Instead, TYOV uses an approach in which the player, prompted by words and phrases from the game rules, writes a journal describing the life of a vampire.

As RPG historian Stu Horvath wrote, "Experiences are single evocative sentences that, when collected, describes one moment, event, object, or person of importance.

After a Kickstarter campaign crowdsourced enough money,[1][5] a hardcover edition was published by Petit Guignol that Stu Horvath describes as looking like "a Mysterious Old Book with a leather spine, marbled end papers, and evocative collages of ephemera inside.

"[2] In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, RPG historian Stu Horvath commented, "Forgetting is the central torture of the game.

Horvath did point out that "The prompts are sometimes untidy, like real-life, leading to momentary fancies and puzzling dead ends that never yield resolutions."