Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

In order for parody to work, it has to be salient criticism: it needs to articulate and illuminate a problem with its subject.

I haven't ever played Guitar Hero - I'm not a console gamer, timed pattern-matching isn't a mechanic that appeals to me very strongly, guitar-driven rock music isn't high among my musical preferences - so I don't have much invested here, but I know that it's a timed pattern-matching game about music. Champion of Guitars demonstrates that if you remove the timing and the music from this formula by making it a turn-based text game, and make no attempt to replace those features with any of the strengths of that medium, it becomes trivial and boring. This is kind of like saying that Adventure is boring if you take out the puzzles, navigation and room descriptions. It's a feeble argument.

Of course, Champion of Guitars is kind of a tedious game - that's the point. But if you're going to waste anybody's time with a crappy game, your point had better be a good one. Parody works best when it wants to understand its subject, when its mockery gets to the heart of something important. When it demonstrates a wilful ignorance, a refusal to try and understand what's going on, it becomes nothing more than a loud, sneering expression of dislike.

Choice of the Deathless has the most richly-developed, distinctive, ambitiously-written world of any Choice of Games work I've played to date. Its setting has previously been explored in two static novels by the same author, and it shows: the world feels concrete and confident, able to veer well outside standard genre templates without getting bogged down in exposition. It's a world in which souls are standard currency and soul contracts are the principal focus of law; law, here, being a largely magical discipline that serves as mankind's best defence against alien demons and not a few gods, beings with massive (but circumscribed) power. This aside, law firms function more or less like their real-world versions, only with more entrails. The player is an entry-level lawyer in one such firm, saddled with student debt and eager for advancement in a cutthroat field.

The world is skilfully evoked, and I'm a sucker for world-twist fantasy driven by venal sins and human frailty. Like Emily, I found that it perhaps evoked an intensely high-pressure career a little too well; I broke up my play into multiple sessions, because playing this in a single sitting would have been a bit much.

Structurally, it closely follows the standard CoG pattern: you follow the promising career of a talented PC of user-determined gender and sexuality, leaping months or years to keep the narrative focus on Critical Life Decisions. Choices that you make shape character stats, and in general it's a good idea to play to your character's strengths. Romance or rivalry may be established with various NPCs.

Deathless reminded me to some extent of the board game Arkham Horror. Arkham is designed to give the player a constant impression of being really, really screwed - but in fact, with some light strategy and planning it's not all that hard to succeed. Rhetorically, Deathless implied that my character would have to make major sacrifices, but by the end it seemed as though I was doing pretty well on all fronts: my character had resounding career success, was well-liked by every tracked character and maintaining amicable romance with one, had heroically saved the day several times, hadn't suffered any great loss or had to compromise any principles close to his heart. The student-debt mechanic seems to be mostly a rhetorical flourish, intended to make the player feel as though they're making bad decisions regardless of what they do.

Deathless attempts a bit of narrative framing, with shades of triangle-of-identities shenanigans. To me, this felt like a lot of setup for something that, ultimately, ended up falling a little flat. (Spoiler - click to show)At the climactic moment, fighting in the demon realm, the antagonist shatters the PC's very being into pieces; the entire story up to this point is a process of putting the pieces back together, of reconstructing an identity. This was meant to feel, I think, like a moment of existentialist triumph of the will, of transformative power derived from defining and asserting one's identity. It's not intended to be just about overcoming this one attack: at the climax of a story that's about being a beleaguered cog in a vast and threatening system, the idea is meant to be that the protagonist has developed and retained a strong sense of self that surpasses their functionary role, an identity that is in itself power. The hero creates their own rescue by understanding who they are and what truly matters to them.

So it's clear that the author has been thinking about the thematic implications of the game structure, of the way that the CoG template is all about character-defining choices. But in the event I think that the climax fell a little flat, because it doesn't make sense unless the character is able to come across as a strongly-defined individual - something that's very hard to accomplish in a game that leaves character definition largely in the player's hands. Because, as RPG players know, there's vastly more to character definition than can be encapsulated in a form: the form is a starting point that you need to elaborate on. The player, here, is filling out a character sheet; they cannot improvise. It falls to the game to construct something on that foundation - and this is a really hard thing for a game to do to any meaningful degree. This is material that deserves a meatier protagonist.

So like most CoG stories, this does a good job of revealing a world and a trade within that world, but ends up being unsatisfactory at depicting character. This is more of a problem for Deathless because its world is not a fun genre exercise, so its hero can't really be a cheerful adventurer; and unlike (say) Fallen London, it's not an open world but a bounded story with narrative velocity, so it's less feasible for the hero to work as a Virgil, a backgrounded guide to a strange world.

My dim recollection is that The Shamutanti Hills was one of the first CYOAs I ever played, and the first game I encountered that really featured the lethal combination of heroic fantasy and dice-rolling. Around the age of eleven, I ate this stuff up. I'm pretty sure that it was Shamutanti that prompted me to lay out pages and pages of horribly-designed, painfully-derivative fantasy CYOA, all written in pencil and in a hand far too small for anyone else to ever read. It was some gateway-drug shit, let me tell ya.

While the prose is solid, as literature Sorcery! doesn't have high aspirations. It's a post-Tolkienian hero's journey, heavily shaped by the school of RPG design that's all about individual, discrete encounters. There is an overarching story, but it boils down to "retrieve the immensely powerful artefact, save the world: to do this you will need to traverse most of the map." The hero is a blank, and the moral range is the familiar RPG dichotomy of "help people, or be a heartless mercenary." But within this overworked genre, it occupies a pretty specific style, with a grimy swords-and-sorcery feel.

The art from the original book has a huge influence on this: it's from a school of 1980s British fantasy art, all hippies-gone-heavy-metal, macabre and hideous, wherein everyone looks monstrous and threatening. Given how much of the contemporary reworkings of medieval fantasy sanitise and soften the era, this is kind of refreshing: it's a world of disease, deformity and desperation, where you're much more likely to catch the plague than to own a suit of shiny plate-mail. Unlike some of Jackson's gamebooks, The Shamutanti Hills is actually not a totally hostile world - allies and neutrals are by no means uncommon, if rarely straightforward - but the art style constantly hints at something nastier and more alien. (The more recent elements of the art, while capable and well-integrated, are a good deal less flavourful.) Much of the original art is finely-detailed enough that it's not really shown to best effect on a phone-sized device.

But about that hostility level: the design of the original is very much derived from a style of tabletop RPGs in which the GM is primarily an antagonist, not a guide, play is meant to be challenging. Like many of Steve Jackson's gamebooks, it actively works to instill paranoia in the player, but sometimes punishes paranoia. Enemies can be allies in disguise, or vice versa. Cues about the better decision are not to be trusted.

The combat is a big improvement from the gamebook version, which (in my faulty memory) mostly consisted of repeatedly rolling dice until someone was dead. The new mechanic is intuitive, not trivially easy, and involves some real tactical decisions. The gloss and guesswork of the magic system is far less worthwhile. Sometimes the adaptation isn't entirely smooth - you can play a male or female character, but there are certain romance-edged scenes that were clearly written with the assumption that the protagonist is male. But in other places the additions are just right, often in ways that make play less brutal - the rewind mechanic allows you to UNDO to any point along your journey, which is super-convenient.

Overall, Sorcery! is a strong and professional-feeling adaptation, and the things that prevent me from being a wholehearted fan of it are largely to do with the goals of the source material: it's a genre that I'm kind of burnt out on, and it's modeled after a style of role-playing of which I am unfond.