A Love Letter to Slashers – A One Page Left Review

Posted onAuthorReyes Raine

A woman in a face mask and jacket holds up a bloodied knife in one hand. The style is cartoon pop, with the blood colored bright pink rather than red. The background is yellow with the title One Page Left in the lower left corner.

One Page Left by M. Kirin is one of the first independent tabletop games I’d seen. It has sat in my “To-Be-Played” pile for years, and when Wobble offered me the honor to write reviews for his blog, I knew that this was my chance to finally crack this game out and give it a spin.

Similar to my last article reviewing Alfred Valley’s Diedream, One Page Left is a submission for the 2023 One-Page RPG Jam. But that’s the only similarity this game had with Alfred Valley’s fascinating experiment on easily memorized rules and purely mind-based roleplaying.

One Page Left takes a different turn. Where Diedream had no physical requirements, this game depends entirely on the blank page before you and how you utilize the space given.

A gridded page that looks old and weathered. Scribbles of a man in a beret, a killer with a prosthetic arm, katana and burlap sack, and imagery of mouths, tongues, and mutilation are present. black and red text is scrawled around, including the phrase SPEAK NO EVIL. A glimpse at One Page Left, a solo TTRPG.
My First Playthrough of One Page Left.

My first time playing was on a digital art program. I kept myself true to the intent, no using transform tools for extra space, no undo, no nothing. However, afterwards, I went back and played a second time, this time on a physical A5 piece of paper, just so I saw all sides this game had to offer.

Another reason I wanted to give this a shot was that this game had inspired me to make a tabletop drawing game of my own: YEARNING. However, it inspired me despite my never playing it until after YEARNING was done and released. So, I wanted to see how different this was from my own creation and if I could learn anything from it.

Design & Art Direction of One Page Left

This game has been stuck in my head primarily because of the itch.io page’s striking design. The striking neon yellow and hot pink color palette had latched itself onto my brain and refused to budge.

The typographic logo, blocky and rounded and constrained into a rectangle shape, was spectacularly executed, and the pink blood on the hero character reminded me strongly of the Japanese video game series Danganronpa’s strong pop-art anime aesthetic.

A man with light blonde and a striped shirt lays on the ground of a library, there is a bright pink blood splatter beneath him.
An example of how blood is coloured in the video game series Danganronpa.

But in contrast to the striking visuals of the itch.io page, the actual rules page is pure white with plain black text. The only stylistic flair is the logo. It’s a brilliant move, keeping the game simple and allowing Kirin to maximize the usable space and overall word count.

It also entrusts the itch.io page to do all of the heavy-lifting in sucking people in with pretty visuals to stick with the bland paper. This game would barely be half as successful had Kirin kept the itch.io page as basic and devoid of colour or visual flair as the RPG.

Though, I know plenty of games that would be very happy to prove me wrong. For example, This Person Should Not Exist by Speak the Sky.

A screenshot of the This Person Should Not Exist Itchio page, which is left at its default style, plain white, default typeface, even default link colours.
A screenshot of This Person Should Not Exist by Speak the Sky. Note the default everything. Not even a banner image.

To call the PDF bland is no insult. It serves its function well and keeps it simple stupid, a valuable lesson for those on the fence about making TTRPGs but worried they can’t because they aren’t artists or don’t know how to draw. Sometimes, you don’t need art to make a great game.

Gameplay & Mechanics in One Page Left

There are two core rules in One Page Left: DO NOT RUN OUT OF SPACE and DO NOT RUN OUT OF LUCK. If either of those things happens, it’s game over.

The set-up is that you are a victim of a serial killer. Your page is your attempt to journal your escape and document the tribulations you encounter and visualize your failing mental state. Surviving is optional.

At the end of the game, not only do you have the experience, but the paper becomes a “souvenir,” a physical world-building artifact of your character’s efforts.

A heart and eye drawn in black on a bright yellow background crossed out with pink crosses. In black is the phrase DON'T RUN OUT OF SPACE and in pink is the phrase DON'T RUN OUT OF LUCK
These two resources are what you need to look out for.

You roll a single d6 and check your results on the table. Each result has a set amount of entries; roll one number too many times, and you get that ending. For most, it’s rolling the same number five times throughout the session; for the 6, it’s rolling triple. If you run out of space on your page, that’s also an ending, same if you run out of “Luck symbols.”

Luck symbols are symbols of your own creation, you earn them through some events or by rolling your lucky number, which you choose at the start of the game.

You can spend luck to add or subtract 1 point from your dice result, which can help you survive in the long run. They can also be taken away from you via unfortunate events or even if you accidentally draw over a pre-existing prompt.

A bright yellow page with near illegible scrawls written in black and bright pink. there's anarchist symbols, some crossed out, a spiral, a drawn polaroid, and a pink box with the words IT WAS ME scrawled in it.
One of the itch.io page examples of play.

For some events, you can draw or write normally; others will ask you record in red ink, others will ask you write with your non-dominant hand, and still others even ask you write with your mouth.

I did enjoy these prompts; they added an instability to the penmanship and highlighted the character’s mental state. Shaky and discordant with my non-dominant hand, and trawling and slurred with my mouth, like they were reaching their wit’s end.

I did enjoy the fact that the game offered the choice for you to write or draw, so those less artistically confident don’t feel pressured to draw if they don’t want to.

Did I mention that this game also has its own soundtrack? There are some Halloween bangers tucked in there amongst the dread. Check it out on Spotify.

An issue I had was keeping track of how many times I’d rolled a certain dice. If you looked at my first playthrough’s page, you’d see chains of numbers in the corner; that was me counting to make sure I knew which table result I needed to read.

I also got confused on my first run about whether I needed to flip the rules page or my game page when I’d finished the initial game setup (the answer was the rules page, whoops).

Conclusion

A photo of a piece of torn notebook paper with black and red writings written all over it. There's sketches of a crucified figure, a business man, a muscled bikie with a nailgun, and some of the phrases say ALL'S FAIR PRICE, BLOOD MONEY DEBT, GOD HAVE MERCY, and PLEASE A LITTLE MORE TIME.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with One Page Left, and I am glad I finally got around to playing it. It’s both different and exactly what I expected, in a weird way, which is perfect, as it’s managed to still give me plenty of inspiration for my own projects.

I’ll definitely keep One Page Holiday in my collection for the Christmas season and would recommend this game for those who would like an artistic little exercise to get into the creative spirit.

  • Playtime: 30 minutes to an hour.
  • This Game Is: Creative, Tense & Engaging
  • Final Rating: An 80s Slasher on his sixth franchise reboot,

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