We played Tunic and read Pale Fire, paired by the theme of “secrets”.
This was a great pairing — you should do it too!
Pale Fire worked really well: short and approachable, while being something we probably wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. The back-and-forth between the poem and the footnotes slowed us down a little but this worked out nicely with the length of the game. Everyone who tried finished it by our end date. We had fun discussing it every time we got together, probably the most fun of any of the books we’ve read so far.
Tunic was also a good pick for us, although it was a little harder to finish — I was only able to finish it after our end date. I loved the experience, especially the puzzles, which made me want to replay Myst. The process of slowly collecting the pages of the manual was so well crafted, and some of the reveals/solutions were literally jaw-dropping. My only critique was that the bosses were a little too soulslike for my taste, but our group was pretty split on this, and some of us loved this aspect.
It’s kind of a hard club to run: we need a book and a game that will keep enough people interested and have some conceptual overlap, and some of our members are more into books than they are games or vice versa, so plenty of potential options are ruled out by being too hard to pick up. I don’t think I’ll be able to convince the group to try ancient literature again after the difficulty of The Iliad, for example. This pairing ends up being a little weak on conceptual overlay, but the strength of each component separately more than makes up for it.