It's a good policy to begin any review or critique with something positive, so the first thing I'll cover is what this game does well: Create Atmosphere. (And no, I don't mean that you can take it with you on a colony ship to Mars. Don't be a smartass.)
As the author mentions many times, De Profundis' primary goal is to blur the line between our reality and that of HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. It has no rules per se, just guidelines and suggestions for recreating the mood and tone of HPL's works by trading in-character letters with other players.
This is a simple and intriguing concept that may have been conveyed more clearly with fewer words. (Can you tell we're already getting to the less positive stuff?) The tone of the writing is, and I tried to find another word for it, pretentious in the extreme; basically, the book is written as a series of letters describing one man's attempt to pen a game he saw in a dream. It does a serviceable job of demonstrating what De Profundis letters might look like, but that could have been done with a more traditional example. Instead, the entire text is cluttered with unnecessary verbiage and this makes the deceptively slim book a bit difficult to wade through. (I would have appreciated a no-nonsense summary like the one at the end of Baron Munchausen.)
Psychodrama, the style of play that forms the basis for De Profundis, is a kind of freeform, improvised storytelling. I've done a lot of role-playing, as well as a fair amount of improv comedy and storytelling, so I know how these two activities resemble and conflict with each other. In order to make a session run as the author describes, you'll need a group of people who are either experienced with improv or talented actors.
Not that De Profundis is meant as a pick-up game for your typical role-playing troupe. Far from it, in fact! The first Appendix consists of a sign-up form for Hogshead's official De Profundis Society, an international network of players. Once this group gets going, I expect it to supply countless hours of entertainment for anyone who enjoys writing, improv, and the Cthulhu Mythos.
In other words, this isn't really a role-playing game in the common sense of the term. If you like role-playing, there's no guarantee you'll like this game. If you like costume LARPs, and wish "The Game" had been a documentary, you'll probably dig De Profundis. At a cover price of $6.95, buying the game just to find out isn't much of an imposition.
Finally, I think De Profundis may have been a more solid game if it had been framed as a model for collaborative writing, rather than immersive role-playing via correspondence. Rules and tips for contributing to a shared story (rather than copious advice on how to stay in-character and "filter reality") might be useful to many, many online gamers and writers. Just witness the deep oceans of fan fiction flooding the web! Despite the book's condemnation of email as a medium for De Profundis games, initial reactions online seem to indicate that the game will end up being used for more PBeMs than anything else.
I wish there was more to say, but De Profundis really is heavy on atmosphere... and if I tried to convey that in this review, it would end up looking a lot like De Profundis itself.
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