Reviews by MathBrush

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!

This game is the third in the Infinity Saga.

One of the biggest differences between the Choice of Games games and the Hosted Games games I've played is that, due to CoG house style, most official games are pretty well-rounded, being roughly equal in the way they treat stats, narrative, romance, and plot. Sometimes they struggle in all 4, sometimes they are fantastic in all 4, but due to testing and editor help it's generally a complete, relatively uniform package.

Hosted games that I've played tend to be very strong or completely focused on one area while ignoring or struggling with others. Wayhaven and Soul Stone War are hyper-focused on romance. Hero or Villain: Genesis is maximized with respect to stats. The Aegis Saga is all plot. This isn't bad; if I want to play, say, a simulator game, War for the West or the Magincia series can really satisfy that.

To this point, the only games that seemed really well-rounded in the official CoG way were the Fallen Hero games. But now this game, Lords of Infinity, is another one in that category. The first two games in the Infinity Series were very war-focused with little romance and only a few characters.

This game expands that world. I saw that some were dismayed that it's no longer purely a fighting/army game. And that's true; but at 1,600,000 words and with 1/4 of the chapters dealing with fighting, it essentially contains an entire war game.

This game branches very heavily, so I can only offer an insight into what I played. After war ended in book 2, I had the choice to retire to my estate or spend time with political maneuvering in the capital.

I chose the estate option, and promptly found that I had huge debts and fairly bad stats (I've heard the pre-made characters are OP, so I might do that instead next time). But I buckled down, courted a neighboring noblewoman's daughter who was my long-time betrothed, improved my village, dealt with bandits, and struggled against political unrest.

Later, combat and battle occur once more. As the game series progresses, we've moved from a frontline soldier with musket and sabre to a strategic commander. We now deal with some of the highest levels of military strategy.

There are multiple clubs you can join and sides you can take. After a while, I decided to use a guide. I had heard people say this series is stat intensive and hard, but I didn't think the last two games were that bad. This game had me restarting many chapters and referring to guides a lot. I found it fun.

Giant games like this do feel overwhelming at times. While they sell very well and are obviously great, I don't feel too bad about authors releasing multiple smaller games instead. But the market will do what it will do.

Very balanced overall, and now I understand many more memes from the Hosted Games subreddit. I've wondered what a 'Wulframite' was for a long time (I thought it was related to Book 1 Duke of Wulfram, and was so confused when he was written out of the book).

The depth, replayability, and difficulty of this game make it a good choice for people who want to rack up a lot of hours of playtime.

This game takes the structure of the first Open Sorcery and fits into a Christmas theme.

Like the first game, you are a sentient fire spirit that is also part computer program. It follows the 'canon' ending of the first game where you save everyone. In this game you find spirits by identifying their 'matter' and 'motive'. There are a lot more nice spirits in this game (although I did find out that I murdered a potential nice pet in the first game. Oops!)

The biggest new addition is that each dream is its own playable game with a variety of puzzles. They can be pretty hard, but you get multiple attempts. An optimal playthrough of the game is very hard, requiring a guide or lots of attempts. A fun but okay playthrough is pretty easy.

I was a little torn on this game. I love Christmas and it was fun seeing a sincere appreciation of it, especially through a new lens. On the other hand, part of my love for Open Sorcery is for the sense of growth and development and newness, and progression, and this game had less of that. It's like the difference between Season 1 of a show and season 4 or 5 where they're really established.

I did love the gnomes in this, very fun. And the emphasis on us learning how to give gifts. For its small price, I'd definitely say it's worth it; while it's not as fun to me as the original, it is still more fun that most games.

This is another Hosted Game that goes completely off the beaten track with its own mindset. So, another caveat here that while it's not what I was seeking when I started playing Hosted Games, I believe it achieves its goals well of providing a progressive strategic gambling experience.

You enter a casino with 5 floors, and are given some tokens. Each floor becomes progressively more strategic.

Floor 1 is purely random, with games like roulette or lotteries. Higher floors include things from Blackjack to poker all the way to a variant of Risk.

I get easily addicted to things (and so do my family) so I generally do my best not to enjoy gambling, so I was at odds with the game's desire to be entertaining to me. Instead, I tried to maximize my success.

The game is like a reverse casino, because you have an inherent luck trait that gives you an edge over the house. Once I realized that, it was easy to get past the first few floors. The reason casinos work so well is that the law of large numbers says that the longer people play, the closer their winning average is to the theoretical average. And every casino game is designed so that the house, on average, wins. That's why high rollers get so many perks; the longer they stay in the casino, the more likely they are to lose it all.

In this game, you have the edge. So, for instance, I can just go to roulette and pick any bet and blindly play over and over again until it gets high enough, then increase the bet and repeat. The standard deviation isn't 0, so you can run out of money, but there's a bank with infinite loan amounts with no interest, just repaying.

Blackjack was easier since I learned how to deal it for a fake school casino event. Poker became a little harder; it's 7 card poker (2 in your hand, 5 on the table) and you can pick the best hand of 5 cards, so flushes almost always won.

Commander, on 4th floor, is the one that really got me. I wanted to rush through since I had been playing an hour longer than I had planned to, and it has a system where you have to guarantee you know whether a certain hand will win or lose, as well as winning 3 out of 5 hands each round. I eventually realized a way to guarantee I'd know.

Each floor has minimal story, with an option or two to get a little text. I did like the building up of the story over time, and the shape of the plot arc is solid.

There are essentially no advantages to the text format here; seeing the cards would have helped a lot. I realize that the graphical gambling game market is already heavily saturated, but if you take an overly common game format and remove helpful features, it doesn't bring extreme joy. IF often thrives when it does what graphics can't or allows much more content than the artists of a graphical game could be paid to create (and that is achieved here in the narrative portions, just not the rest).

The progression worked well for me, although like I said commander was pretty hard for me. I don't think that the author could have done better with the goal in mind (to make a text-only progressive gambling casino with a focus on games and a de-emphasis on narrative).

This is the series I didn't know I needed. I never was a big 'military' guy outside of a book I read as a kid called "Arms and Armor" that had pictures of English, well, arms and armor throughout history; I used to use it to look up what weapons in D&D manuals and David Eddings books looked like (like Lochaber Axes).

But I always thought things like rank and chain of command were interesting. One of my closer coworkers is a marine veteran and talks about things in the military a lot, and my ex-wife's grandfather was a lieutenant colonel when he died, which I found out is what most officers retire at.

This game really helped explain everything a lot. Now I know that doesn't sound like a resounding endorsement, but one thing I like about really peak media is how it teaches you something about the world or makes you think that it's teaching you about something (a non-real example would be like Mistborn's system; a more realistic example would be Moby Dick, which I enjoy quite a bit). This game made me feel like I really was an officer, climbing up the ranks.

It is a continuation of the last game in the series. You engage in a series of serious battles, and can gain temporary authority even up to lieutenant colonel. There are two main branches, and competent women make a significant appearance (unfortunately, my character, while interested in the spy woman, failed to make a good impression on her, to the point that she hated me).

I was dismayed to import my character from the first game only to be essentially told "Your character will fail. Make a new one." I appreciated the warning though. And it's not wrong; I had made an uncharismatic, boneheaded soldier who mastered individual warfare.

Once again I died at the end; once again I didn't mind due to the save and the realistic circumstances (many battles are lost due to random chance or poor decisions).

I'm looking forward to the next game. I heard the fourth game is on ice, and read the authors's Jan 2025 post about it, which puts a lot of things into more clear context. I definitely wish him the best!

The art for this series has been fun so far as well.

I really liked the writing in this game. You play as a soldier in a time of sabres and muskets in a fantasy world that only has light changes from our own (in this game, the only different was some sensing abilities and magical fire).

I'm posting these reviews on IFDB and the Choice of Games forums simultaneously, and I was really shocked when I came to IFDB and saw the most common rating for this game was 3 stars. I thought it was great! I think the interactivity might have been what turned people off; while there is significant, signalled branching, there are also long chunks of 'next page'. I don't mind that nearly as much when the story is solid, as it is here.

This games serves a specific niche. You are genderlocked male and war, training, and comrades are the main focus. There is no romance that I saw, although the relationship with the two main male NPCs can definitely be coded as yaoi-esque (using that term rather than mlm because it really reminds me of manga ships that my students really like, like Gon/Killua, Hinata/Kageyama or Deku/Bakugo where there's nothing canon but you can infer tension). I interpreted the relationships as friendship, doing my best to be a buddy to the grim and glum illegitimate nobleman I was rooming with.

You choose your overall stats fairly early on, with some chances to adjust them here or there. Time and money are perhaps even more important as stats; I chose to spend money on lodgings for my soldiers.

I died once, but the chapter save helped. I played the entire time as a combat maniac just wanting to bash everything.

My dad growing up used to spend a lot of time on wargames, buying those old tabletop hex wargames that were largely replaced by computer games such as Fantasy General and Panzer general, which he also played. He also liked (he's still alive, just not into this stuff as much) civil war stuff. I'd watch the shows with him and play the games, this really gives me that vibe. Also reminds me of war books like All Quiet on the Western Front. Very excited to read the rest of the series.

This game is one of the smaller Hosted Games. It contains a full story and a systematic scoring system, and if someone I knew personally told me they had made it, I'd be proud of them for finishing an interesting story.

As I've been reviewing all hosted games, it inevitably falls into some comparisons, and I'd have to say it is on the weaker end of the scale for my personal tastes.

It riffs on the Wizard of Oz books, and includes characters like Ozma. You are a young person (a wannabe witch or wizard) and its your quest to ask Glinda to make you a real witch or wizard.

You travel through Oz, running into familiar faces and deciding to either do good (for which you get goodness points) or wickedness (for which you get wicked points).

It looks at first like there's a lot of branching, but in most scenarios that aren't good vs wicked, only one option will be 'real' while the others send you back to the choice until you pick the right one.

The author does seem to have a big love for different parts of the Oz series, including a lot of scenes with the powder that makes things come alive.

There were some noticeable typos every few pages. Overall, while this feels like a labor of love, I didn't have quite as much fun as I could have due to the lack of substantial choices or character arcs (except for gaining wizard merch, that part was fun).

This is a huge Choice of Games game with a lot of branching.

To me this feels like pure TTRPG. You are an orc, and there are 4 or more stages of your life. (This game branches a ton, so I'll share what happened in my experience and mention others' later).

I started as a baby, and decided to have pure violence throughout my life. By attacking and assaulting other babies, I became a proud young orc.

As a young orc, I gained a 'hub' and the option to do different things like train to be a warrior or a shaman. My hub gained in options as I became a young adult and then a mature adult.

Hub options include getting tattoos, buying magic items, training, meeting with camp visitors, or, the most expansive, going adventuring, which results in a lot of D&D style quests. And D&D/Pathfinder was the big feel for me here, with halflings, elves, dark elves, humans, orcs, goblins, a lich, zombies, a one-eyed orc god. The only unusual thing was a mind-controlling cyclops or two.

There were also war simulators, where you have cavalry, land units, and skirmishers.

I chose violence and power almost the whole game, helping me win tons of battles and kill a lot of monsters. Then, I became king.

Suddenly I can't kill everything personally! I can kill a lot of things, but now I have to negotiate. Do I regret not being nice to the orc god before I became king? Maybe.

It's kind of like Spore, going from cell stage to individual to tribal to society.

There are a lot of chances to help others, which sometimes gives you amazing benefits and sometimes bites you in the butt (I'm looking at you, goblin entrepreneurs).

The difficulty was tuned well for me. There were many save points, and I felt powerful, but at times I had to make sacrifices.

I was worried I'd not have enough time to try all the activities, but ended up circling around and doing a lot over and over again. I didn't experience everything the game has to offer, though, as others have mentioned becoming a demon, and doing different shaman activities, or a quick ending to the game focused on gluttony.

There was no romance, which I didn't really miss (although a few NPCs you meet would make pretty good ROs.).

The writing went beyond basic or perfunctory to be interesting and fun. My life felt epic, and while there wasn't one huge plot arc, each scene was well written and there were many narrative payoffs. The character art was well done, cohesive and fit with the style of the game.

My final ending was pretty great. All in all, this is a good 'meat and potatoes' game for people who like classic fantasy RPGs, gamebooks, or power fantasies.