Reviews by MathBrush

I was given a review copy of this game.

This is one of the lower-rated Hosted Games, but I liked a lot of aspects of it. It uses an open sourced TTRPG ruleset called Blades in the Dark, which assigns a difficulty to every action and has randomized rolls to meet that difficulty. You can fail with a complication, fail, succeed with complication or succeed. Complications raise meters for bad things like dying or losing your current objective. You can pay for better results by acting out flashbacks or by saying you had the right tool all along (which takes up inventory space).

I was a little bummed that this story was presented as a vignette, with 9 short chapters that build up to a big event but don't show the aftermath. I think with different framing it could feel like a complete game; giving it the tutorial setting makes it feel less engaging.

I do like the backstory, a gothic arcane city with a school filled with magical beings, ghosts and monsters. We play as 3 characters with two additional friends. The characters make choices to navigate a tower and retrieve a signet ring for their club, preventing them from getting expelled.

The mechanics had some highlights (I liked the 'Devil's Bargain's a lot) but I often felt like they interrupted the story too often. This is contrast to the last Choicescript game I played (Falrika the Alchemist) which had all story and almost no choices/mechanics. To me, I feel like there is a bit of a war between narrative momentum and mechanical enjoyment. They can work together (when a big choice has been built up the entire game until you finally make the choice, like in Slammed during the final fight), but I felt like in this game they were treading on each other, the big narrative story beats interrupted by choices at inopportune moments.

But I had fun. Each page was fun. I would definitely read more by this author.

I was given a review copy of this game.

I am working on reviewing every Hosted Game, trying to see what makes them popular and not. I started with some of the highest rated (like Fallen Hero) and am now working on the lowest-rated.

Falrika the alchemist has a 2.5 star rating and only 5 total ratings since it came out. What's it like?

This game is 173,000 words, big to me (I generally write < 100K words) but small by Choicescript standards. However, most of those high wordcounts come from branching. Falrika has almost 0 branching. Most chapters are purely linear, with perhaps a choice or two that usually has consequences only a paragraph long.

That means that you read almost all the text in every playthrough, making this game longer to play than even some 1,000,000 word games I've played!

In it, you play as an alchemist who has opened an Atelier. You are sent quests to make items that have a list of ingredients that you can pay for or hunt. Along the way, you get vignettes of other characters having arguments or quests. Then, those characters appear, and join your party.

I was deeply confused by a lot of the worldbuilding, as there were so many implicit assumptions and unexplained phenomena. For instance, there is a level system that is publicly discussed, people are assigned to RPG classes, and Teleportation Feathers that transport you from place to place, and the items in the recipes are hyperspecific (like a 'Mug mark 539' or something) but result in items completely unrelated to what went in. Everything made so much more sense when someone pointed out that it is a fangame of the Atelier series, which has all of these aspects.

The game feels very long. I remember thinking I surely must have gone through 1/4 of the game and then I saw 'Chapter 2'. There are 20 Chapters! It is episodic in nature, so there is essentially no continuity between chapters besides characters joining your party. I did like the Law and Order fanfic chapter. The episodic nature of the game reminds me of a guy I taught creative writing to. Everyone else would try little stories each week or beginnings of sketches of characters, but this guy had an obsession with both cars and Tiny Toons. He would write out episodes of basically 'top gear but with Tiny Toon OCs' where they would travel to a town, pick out an old car, trick it out, race it, and move on. Each one was 10-30 pages of script, and he had over 200 scripts. No overall plot ever happened, and we'd read and critique it during sessions, but none of the critique really changed anything, he just really loved what he did. We begged him to further the romance between two characters, and he did make a slight change showing they liked each other.

This game reminded me of that, just 20 chapters of episodic Atelier game fanfiction by someone who clearly loves the game.

The most biting criticism I ever heard about an author was when someone said, 'He clearly has encountered humor, but doesn't know how it works'. This game feels like the author has encountered and enjoyed video game mechanics, but doesn't know what makes it fun. It constantly tracks the amount of money things cost, but you don't make choices on how to spend money and it's not tracked in stats. It uses hyperspecific quest items you have to get for alchemy, but you have no choice (except in super-rare instances) on what order to get them in or whether you choose to buy them or get them yourself. It offers choices occasionally, as if aware that a game should have them, but makes them completely blind, random choices, like 'Go left or Go right'. It has relationship bars to track stats, but they start at 1% and only go up to 7% or 9% by the end of the game, and they don't seem to have any impact on your choices (you can pick one of out of 4 people to romance, but that seems to come down to a single choice at the end).

All characters have similar voices. Everyone is sassy and makes quips, with most of the humor coming from being random. The author often stops the game to make long statements about social conditions, including social media bullying and several-page-long essays about how parents shouldn't be strict towards their kids. Monsters will do this, with giant slavering dragons bursting out of the ground to stop and say things like, 'Oh, you think you are so good! Self-righteous people make me sick. You probably negatively affect others with your down attitudes!' (not actual text, just the feel of it). On the other hand, it's implied that the setting is low-tech, with the first fast-food restaurant in history being opened (themed on the one in Pompeii).

There doesn't seem to be much logical connection between what characters can do and the way the world works. Sometimes they use teleportation feathers for instant travel, and sometimes they trek over a long time. They invent an instant slimming potion but add 'only use it in addition to diet and exercise!' and have to get it FDA approved and a stamp on it that says 'Not approved for medical use'. What makes it magic? You could just drink water and include diet and exercise and it would make you lose weight. I just feel that the implications of a magical society aren't integrated at all.

The positives of the game are that the length lets you get very familiar with the characters by the end. A couple of the later episodes were interesting, with the gang shootout being the best, I think.

The author states that this was an attempt to put a VN in novel form, and that that explains the long sections of non-interactivity and the short, choppy writing style. I've played several visual novels that I've enjoyed that have quite a bit of real interactivity (besides famous ones, I like the French indie VN La Faille), so I feel like saying it's VN style doesn't necessarily lead to no choices. And the short and choppy text is usually used to to a VN's small text window. Here, with a whole text screen open, I feel like it would lend itself better to larger paragraphs with full line breaks.

Overall, I think that either a more coherent plotline with rising stakes or including the hinted-at mechanics like money and letting you buy things would have significantly improved this game's reception. Several people have stated on reddit that it's not that bad, so people like a lot of aspects of it. It could just be tweaked.

This is the second game in the Fallen Hero series. I'll give a brief, spoiler-free description first, and then dive more into spoilers.

This game has significant branching, so my playthrough may have been very different from yours.

The first game in the series set you up as the former hero Sidestep, a telepath who used to use that ability to detect incoming attacks and 'sidestep' them, but is now (for unknown reasons that are revealed over both games) a villain who uses telepathy to control and manipulate others, including the body of a coma patient that you use as a decoy. Your old hero friends don't know the truth about you, leading to some crucial and stressful decisions when interacting with them.

The first game leads up to your villain debut, while the second one deals with the expansion of your power and the progress towards your ultimate goals. While the first has limited romantic options, the second has numerous options, including villains and heroes, old friends and old enemies, etc.

Okay, into the spoiler territory/my opinion territory.

While I recognized the high quality of the first game, it didn't resonate strongly with me. I generally like upbeat media or 'light conquers darkness despite suffering' media (which is most media). I was never interested in grimdark or villain-focused stories like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. Fortunately, Rebirth (the first game) had enough personalization options that I could be someone that fits my model more (not a full hero, but not a killer of innocents, for instance).

This game, retribution, resonated with me much more, because what we find here is someone that deeply hates themself, that considers themself a fraud, an impostor, and is terrified of friends and others finding out. In some paths, Retribution can barely stand to look at themselves in the mirror.

I have major depression, which I have some support systems in place for, and I also tend to be my harshest critic, so this resonated really well with me. 'Oh, I'm pulling away from Ortega because if she knew what I was really like on the inside she would hate me and it would hurt her and I could never make her happy? Just like real life!' So instead of keeping the game character at a distance and treating it like watching a show, I instead immersed myself in the character and thought of it as therapy (which is easy, considering you go to therapy).

The puppet character is also a brilliant choice for an IF game. I may have said this in my review for the last game, but it makes it a lot easier to identify with the MC for any player, because we, the player, are playing a game as someone else and messing around with romantic options and ethical decisions with few consequences since our character isn't us. Similarly, our character has their own character/avatar that lets them explore relationships and actions safely.

I stuck with Dr. Mortum the whole time despite a fling with Lady Argent. I saw on a poll that Mortum is the least popular romantic option, but I had a great time. Romancing as the puppet and then getting closer together felt like making a throwaway reddit account that eventually becomes your main but you're stuck with a stupid username.

This game felt less strongly plot-driven and more open-worldish with significant threats (usually related to people learning about you). It's not actually open world, it just feels like there's a lot of time wandering around, talking to people, exploring, digging into things, etc.

The main plot points were great, it's like the author sets up "here's how we will manage your existence. Everything is precarious but we can barely make it through and live unless X happens." And then X happens. For me the biggest X moment was (remember I said this review had spoilers?) Ortega seeing me commit crimes. That was more terrifying to me as a player than my character getting in an accident. I know I have plot armor, but Ortega knowing about me could destroy the entire life I tried to build.

Like the last game, there is very little emphasis on failure through having too low of stats (though failure can definitely happen in a variety of other ways). That's got to be something I can incorporate into my next Choicescript game, though I'm not sure how; even seeing a great game like this up close and analyzing it, it's hard to figure out what to emulate from it, what makes it 'tick' or work so well.

One thing is for sure, it doesn't feel like there is 'one true path'. The long development time and high word count is due, I think, to the author taking different paths or character personalities and imagining what a full playthrough would look like with them at the center, so it feels like that's the 'real game'. This is in contrast to my own work and many other choicescript games, where you can, for instance, romance a side character, proclaim love for each other, and then they show up in normal game scenes acting the same as they do when you don't romance them. Retribution avoids that.

I look forward to the future games, but based on what I've seen here, it takes a lot of work to craft the different paths and it could easily be a decade or more before the series finishes. But that's fine; once it's done it's done forever.

I was provided a review copy of this game.

This is one of the most popular Hosted Games of all time, and, by extension, one of the most popular Choicescript games of all time. On the Choice of Games subreddit, it's a running joke that people will sincerely recommend Fallen Hero for literally every possible recommendation request that gets posted. Want to play a game with an older love interest? Fallen Hero. Experiencing meaningful gender transition during a game? Fallen Hero. Play as a villain? Fallen Hero.

So it's difficult approaching the game objectively, after hearing it built up so much (and also not having, at the time of this review, played the second game). But I can certainly say that if I had found it with no prior warning, I'd regard it as one of the best Choicescript games out there.

In this game, you play as a villain who was once the telepathic hero Sidestep. Due to a traumatic event in your past, played out in small flashbacks throughout the game, you have decided to go full villain and commit terrorist attacks in service of your true goal. Things get rough when the heroes that haunt your memories start crossing your path in real life.

Complicating things, you have a second body, a comatose individual that you pilot telepathically. You are boring; your other body is exciting. You try to hide; your other body tries to stand out. You can meet people in this other body. You can romance people in the other body.

This is another facet of the game, which is that it allows truly villainous acts. But, since the game hides your true purpose, it allows you to imagine any justification for those acts. I was on board with almost everything my hero was doing until I was given the option to just straight-up murder innocent bystanders; I can't imagine any background that would justify that. The issue of deceiving others into romantic relationships with a fake body is also addressed. We can also manipulate people telepathically, and commit a whole assortment of crimes that are more common in fiction (theft, assault, embezzlement, violating OSHA, etc.)

I started playing the Hosted Games to see the contrast between them and the commissioned Choice of Games line. One thing that really stood out (and this was true for Wayhaven as well) is the lack of the classic CoG lineup of 4+ powers that are used in different encounters. Choice of Games style is to have a variety of attributes, including skills that go up and opposed personality attributes that go back and forth. A lot of CoG games (including both I worked on) tend to use these powers heavily, with a large number of encounters relying on you choosing your best 2-3 powers and using them each time. The best CoG games mix this up a lot more, adding unique flavors to each element (I loved how Choice of Magics gave a curse to each power), but I've struggled as an author on how to mix it up.

In this game, we only have 2 real 'power bars', and a small number of opposed stats. The vast majority of choices are just 'mixing it up', which in this case looks like strategizing and then carrying out a plan. Often there are just binary choices or 3 choices. The most common choices are to be risky or to be safe, or to affect a romantic interest (getting closer or pulling away). There are also moral choices like trolley problems (do you possess an innocent bystander to keep yourself safe?) and style choices (like the design of your villain outfit).

Perhaps the biggest positive aspect of the game as compared to the lowest-rated Choice of Games games is that there is almost no messaging of 'you, the player, messed up and failed'. Things definitely go wrong in this game, but it's usually due to outside circumstances. Other people's failures. You can make wrong choices; on one playthrough, I stole an item without a hitch and got an achievement; in another, I got critically and barely managed to scrape by and got an achievement. The achievements are part of that good design; you may have made risky or bad choices, but the game frames it as a cool thing that you did. And that's throughout the game. Compare this to my own game In the Service of Mrs Claus, where most choices, if you pick an option you're not good at, have failure text that makes it clear that you, the player, are at fault here. That failure text doesn't reward gameplay. Fallen Hero: Rebirth, on the other hand, doesn't divide the game into pass/fail; it divides into one version of a good story vs another version of a good story.

To be clear, I'm not saying that it's better than all official Choice of Games titles. It definitely ranks highly with them; but there are several high quality official games that share in some of the same qualities as this one. Here are some recommendations:

-For people who liked the edginess, ability to be a jerk, and darker/mature tone, Werewolf: The Apocalypse -- Book of Hungry Names would be a good choice. It has a very dark tone, with the ability to do things of dubious moral quality, and with heavy violence and a lot of relationships. While completely unrelated, the other Werewolves triology has similar good attributes.
-This game has a really strong central storyline that elevates the overall game quality, and which has the nature of a gritty hero's quest. Choice of Rebels, Vtm: Night Road, and Champion of the Gods have some similarly excellent storylines.
-This game lets you be a strong villainous character. The games Grand Academy For Future Villains (much less dark and more humorous) and Choice of Robots (allows you to be pretty ruthless) have good villain paths.
-For games that handle failure with grace and fun, I really enjoy both Creatures Such as We (which actually doesn't track stats at all) and Mask of the Plague Doctor (I loved the ending I got which would have been just a death/failure in other games but gave me a lengthy epilogue instead).

There are several other great games I didn't mention, but that's because they're good in different ways than Fallen Hero (for instance, Creme de la Creme has a huge selection of romantic interests, while Fallen Hero only has 2. They're great ones, but the focus is different).

Does the game live up to its reputation? Certainly. The story was gripping, the mechanics were seamless, and I look forward to the second book, which I've heard is even better.

I played this game as it was one of the least-rated games in the Short Games showcase.

It's a visual novel about a girl who meets a witch who's broken her broom. The pictures are drawn with bold colors and depict colorful characters.

The story is pretty simple; you walk around town viewing halloween decorations and trying to find a new branch for the witch's broom, and you intermittently get binary choices on how to treat people. While the game was short and its branching simple, I enjoyed the decisions, had to think hard about them, and experienced real consequences.

I found this piece charming, and enjoyed playing it.

This was the least-played Petite Mort game on my list. I wonder if people might have been off-put by thinking the cover art is AI, but the credits link to the different components it was built out of (some pixabay resources), so it’s legit.

This is a pretty brief Choicescript game. Most popular choicescript games boast of their vast length, so it’s a difficult medium to do an Ectocomp game in. Here the author handles that by reducing branching in the early parts and replacing it with player reactions, leaving stronger branching for the end (unless I misread that; it’s just the impression I got).

The story is based on Irish folklore. Late at night, you find a strange feathered cap near the ocean, of the type that your family used to tell you was worn by fairies. Keeping it, you begin to find strange occurrences around your house. It kind of made me think of Tailypo, but more like ‘what if Tailypo was hot?’

Overall, it was fun. I didn’t find any bugs, and I’ve always loved Gaelic, so seeing it in the game was a bonus.

This parser game takes you to a mountain town in Europe where you have to foil an evil villain. You'll explore a casino, tunnels, hotel and lair, have a car chase, use gadgets, and commit sabotage.

I started this a few times and stopped each time. The game is really open early on and the parser isn't 100% responsive so it was hard to know if I was on a wild goose chase or if I was close to figuring out the right thing.

I ended up trying a third time and followed the hints file pretty much exclusively. There were a lot of clever things in there that I probably wouldn't have thought of on my own.

The game leans heavy into genre stereotypes but it feels like it comes from a place of love, making for a generally enjoyable parody.

I was having a mental mini-crisis before playing this game. I had found that I hadn't been interested in playing IF as much in the last week, and wondered if I just wasn't enjoying the field as much as a whole or just the individual games I had been playing.

I sorted IFDB by latest publication to see what interesting games were newest and to see if there was any pattern. I was surprised to see a game had been released less than an hour ago, and by Jacqueline Ashwell. I've liked several of her games before, like the Fire Tower and her Fingertips game, but she hadn't released anything this decade.

But no, it was a new game. Booting it up, I thought, 'okay, this is the kind of IF I like. It's the kind of well-implemented strongly voiced style that was really prominent in the 00's.

I was slightly dismayed to see that the game invited you to follow specific actions in real life. I haven't really engaged will with games like that in the past. I didn't, I'm afraid, draw sigils on my arm when playing With Those We Love Alive and I didn't relate to the self-help in a recent IFComp game designed to help with heartbreak.

So I did skip a step or two in the instructions (I live in a one-bedroom apartment with my son and there's not a lot of space for turning off lights or shutting out sound), but I followed the journaling part. It was really therapeutic; I realized that I had had a huge number of positive and great things happen to me this year, and that the bad things that happened I could be proactive about next year (like getting proactive car maintenance). So I found that very satisfying.

This was a good interaction and restored my faith in IF and helped me decide my next move in IF (I was debating whether to release my new game I'm working on into IFComp next year, meaning I wouldn't be able to help out that year, or in a different competition, but I've realized I enjoy the helping out aspect a lot, so I'll release it separately).

Garry Francis has a longstanding series of polished, relatively 'meaty' parser games with traditional puzzles and a variety of settings.

This outing isn't up to his usual standard of excellence. It has a very small map, with no 'special' room descriptions for items, so most rooms end up with default listings like 'there is a lamp post here' or 'In the fountain you can see water' (not taken directly from the game, but similar). I found myself fighting the parser for basic interactions. For example, with the monkey, (Spoiler - click to show)it suggested giving a donation. I tried GIVE DONATION. That wasn't understood. I looked in my inventory and found cash. I tried PAY CASH. It needed a second noun. I tried PAY CASH TO MAN and PAY MONKEY. Both weren't undrestood. I tried TAKE CASH. I was unable to do so. I tried PUT CASH IN CUP. It said, 'But you are not holding the contents.' I later realized that there was a separate source of cash I needed to find. There weren't really any puzzles beyond (Spoiler - click to show)finding the coin, which is okay, but that's usually a highlight of Garry's games.

I'd usually say at this point that at least the setting was charming, but each room is given a minimal description, as are the vendors, and there is little emotional exchange between us and our three-year old child. My character felt detached, irritated.

I can say though that this out of the norm for Garry, who usually has very solid games, like The Mystery of Winchester High or Search for the Lost Ark.

This PunyComp game has you, a person with extremely good hearing, wandering around town in an attempt to stop a witch later on.

The game has a compact map with relatively few items per location. It has the traditional parser pattern of 'find either a solution looking for a problem or a problem looking for a solution and bring them together'.

It has amusing parts. My early death at the hands of my eventual nemesis was funny, and the response to my first UNDO was very funny.

There are a bunch of side plotlines which are quickly introduced and then quickly resolved. The fog and the tree in the graveyard, the doghouse, Mrs Green. The fact that the (ending spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)actual witch was exactly who we thought she should be. Every thing in the game is smoothly implemented and the little story bits work, I just wish it was more of a coherent whole. (Spoiler - click to show)What connection is there between the witch, the priest, and the graveyard?

I appreciated the customized responses to actions and the smoothness of many of the puzzles; the mechanics of the game were a pleasure to play.

There's a time limit which is clearly stated early on. It is very generous.