It made me think of all the people who complain about games that "get in their way."

IT'S ACTUALLY PRETTY IMPORTANT THAT YOU SPOIL THE CAMPAIGN IN YOUR REVIEW

Like others in my generation who take their meals with hour-long video essays, I was initially drawn to Public Access because of a longform review by Quinns "Quest" Smith which lavishes praise on the game. While in the last 10 minutes of the review he motions at problems with the lackluster writing (both in adventures and the Odyssey Tapes), he also doesn't dig into the problems of why the campaign system for this game is so dreadfully counter to everything else this game has to offer (all for the sake of "not spoiling things[*1]). They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here presented before further comment are Public Access' 2 campaign sheets - Keep in mind this is meant to be a slow-boil spooky analog horror mystery about a small town and its mysterious cable station:

Now the manual adds some (emphasis on some) supplemental advice on each of these layers, especially the fifth one. But also ???. If the Public Access team reads this, I hope you'll forgive me if I'm being overly cruel here, but my primary reaction to this campaign was "what the fuck..." and not in a cool shock and awe way.

The 5 layers, of course, mirror the 5 stages of grief:

LAYER ONE DENIAL - "Comic book movies usually have scenes that play after the credits roll." A direct quote from the book when beginning discussion of this layer. Maybe an odd comparison, but I suppose Friday the 13th has a similar comic shlock... But also Friday the 13th seems like a whole different brand of horror than the slow boil this game seems to want to evoke... It's fine! We're sure this campaign will be good, the first half was so good and so much of this game is about trusting the mechanics and improvising. This scene works. Yes it's a bit clunky to have a large read-aloud monologue in a game so focused on the players coming up with the story, but the Big Man is there, and we are delighted, and it's all got this almost Twin Peaks atmosphere that really fits. Surely this is working.

LAYER TWO BARGAINING - The history of Degoya County (besides being dubiously insensitive) starts to raise some red flags. "Oh so we're doing like old god stuff? I guess? And a lot of this seemingly has nothing to do with a TV station?" But, you think, I can fix this. The adventures were a similarly mixed bag. Take what you like, throw out what you don't, trust the process and something beautiful will happen. This game is ever so open ended after all.

LAYER THREE ANGER - The first sting of betrayal. It's so specific, so out of nowhere, and it feels like it's adding so very little. First you're supposed to somehow make Mr. Melting Face "delightful" and "mysterious" even though we've directly and publicly tipped the hand of what he knows but also now we're doing three horseman of the apocalypse who you have to pull out from the middling Odyssey tapes??? I think if I had any of the major stars from these tapes stepping through that cave mouth it'd elicit laughs more than any kind of terror. What am I supposed to tell my players who were expecting a dark slow boil mystery? How are these "Great Hungers" adding to the analog horror? Maybe, maybe, this can be salvaged, but this is such a U-Turn from the kind of creepy tone we're building that we've entered full shlock slasher and you wish you'd known that at the start. This game is making a fool out of the GM and players alike!

LAYER FOUR DEPRESSION - It got worse. We jumped the shark. The Night of Bone Wolves asks that we pause everything to have a slapstick fight with a puppet and an as-seen-on-tv salesman. Why are we even playing this? There's no point in turning back now. I guess you'll just juxtapose from solving mysteries to literally punching the eldritch horrors that for some reason are specifically targeting the latchkeys and instead of looking for clues and building atmosphere we'll spend the session setting Home Alone traps. This is so tonally at odds. This doesn't even sound right for a slasher flick. It's not even whiplash tone-shift in a Cabin in the Woods kind of way. Nothing in CATS prepares you or the players for this, nor is it meaningfully mechanically scaffolded in a way that lets me imagine this as anything but hilarious at best if tonally deeply disappointing.

LAYER FIVE ACCEPTANCE - And here you are. Alone. Abandoned. Finally left to do what you should have done from the start; figure it out yourself. Despite the completely left-field climax, we made it to layer five and are told to draw the rest of the owl for a few sessions. It's decided that in a game of open ends, it was best to get hyper-specific in the Night of Bone Wolves, and now we've been thrown out in the cold, told to write a full mystery while we dig through the rubble.

Initially I thought I was missing something. I read and reread this and the manual a hand full of times. I even brought it to a buddy who was thrilled we were playing Public Access and was as enamored with the book's first half as Quinns seems to have been (a friend who is far more well versed in horror, and especially this brand of horror, than I am) - And watching his face contort with horror and disappointment as he read the campaign was maybe one of the most vindicating moments of my life. To quote him re; the TV Odyssey campaign sheet:

"Every decision is truly baffling. It makes me wonder if the creator has ever actually engaged with the media they claim to have inspired them. I can not stress enough how the campaign guide is the antitheses of the entire rest of the game. If you are going to run a campaign of Public Access (not recommended), do not print out the campaign guide. As the blank paper will be

1) More easily understood.

2) More interesting.

3) More useful." - Catboy House MD

Another friend soon joined in the shock-reading and had this to say:

"I really appreciated the way the DM campaign notes made me feel lost and confused. It was like I was right there with all of the players, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Very immersive -- The dm campaign guide truly instilled feelings of revulsion and horror." - Dersu

A Stranger Things fan who we were talking to lamented that this descent into action shlock mirrored the Netflix show's slow losing of the plot, but I've only watched the first season (and plan to keep it that way) and who can say what truly inspired this umm.... unexpected choice. The Night of Bone Wolves is, to me, the single biggest reason I would have absolutely zero interest in running this game as a campaign, and it is, for better or worse, something that seems very intentionally there. Sure I could go write my own campaign, but at that point I'd might as well write my own mysteries, and refine the character moves, and now I'm asking myself "what is this game even doing for me?"

The game's expansion Skinny Jeans & Summer Screams promised to be "Leaner. Meaner. Weirder. The “Skinny Jeans” ruleset tightens the base game, putting a stronger emphasis on its core themes and ideas while also centralizing the TV Odyssey mystery, refocusing the overall campaign into a more terrifying experience." - While there are some welcome mechanical changes (like being able to split the party while one person watches a TV Odyssey tape [which also feels implied in the original rules but whatever]) I was sorely disappointed that the "refocusing" of the campaign simply meant that layers progress faster and that players turn a key after each layer. Sigh. A revised version of Public Access is coming to Kickstarter and I can't say I'm confident any of my critiques here will be meaningfully remedied.

When I say "TV Odyssey is not what you think" I mean to say that this game is a romp. It's a slasher at best, and a comedy action-flick in a Spirit Halloween at worst. I think Public Access may well know what it wants to be, and is absolutely being it, but what it's being is not what many of us think when we think Creepy Pastas and Analog Horror. This is dudes with guns shooting monsters in the Back Rooms.

It's a game whose premise, set-up and even some adventures, feel like the perfect horror game, but whose quirks and campaign have utterly soured me to running it in full. Even now, I couldn't quite say what Public Access is going for, but I can definitely say it's not what I thought it would be.

[*1 : Say it with me: Great art can't be spoiled.]