Reviews by MathBrush

This is a genuinely very funny game. I laughed at a lot of parts.

I was just thinking before this how one thing I really value in a text adventure is adding some storytelling to it. I was thinking, “like a big plot arc or humor”.

Well, this game has a lot of humor. You play as a squirrel named Slappy, and the love of your life has been kidnapped! You have to head into town to save her, only you’ve lost your car keys.

I think the moment I realized this was going to be a great game was when I bemusedly tried painting the bus stop sign. I thought it was really funny that it worked. That’s when I realized that, instead of having regular puzzle solutions, everything in the game was going to be about using the items and objects in the funniest way.

The cliff and safe gags were especially funny to me. Finding the feather, I knew what to do it with it right away, and tried it on everyone, to funny results. Over and over I found a problem and later got something and thought, “Oh, I know where to use that!” which is, to me, great puzzle design. The ambient storytelling is great too, like the signs in the Carnival. Lots of care and detail are put into some of the default messages too.

I had a few hiccups with typing things in and one weird response, but no bugs to speak of. This is definitely my favorite improvmonster game so far, and I’ve added it to my IFDB list of fun comedy games.

This unique game uses the Choicescript engine for an entirely different kind of game.

There is only one chapter. You play as a grad student interested in time travel. The science here is 'soft' science, with hints of hard science but mostly just 'cool science', which I had a lot of fun with. You basically take the idea of Schroedinger's cat and make a time travel machine based on it that allows you to remember the future.

From that point on, you have access to memories of different times in your life between 18 or 19 and 50. Once you've learned about your future, you have the chance to go back and change things.

This is definitely a 'monkey's paw' scenario for the most part (but not entirely). Fixing one problem can cause two others. Some whole branches can get pruned when you realize a person or goal is just not worth it. One particular scenario involving a farm house and a redhead took about a third or more of my playtime.

I liked the ending I had (named after the game itself), and peeked at the code for some other endings. I like time travel games a lot and the final results here were fun. The only drawback I can see is that there wouldn't be a lot of variation if I wanted to go back and replay; it feels like a somewhat ironically linear non-linear path to get to any of the endings. But there is still a ton of variation. I see the author has a lot of different games; I look forward to trying them!

To adapt a copy pasta that's been around for a while:

looking for a new hosted game
ask people if its plot, simulation or OCs smirking
they don't understand
pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is plot and simulation and what is OC's smirking
they laugh and say, "it's a good game"
play game
it's OCs smirking

All 3 categories have good and bad games; there are some games with great plot or complex simulations that aren't fun to play, and some OCs smirking games that are fun.

Here's what I mean by OCs smirking: the game seems centered on getting to know the personalities of several characters. Any events or plot develpoments not involving these characters requires extensive scenes debriefing with these characters. Most major choices revolve around which characters to spend time with. For some reason, a lot of these games use the word 'smirk' or similar words (like grin) in inappropriate situations where no one in their right mind would ever smirk. This has led me to wonder if the 'OCs smirking' games stem from a common source or culture (maybe AO3?).

Games I would put in this category (including some of the bestselling of all time!) include Wayhaven, Soul Stone War, The Golden Rose, Creatures Such as We (one of my favorite games), and, now, Magikiras. I'm interested in upcoming games in my playlist that are OC smirking games, so if you have any favorites I should check out, I'll add them to my queue.

This game has some cool stuff. You are a pilot of a magical suit in a new continent raised by magic users. You can choose to be a magic user or not; I don't think there's any downside. Using magic seemed to be the best option whenever I tried it.

Characters include your partner (who has a significant plot line), a psychic, your father The Major, a quirky scientist named Edgar, and several other characters (I believe you can choose between sets of side characters; I chose to work with a tough guy named Luis and a cute shy girl Karin who was coded to like someone else).

The mech suits have surprisingly little relevance. Fight scenes are common, but are written as if you weren't wearing a suit (for instance, shadow fiends are pulling on you and you are screaming, but it just made me think of that part of Big Hero 6 where Fred is being stretched until he realizes he's in a suit and nothing is hurting him).

I reached an ending that was open ended after a plot twist, and the author said that the story would just stop there and never be continued. Others have reported getting to the second to last chapter and being told that their choices made winning impossible and they needed to start the whole game over.

There are a ton of plot details. A psychic soldier sees a vision of you finding a magical artifact. So she's transferred to your unit. But your boss doesn't tell her about the magical artifact. What's the reasoning here? Why transfer her at all if you're keeping her in the dark?

Dialogue is often stilted as well. You boss talks to your group, which is mostly young people and one older person, and the boss says:

"That's right, kids, except Balogh, who's not a kid."

Another example (this one's not bad, it just shows what I'm talking about with games using smirk in weird ways):

"We just have to wait for Altug and the others to arrive before we get things done for the rest of the day. After that, you wanna get a drink with the rest of the team?" he asks, trying to make it sound light.

You open your mouth to answer, but you turn your head to the door at the same time; it swings open just before you can answer, and you smirk to yourself just as Altug enters the briefing room.

This is a lot of complaining (I have more I haven't written, like stats being handed out pretty stingily and a reliance on code puzzles like Pride and Prejudice and Murder).

So what are the good points? Well, the game atmosphere is fun. I may be flippant towards "OCs smirking games" but they're great social simulators and help you build friendships with and internal models of the characters. I did like several characters in the game, and there is more plot in the game than in many others. I felt like my decisions actually mattered and, because I happened to chose a good spread of stats at the beginning, I only had to restart chapters a few times and felt like I was really challenged.

I've played many games far worse than Magikiras. I might even play it again. But it just solidified in my minds some patterns I've seen in games. Now that I've seen more of this genre, I can approach it with a more open mind and not complain every time I run into it. (Official Choice of Games don't really do this as much, as significant plot events are more important and are required as part of the outline submission process. The closest one I can think of is Escape from Death, and maybe Luminous Underground?)

Edit: I got some pushback on this from the Choice of Games forums: https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/mathbrush-reviewing-hosted-games-latest-magikiras/175455/138?u=brian_rushton

Pride and Prejudice and Murder

I instantly thought of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies when I saw this, so much so that when I started reading I was surprised that there were no zombies at all, until I remembered. Then I locked in.

I'll be honest, I didn't like this when I started, but I came out at the end liking it a bit better. Let me explain why.

Writing-wise, the game leans a little too heavily on familiarity with the book Pride and Prejudice. What I mean is, especially in early scenes, character interactions are often more like "Here's Catherine de Bourgh! We all know what she's like ha ha. Anyway here's Darcy. Classic Darcy." Someone with no knowledge of the books would be hard pressed to identify strong character traits of the different people involved or to develop a liking or detest for them. The original pride and prejudice used wordplay and dialogue to establish unique personalities, and this game just struggles to match the quality of one of the world's greatest books.

This is compounded by the structure of the chapters, which have huge info dump pages with very few choices. These describe every character, which is what takes a while.

But, as the game goes on, things improved in my opinion. I've often seen it with authors that the later chapters get a lot better than the first due simply to practice. That's why in my non-Choice script games, I usually write the beginning last, when I'm at my full strength. With Choicescript games go you generally either send things to an editor linearly or release them publicly linearly, so it's hard to do that.

Anyway, as the authors begin the actual mystery, pretty much all the 'original', non-Pride and Prejudice content is pretty good. I liked the description of the mystery and the setup. The last chapter was a lot of fun for me. It's like the opposite of that old saying. The old saying is "It was original and fun, but the original part wasn't fun and the fun part wasn't original." This game is the opposite of that to me: "The original part is fun, but the unoriginal parts were boring."The choice structure came down to picking between several viewpoint characters and solving on occasional riddle or clue, as well as choosing the final mystery. I've done some classification of mystery games before (I'll quote from upthread):1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This is mostly like number 1, you don't do that much detecting, it's more gathering clues and the game explains the mystery. I also believe there are multiple 'real' murderers, which, if true, is always a bit of a bummer to me, as it implies that reader had no chance of solving the mystery on their own (since the murderer is not determined to the end).

So overall this is a game that started out weak for my tastes but continually improved until the end.

Tin Star

I had heard of this game long ago. It was famous for being the first million word game, I think, for Hosted Games.

It holds up great! Plays a bit differently than most Choice of Games, has a lot in common with Magincia series but with more story. Overall I'd say it's great, up there with my highest tier of Hosted Games.

You play as someone set to be hang who is instead made a marshal and sent off (with a tin star) to Nevada. I grew up in Utah and my grandfather's family was from Elko, so it was fun to see it mentioned here (they use to joke about going to prestigious Elko University). We used to drive from Utah to Nevada every couple of years as a kid and I remember them telling me it was the loneliest highway in the US, and that if you saw anyone whose car was broken down you should stop and help because there might not be anyone else for hours (this was before cellphones).

Gameplay has interludes where you train or buy things or build. Like other resource and upgrade-style games (Magincia, Adrao's games, Night Road), there are a ton of options, from social to combat to self-aggrandizement. I liked how many small little details there were here, like going to the general store and finding books about you, or all the training dialogue having details.

In between interludes are the chapters, where something bad happens and you have to resolve it. I chose to interfere in pretty much everything. The game is 1.2 million words and it didn't feel as long as, say, Golden Rose, so I assume there are significant branches I didn't see.

I made Carraway my deputy and wife. I dealt with raiders attacking settlements, disputes between friends and family, a mining town, an army, and a lot of Uptons.

Some Choicescript games are 'here is this very specific scenario with my OCs and you'll experience the events exactly as I want you to and you can react'. This game, by contrast, lets you build your own story.

The beginning let you choose to be a doctor or lawyer among other things, or both. It was really funny to me when we had to leave something behind (I chose law firm) and one option was 'a hospital for lawyers'.

I liked the representation of my ancestors, the pioneers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (here referred to as Mormons, as was common at the time). I've seen way worse depictions (the first Sherlock Holmes book was very anti-LDS). There's a bit dodgy part hinting at some temple ceremony stuff but that wasn't too bad (members are supposed to not talk about it as a sign of respect, but all the information is online). The LDS people in this game are just another group of folks, like the native american bands or the army. In fact, they were kind of worse in real life; before the railroad came, there was a big Reformation in Utah where they especially focused on how dirty and gross everyone was, with junk in their yard and people not taking baths. This game portrays them as clean and tidy, so I feel like they're being generous. Also, there are parts here where white raiders use Native Americans as decoys to make people think they did the attacks; that's historically accurate.

I appreciated the freedom to act as I wanted. There were many opportunities to take bribes or steal. This playthrough I was honorable but not very law-keeping, shooting a lot of people rather than talking things out. But even if I didn't take the bribes having the choice made it feel more real.

Great game, I had fun playing it and feel like I can learn a lot from it.

This Hosted game is very short and quick, and wasn't really designed for the same kind of things Hosted games usually are.

It was for one of the Jay is Games Casual Design competitions (I'd heard of these competitions before because they also ran one for one-room parser games, which ended up with fun games like Dual Transform, Fragile Shells and Hoosegow).

As a game made for a relatively quick competition where the rules are 'web-playable game about friends', I think it does a great job. You pilot a starcraft with friends Fred and Linda, and most of the game is dealing with their two opinions (I saw Fred as more of a goof-ball and Linda as more level-headed, but they're nuanced).

You have been give less than a week to track down and reboot a computer on a mining asteroid. You're lucky to get this job, because you just messed up something important on the asteroid Ceres.

For a small game the author has managed to throw in a lot of neat choices. You can pick what you and both of your friends train in; you have the choice of two extra crew mates or none, there are multiple new ships you can buy. There were so many options I was worried I'd pick a wrong one and die, but it all worked out; either it's rigged to always work out or it's a gauntlet and I lucked out.

When I say short, I mean Ch. 7 for me was two pages with no choice and Ch. 8 was one page with no choice. The characters have personality and there are funny jokes, but the plot it pretty thin.

The Golden Rose

This was a really interesting one.

There’s been a poll running on r/hostedgames about games with the best prose, best MC, etc. and Golden Rose won for best prose, so I was really hyped coming into this.

You play as a mercenary exploring an underground ruin whose existence is banned by the church. There are occasional flashbacks to a time long ago when Latin was the main language (this is like an AU medieval europe). Unfortunately, the treasure you seek has been stolen, and you have to set off to find the thief, spending a lot of time in a big city with a wide cast of characters.

The main NPCs are Alessa and Hadrian, fellow mercenaries, with Hadrian a former templar and Alessa an ice queen who wields two blades and knows more than the two of you about what’s really going on.

At 1.2 million words, I expected a long game, and having won best prose, I was looking forward to things. Then I started getting a little burnt out. Let me explain.

The author takes small events and amplifies them in a big way, letting you react however you choose to them. For instance, here’s how I feel the author would depict ordering eggs:

I look at the menu. (3 paragraphs of menu description).

Choice of reacting to menu (including grinning at the menu, saying nothing, frowning)

The menu reminds me of the hard times on the roads. (4 paragraphs of remembering journeying, when food wasn’t available.).

Reacting to those road times (including smirking to myself, saying nothing, frowning, praying thanks I’m not starving now)

Saying something to Alessa or Hardian about the road times (3 paragraphs of conversation)

reacting to comment (I can flirt, or my lips can quirk, or I can frown or be silent)

I ponder the menu. As I do, I look about the room. (description of people for a page)

Choice to react to people (I can flirt with them or smirk or grunt or pray)

Someone resembles those who are chasing us. I freeze. memories of being hunted come to mind (for 4 paragraphs)

reaction (I can weep in fear, wear a hard grin, say nothing or pray)

Thinking about those chasing us makes my hand hurt (4 paragraphs of hand hurting).

reaction (wince in pain, grin through the pain, grunt in pain, pray)

end of chapter.

Chapter 7: The Waitress Appears

Now obviously I didn’t receive this as well as many readers have (the game has more ratings on the Hosted Games app than almost every Choice of Games game, so it’s obviously extraordinarily popular). I thought it must just be a hit or miss thing, and went to Steam to see if any negative reviews agreed with me that it could get tedious, but the steam reviews are wildly over the top:

The new standard. Makes every other COYA game look amateurish. The writing was fantastic.

Amazing writing. It pulls you in and just doesn’t let go. The roleplaying opportunities are great, you can really develop your character’s personality, motivations, and skills. There’s so many choices and the game doesn’t make them for you or force you into a choice like some other text based games. It’s funny, emotional, charming, and has a lot of depth

Writing, writing, writing. The prose is lyrical and textured, but never indulgent. It doesn’t waste time describing every rock and tree, but it does make you feel things—from the weight of your sword on your hip to the quiet ache in your chest when someone you care about looks at you a second too long. It’s storytelling through implication. You feel like a real person, not a stats-driven machine.

So what makes good prose? That’s completely subjective. If someone likes the prose, it’s good prose to them. For my own tastes, I like to dabble more in the fantastical and metaphorical. I like a lot of dialogue. I like high-density information.

Let’s look at Golden Rose when it wants to have a dramatic moment. I think this is good:

Before your eyes, the Golden Coast stretches from east to west. The Mediterranean Sea, undulating gently on the surface, seems almost purple in the setting sun. The air smells like salt and fresh summer evenings.

You lower your eyes and see it.

Sitting on the rocky shores of the Iberian coast, its high walls and narrow streets jutting out, rests a sprawling city. From above, you see the soaring towers of the castle and the spiked balustrade of the enormous Cathedral.

A large dock juts out of the cliffs. The wood and black stone merging together to hold countless hulking ships with high sails and golden names on their hulls. Smaller, single-masted vessels fill the rest of the space, clogged together so tightly they seem to form an ocean of their own.

Standing proudly at the center, its masts soaring high above all, a Portuguese galleon sways gently near the pier, its white, triangular sails flapping in the wind. You see the imposing red cross and feel a weight settling on your stomach.

The Holy Cross.

So, they’re here

On the southern end of the city, facing the rolling hills and the endless flatlands beyond, is the main gate. The iron door that bars the outside world from the safety within.

Tarragona.

This is good writing! This is professional writing. 90% of the IF I’ve read is worse than this. Lots of sensory details (smells, colors, sights). We get a lot of info: There is a sea (the meditarranean, with a city with high walls, a big dock with a lot of little ships and one big ship, then a big gate.

We don’t get any real information on how we feel about this (nor do we choose our reaction here, as we do in other scenes). We don’t know what emotions are at play here. The imagery exists but is not, I’d say, vivid.

For my personal tastes, I like writing that more focuses on giving us information we couldn’t otherwise deduce, or that surprises you with it’s words. It’s hard to find comparisons to Golden Rose because these games don’t focus on long, ponderous descriptions, they use quick bites and often intersperse with dialogue. For instance, the game Bogeyman by Elizabeth Smyth gets down to the details quickly:

The window is a pitifully small square of thick, warped glass. You can’t see much through the frost crystals still thawing on its outer face: a foggy morning settling over a rocky incline.

This tells so much in two sentences: it gives a sense of claustrophobia and wrongness. It tells us the season and time of day, gives the general setting. We can imagine the world with so little.

Like I said, other of my favorite authors using a lot of dialogue. BP Hennessy’s games are just scripts:

Birdland
DAN CANOE: …It’s all about respect. You have to respect the paddle. Be one with the paddle. Treat the paddle like a lover. Or, if you prefer, a close friend. Most of all, you’ve got to stay calm and centred. The paddle can sense anxiety and if you bring a nervous energy into the canoe the paddle will betray you.

(The campers stare at him blankly.)

DAN CANOE: Now. (He picks up a paddle.) Today we’re going to be practicing some basic strokes. Remember to grip the handle firmly and make calm, deliberate motions. Any questions?

(You raise your hand.)

DAN CANOE: Bridget.

This conveys so much with just a few words. We immediately get a glimpse of this man’s personality, we get a sense of the social dynamics, how everyone is feeling, our role in the social pecking order. Without any other context you can guess a lot of the game’s structure and setting and feeling from context clues here.

I also like authors that use interesting and fun word choices that take time to read and process, like Chandler Groover in Cragne Manor:

Some instinct called them to the plant, compelled them to fall in this particular arrangement. Their limbs are like letters, their slaughter grammar. Whatever language they might embody, its blasphemy could never be written. Only erased.

Now, it’s really hard to come up with writing text like this, especially to fill out 1.2 millions words, so some kind of redundancy or filler is to be expected. But Paul Wang has similar wordcounts. I like how he describes approaching a major city (much like Terragonna):

From Guns of Infinity

The Antari write poetry about these plains. They have songs, folk tales, great epics, all about the vast expanse that now surrounds you. To read or listen to such things, you would imagine that the place would be a land of unbound wonder, a place to lift the hearts of all who would walk or ride it.

Yet you feel nothing. It is merely grass upon rolling hills, good ground for light cavalry perhaps, but you feel no different surrounded by it now than you did two days before, when you were surrounded by trees.

Your column makes good progress that day, forging forward until it is too dark to do anything except set up camp.

The next morning, you spot a grey haze above the horizon before you, the sort that only comes from smoke rising in vast quantities. By midday, that haze has become a cloud, and you begin to see the low, dark shapes from which the blackest and heaviest of the smoke rises.

By mid-afternoon, the sky grows dark from the smoke, which now begins to blot out the summer sun above you. Finally, you and your men crest the top of one last ridge, and you breathe a most involuntary sigh of relief when you finally have a clear view of what is before you.

Not three or four kilometers ahead of you lies an expanse of canvas tents, staked out and arranged neatly in rows around a large pavilion. Beyond that, there is a hellish expanse of trenches, earthworks, and fighting positions, boiling over with men in the burnt-orange coats of Tierran Line Infantry…

…and not a few hundred paces beyond them, scarred, battered, scorched, but still standing proud and unbreached, are the defiant walls of Kharangia.
Just like the Golden Rose text, there is vivid imagery, but see the difference! Action,movement, suspense, emotion, lore. We can tell right away what kind of genre this is.

Anyway, my goal isn’t to convince people that Golden Rose prose is bad since you can’t objectively prove subjective things and because it’s not, in fact bad; I just don’t think it’s revolutionary or the greatest prose of all time or even of CYOA prose or even just of Hosted Games.

I think a lot of that comes down to plot. I love plot, and this game has very little. Everything is stretched out as far as possible. Exploring the docks (which is 1/4 or 1/5 of Ch. 4 alone) is 120K words, the same as Creatures Such as We, one of my favorite games of all time. We start the game chasing down a thief, at the end we find him, the middle is all looking, but there’s no content besides the looking. 1.2 million words of looking for the thief.

The choices provide a lot of customisation. Basically, choices affect your states but never really test your stats (though some past decisions are tested). In on chapter with 96 choices, only 4 or 5 or so had stat checks.

But, 16 of them allowed me to ‘smirk’ and 25 allowed me to ‘grin’; plastering a smile on your face is one of the most common options (other variants of this personality are to laugh or to ‘quirk your lips’). After having two options in a row where I could smirk at inappropriate moments, I imagined an MC that picks these options all the time just terrorizing Terragonna with their smile. I called him ‘smirky’ and sketched him and then added some other common variants

(we have ‘Pious John’, who utters prayers to the saints. ‘Frownie’ who is unhappy or unpleasant. ‘Blusher’ who does the flirty or shy moves, the OG Smirky, and ‘Grunter’, who grunts and side-eyes or says nothing the whole time).

None of these choices really do anything; the big choices are in branching the story.

So, why is a game with solid but not enrapturing text, very little plot, and choices that don’t really do much of anything so popular? (By the way on IFDB I plan on giving this game a 5/5, and would rank 9/10 in competitions. I’m 100% only pushing back because of the extraordinary claims in the Steam reviews).

My hypothesis is that people like it less as a story and more as an experience to live in, like a Sims game. At every moment, you’re being that character, which can take on some of the tropes I listed above. With thousands of words per scene, you can take your time and spend days or weeks reading and imagining yourself there; this time makes you familiar with the characters like they are your friends. With little plot, you can pick up the book at any time, even after many days, and hop right back in since there aren’t a lot of plot points to forget. The lack of stat checks mean that you can just be yourself and not worry about anything.

So for people who want fiction that can be a reflection of themselves (which is one of the whole points of CYOA) or for people who want a ‘life experience simulator’ or for people that just want a lot of material, I think this is a good game. I’d love a 240K word version that just has the parts about the latin and sculptures and the conversations with friends.

Now that I’ve been grumpy (and I know people won’t like this, I saw how people reacted to my Swamp Castle review so I’m ready for the heat), I’ll say that Beka and Billy were awesome characters. I’ve never really seen a character like Billy (I can’t remember if I named them that, but that’s my horse); he’s genuinely funny. And every scene with Beka was a delight. I also liked the ‘corrupt older man’ depictions; a couple of people in the game (notably Aurelius) felt like Judge Claude Frollo from Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Anyway, that’s my take. As someone who like information-dense genre fiction with lots of choices and some pushback-crunchiness-chance to fail, this game didn’t enchant me, but if I were the author, I wouldn’t change a single thing I complained about here. Every single thing that rubbed me the wrong way is something that other people have liked and has spurred sales. You can’t really make fiction that appeals to everyone at once, and Golden Rose has levels of sales and popularity I will likely never achieve in my lifetime, and I think the author deserves it for finding out what the audience wants and deliver it. Never Change, Ana Ventura. But if I change my viewpoint I’ll come back one day and change my review.

This game is by Adrao, whom I know from Hero or Villain. I associate this author with complex mechanics-focused games that let you try out interesting systems.

This game was both more ambitious but less polished, even unfinished, then the last one I played.

For one, it is the sequel to two unrelated games, one a fantasy game, and one a game set in modern Tokyo. You can import a character from either one of these games. The differences between the two are slight; you end up in an underground cavern with a skeleton protecting you, and you explore your base while dealing with otherworldly creatures. In the Tokyo version, I made a surface cult and there was an alien/elemental attack on Japan, while in the fantasy I didn't see a surface cult option.

There also is a way to make a new character for both, but the stories feel a bit incomplete. The Tokyo one is short but leads into the cave pretty well, while the Fantasy one just jumps from being a weak spellcaster to a very strong one.

The incompleteness isn't just inferred; there are notes throughout the work saying that the game is incomplete, mostly saying that the author might expand one storyline later. The most notable part is the epilogue, which is blank, saying the author might add one at some point to link into another game.

Gameplay itself was hard to get into the rhythm of but improved over time. I played on easy mode, having learned from past games that this author likes to provide real challenge. At first, rats ate all my stuff, so I made ghouls to stop the rats. I had a big army mining and making weapons, when a dwarf came and overwhelmed me. It turns out I needed unassigned monsters to fight random visitors. There is an attack power level based on you, your spells, and your unassigned minions. If it's higher than the enemy you win, otherwise game over.

So I started over and focused on making tons of guys. My health and will were continously depleted because my cult was making ghouls, but that gave me a big army and I found spells to replenish myself. I thought I had a strict time limit, so moved fast (the game kept saying I needed to make a portal whenever there was a lunar occurrence of some kind and I missed 3 or so before I finally made one). But it turned out I had enough time to research 2 mega-spells (Death Knight and Banish) before the end happened.

I made my army big. Too big. By the end I was riding my dracolich, summoning demon allies, fighting alongside 2000 rat zombies with my army of skeletons and zombies led by a fully armed and armored Death Knight against alien invaders. My attack power, due to my careful planning, was over 600. The alien overlord had 30.

So, I won! Using the ring of time and harvesting elementals for my ascension.

Near the end I had ran out of most story-based options and was just in a cycle of learning what I could until I ran out of useful options there, so I just cranked out studying for my big spells.

If someone wants a simulator for manipulating a necromantic army as a lich, this game works well. I just wonder why it was released with gaps in the story?

This is a small Inform game centered around adverbs, the second such game I have encountered (the other being Forever Always).

It's also designed to always look 'nice'. Typically parser transcripts don't read as a full story because the player will wander around and have lots of > symbols everywhere. Some games, like Laid off at the Synesthesia Factory and My Angle, got past that by eliminating the parser prompt symbols and making the game's error messages read like actual story, or just advancing the story no matter what you do.

This game removes the parser prompt and messages. It also writes its responses in verse.

It was a bit hard to figure out what to do at first, but typing different emotional adverbs and watching the reactions helped me get to an ending.

The story is about a woman dancing in the woods at night, weary and wanting to stop but unable to do so. More lore is spooled out as you continue.

Interesting concept, but a bit confusing.

When you think of genres with standout authors, "mouse train" may not be one that immediately comes to mind, but perhaps that's a sign that you should try more solipsistgames.

The Neo-Twiny Jam is a long-running game jam that looks for games using 500 words or less. Sometimes that helps encourage new or busy authors by giving an easier target. Other times, it encourages creativity and fun, seeing how much game you can fit into those constraints. (both can be true of course)

This game takes the 2nd path. It's brief, and has a simple premise: a mouse takes a long train ride, and other creatures join the train, whom you can try to talk to or not.

There is some tension from people's reactions, which feel pretty realistic to me. And there are a couple of different endings.

What I like is the truly lovely art for the game, especially of the creepy critters. The game itself is only a couple of minutes long, so I definitely encourage people to check it out!