Herzfuck

Modern (horror, occult)
Left Hand Publishing
2017
Complexity: unplayable as presented

Here’s the thing about edginess: a little bit is tolerable, a moderate amount brings back cringe-inducing memories of angsty teenage antics, a lot is just sad, and an extreme amount becomes comical—whether intentional or not. I find that things with “fuck” in their title tend to fall into the latter two categories.
Herzfuck is yet another one-page role-playing game, which puts the players in the role of… well just kinda regular folks trying to stop a cult from summoning the titular “ancient demon of sex and murder.”

Character Creation: 1/5
Players choose from one of six character types—with such edgy options as Magician, and Bum—-which provide values for the three attributes and a bonus to one skill—each attribute has three associated skills. Then roll for equipment and determine hit points.

Mechanics: 1/5
Herzfuck uses a standard d6 roll-under system, but with attributes ranging from 1–3 and characters getting a +1 bonus to one skill, success probability for anything other than that one skill is 50% or lower. Is being statistically likely to fail at almost everything edgy? Either way, you can write that off as a design choice. You know what you can’t write off as a design choice though? Not including rules for damage. To be fair, the rules do mention that “if your hit-points fall to 0, you’re dead. No discussion. Bitch.” But nothing on how much damage characters take from—or deal on—an attack. Actually nothing at all on how to determine if an attack against a player character is even successful. Maybe

Writing and Presentation: 2/5
As a game that purports itself to be “a brutal role-playing game about a nihilistic demon sex cult. Fuck yes,” Herzfuck’s writing is remarkably non-edgy—and who says “fuck yes?” “fuck yeah,” sure, lots of people say that, but “fuck yes?” There’s the occasional edgy bit tacked tacked on at the end of a paragraph, but overall it’s just a straight description of the minimal rules. You wanna be edgy, go ahead, be edgy. But don’t act like you’ve got the edgiest thing under the sun and then not deliver.

Herzfuck is another one of those things that looks like a real game until you actually read it. There is some very nice layout work, they definitely put in that little bit of extra effort to make things look nice. Coherent color scheme, easily-identifiable sections, thematically appropriate display typefaces and clipart. Although maybe some of the space taken up by pentagrams and edgy quotes could have been better used, maybe for the missing rules.

Content: 0/3 [−][−]
Pretty much none to speak of, aside from the random equipment table—which notable doesn’t include and information on what said equipment does—there’s three tables for generating a plot, like “the cult is trying to (roll) avenge (roll) all dogs (roll) because Hezfuck thinks they are beautiful.” Honestly, that’s probably the only part of the game that’s any fun.

Final Remarks
All in all, Herzfuck tied to do something it didn’t really have the room for. With a few more pages of text maybe it could have delivered the tone it seemed to be going for—and maybe complete rules too. But as is it just doesn’t deliver.
While not an intentional choice to follow it in reviews, this game does bear a strong similarity to Shriek. But somehow manages to do everything—and mind you, Shriek didn’t exactly do most things well—worse.

Score Summary
Setting: N/A, Character Creation: 1/5, Mechanics: 1/5, Writing and Presentation: 2/5, Content: 0/3
Base Points: 5
Character Creation: 1/5, Mechanics: 1/5, Presentation: 3/5
Adjustments: −3
Setting: N/A, Writing: −1, Content: −2

Overall Score 13% (2/15 Points)
Too edgy to be edgy.