Reviews by MathBrush

This game is a remake of a text game that came out before I was born, back in the early 80s.

The author has fully updated it, but it comes from a different tradition than the IF tradition I typically interact with. So in some features it's definitely an upgrade over most IFComp games, and in others it lacks features that I missed.

You play as a detective hired to break into a house and free a girl that has been taken hostage. Along the way, you'll encounter some chemistry, several animals, criminals, and some fun retro electronics.

The game's big features are its graphics, some of which are animated. It opens with a typewriter scene that spools out the backstory before jumping into a deserted town.

Other nice features are the game letting you hold down a button to see convenient names for interactable objects. The two-word parser (occasionally three-word) will block you from typing if you start entering an invalid command.

One nice part was finding an old electronic game of a sort I had recently been thinking about and talking to my son about. It was one of those retro ones that has the images literally baked into the screen and all the game does is choose which one lights up.

There are numerous achievements you got. The first time I died, I got around 12 achievements. It was pretty fun!

Other things went against the grain of what's considered common wisdom among the groups of authors of games I generally play. There's a 2-hour timer, frequent deaths, and no way to save. It doesn't recognize the command X as an abbreviation for EXAMINE (but LOOK ____ works). To fit onto an older platform, the text is sparse. I didn't end up finishing, as I had trouble with a crafting puzzle near the end where many actions result in death, and on replaying I found new deaths that set me back.

This design seems to me to be intentional; this is a commercial release, and players want things to feel substantial. By forcing replays that make you memorize a 'best path', it significantly increases playtime. The original Adventure did something similar with the time limit on the lantern. So, for someone looking for one game to occupy some time, these features help. For someone looking to play a lot of games in a short time, it can be frustrating.

This game has a target audience and I think they'll love it. If you can name a British microcomputer from the 80s, you should definitely try this game. If not, it still has enough charm that it could be worth your purchase.

I was given a review copy of this game.

This is a long simulator Hosted Game, similar to Life of a Mercenary, which I played recently. In this game, you are a medieval lord who has recently ascended to the throne.

You have 3 main stats (combat, knowledge and social), a revenue stream, soldiers, and four advisors, one for each main area of interest in your life.

Most of the game consists of a free-form ruling sandbox where you can visit the temple, train or recruit soldiers, read books in the library, or, most often, just hold court.

Holding court causes random events to occur. Frequently you have the chance to pass judgment in trials or decide how to invest your money.

Occasionally there are big story moments. One includes a mysterious meteorite. Others allow opportunities for marriage (I went for a political alliance marriage with a neighboring lord's daughter).

Near the end, the story becomes more prominent and sandbox options decrease. In the early game, it feels much more 'game' than story; in the end it switches and is almost all story.

This is labelled as a grimdark game but I would say it's fairly mild for grimdark. The grimdarkness comes from the opportunity to do things like cheat on your spouse or be villainous by killing peasants, and story elements involve differing amounts of blood and gore. The content warnings include rape but I didn't encounter that in my playthrough.

Overall, I generally understood what stats did and story elements seemed fairly clear. I did at first think it was going in a pretty boring direction with religion (the standard 'haha we're enlightened medieval people who realize that religion is fake even though our world has supernatural elements'), but near the end it took on a lot more creative role which I liked quite a bit.

I did feel like I was meandering a lot in the middle, having exhausted every single book in the library. There were numerous opportunities for big spending early on that I skipped and few in the middle. Overall, though, I liked the money balance in the game.

Compared to the most similar hosted game that I've played, Life of a Mercenary, I'd say that this game gives you more power, authority and agency, while Life of a Mercenary has a lot more character focus.

Glad I played this game; I spent around a week on it, and instead of binging it I just popped it open to play through a few days in-game, and I found it great as a time-spender when bored.

This game is a bit off the beaten path for most Choicescript games I've played. It's long but eschews most numerical stats, instead giving you a variety of personality traits that come in threes and which you can switch between (I think, I was never quite sure).

There is a lot of worldbuilding here. There are many races, including one of scaled magic users and another of cannibalistic giants.

There is a pair of kingdoms with two rulers, each of which has their own consort. The consorts are the only people that know the identity of the heirs, who are camouflaged by being raised in orphanages. The current consort is the consort of both houses at once, which causes problems.

We follow four protagonists, with two making up most of the game. The first main protagonist is an orphan raised in one of those orphanages. The other is one of the scaly magic-users, embarked on an expedition to save their people. The two others appear in the prologue and in intermissions.

The stories are primarily relationship-centered, and not romantic ones, more like friendship, clanship, bullies, etc. There are some fights and several action scenes, but they mostly revolve around whether to help or protect others or to be selfish. I liked that.

For most of the story, I enjoyed the writing, characters, and worldbuilding, but I felt that the plot arc was kind of flat. It started off with bold moments and then just kind of simmered for 12-14 chapters, occasionally rising up and down. Important things happened, but it didn't feel as coherent as it could, especially with switching viewpoints so often.

In the end, it is revealed (massive spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)Our two protagonists are actually the same! The scaly one is a partial reincarnation of the orphan's soul. This definitely raised my opinion of the game, but I'm not sure it makes up for the slow-paced early development.

Being part of a series means that slow development early on isn't too bad, but the ending of this game bursts with combinatorial explosion. It's no wonder the author hasn't finished the sequel; just resolving the loose threads from that last one would make the first chapter enormous (I had a similar issue when I helped revive a WIP by a different author, with permission, and my first task was to resolve an enormous combinatorial explosion with about 120 options on what kind of club activities you were going to have at a school festival).

So, as this game stands itself, it was very enjoyable, great writing and development, but could use better pacing/rising tension for my personal tastes.

I was given a review copy of this game.

While this isn't the Hosted Game with the highest wordcount (coming in at 380K words), it's really big gameplay-wise, as it uses simulation-style gameplay to get a lot of mileage from less words. I played it over 2 weeks.

You play as the head of a mercenary company, and you have a variety of stats like intelligence, stamina, health, etc. You also have money, guards, healers, etc. Together with you are your stalwart companions Arlo (level-headed and kind) and Anne (cutthroat and mercenary). You can also add other characters to your roster.

Rather than a strong central storyline, the game progresses through missions. Each mission has some fights you have to do and some gold. Missions often have ethical problems; a common one is 'will you help these people and lose money, or get money by letting them suffer?' Sometimes it is more complex, though, like 'will you help this group of people if it hurts another group?' There are also investigation segments where high intelligence or wisdom lets you take new conversation options.

There are tons of missions. The game was nudging me strongly towards retirement at the end, but I had about 4 or 5 big missions I could have done as well as a few tournaments I missed early on.

In between sessions, there is plot, as your advisors come to you with questions. I enjoyed seeing Arlo's backstory in a side-quest; perhaps one of the quests I missed had Anne's. I retired as a noble with Vera by my side.

There were bugs, as others have noted. I had negative soldiers at one point. Sometimes choices felt weird in ways that are hard to nail down (at one point I died and had to restart at a checkpoint while at other points I died with no lingering bad effects). But the overall quality of the game overwhelmed that negative point for me.

I also found the writing sparse and even dull at first, but as it progressed the quick dialog and fun characters grew on me, even though it never became very descriptive or florid. I think the author grew in skill while writing this.

Overall, I think I could recommend this to others. I think it has a demo, and gameplay is pretty similar throughout, so I'd recommend people to check out the demo and get it if they like it.

I was warned ahead of time that this game was different than the others in the series, and that's definitely true. It feels more like an intermission of the series as a whole or a denouement of the first two games.

The first game tells the story of you leaving home, meeting everyone, and getting your soul stone. The second game has your friends finding their stones and culminates in a raid on the enemy base. Both of these feel like a full 'act' to a larger story.

This one doesn't quite feel like that. There's a lot going on; you've found the revolutionaries against the high king, and yet again you get chances to trust or distrust them. There's a lot of time recuperating. Everyone reveals their darkest past, even you, and there's some library and magical artifact research about the history of the Dragons.

While it's shorter and less full than the other games, it does take the time to relieve a lot of dangling plot threads, especially the lingering 'backstories' threads. It allows the player to process everything that happened to them and their loved ones, and introduces your Soul Stone as more of a character.

I would not enjoy this as a standalone game, but as part of a longer series, it makes sense. Writing big games is hard enough; writing a series of over 1,000,000 words is an immense chore. Given that this is the third of five planned books, I suspect that readers will look back from books 4 and 5 and see that this book was a good breather (a lot of long-running plot heavy media do this; manga for instance, often do time skips or training arcs after heavily dramatic episodes).

So, overall, I'd say this entry gives me good hopes for the series as a whole, even if this particular episode didn't have a strong self-contained plot arc.

I liked this sequel better than the original game. In that one, you were a frail weakling protected by four big powerful love interests. I enjoyed it, and enjoyed the romance aspect (which was the majority of the game).

This game builds on those strengths and adds more. After obtaining a soul stone in the first game, you now are quite a bit stronger, able to directly steer events and take charge.

I liked the interactivity. Rather than focusing on success and failure of skills (which did exist in some form, especially when choosing how to attack), the game features more strategizing, especially 'who do you spend time with' and 'who do you trust'. There are several strangers, friends and foes who have propositions that you can accept or decline. There are definitely 'failure states' but the game did a good job (to me) of making a failing, struggling story just as interesting as a winning one.

Plotwise, we spend a lot of this game gathering the other soul stones and preparing for a raid on the evil Vampire Lord to rescue our friend (I only played one path, so there may be more variations). Like the first game, there are so many options that pace feels a bit slow when it comes to the plot, but big when it comes to people and characterization.

I'd say this game/series is best for people that want the experience of camaraderie/ a large group, and the feeling of becoming more powerful over time.

This is a popular Hosted Games from a few years ago, the first part in a long series.

The idea is that there is a powerful King who is a deathless vampire in possession of a Soul Stone and who desires to have the others. You, on the other hand, are simply a runaway from a village, judged for who you are (there are a few backstories available, this is the one I had).

While you are escaping your village, you find two strong, bold men and two powerful, battle-ready women who will do anything to protect you and help you, even putting themselves in danger. This is good, because you are quite possibly the wimpiest protagonist I have ever seen. I felt like the main character in the gothic novel Mysteries of Udolpho, fainting at a moment's notice. My character passed out from exhaustion, possession, getting hit, etc., got entranced or pinned down on multiple occasions, and had to be rescued over and over.

That's okay, because my big buff adventuring party was there to catch me in their arms as I fell, and to stare at me in concern, and to tease me with nicknames.

It was actually fun. Wayhaven has a similar vibe. I enjoyed being protected and romancing my big dragon woman NPC. It gave me ideas for future games; instead of focusing on failure when missing stat checks, to have your ROs save you, so you can choose to play as a strong person or as a helpless one.

This game doesn't really have that choice, you're helpless most of the time.

You might notice I didn't mention the main plot much. That's because 99% of the game is RO interactions. The eponymous soul stones only make appearances near the very end.

This game is just part 1 of longer ones. I've long noticed that WIPs and unfinished series are really popular in itch and Hosted Games culture. Having played more recently, I genuinely wonder if its because (besides WIPs being free), the open-ended nature of unfinished games and sequels lets people imagine a great sequel or ending that will almost certainly not be satisfied by a real one. The hope of one day having a great fulfillment to a game is perhaps more enticing to an imaginative reader, and, in communities with close access to an author, perhaps an ardent fan might influence the author into giving them the ending they want.

I'm interested in seeing how the next 2 games play out because very little plot happens in this game. I did have fun with my RO-centered damsel in distress simulator, and I can see why this series is popular.

I was provided a review copy of this game.

This is one of the longest Hosted games, around a million words. It's packed full of characters, scenes, and equipment, with a lot of romances and little vignettes and a lot of visits to bootleg McDonalds.

You are a criminal in this game. You're inducted into a vigilante gang called the Archangels where everyone is assigned a codename themed around angels; you are a Raphael (one of several).

Gameplay is in a cycle where you plan a criminal event, then buy supplies, train, or hang out with friends and ROs, then enact the criminal event. Planning includes choosing people for a team, time of day of attacks, how risky to be, etc. Supplies include a long list of specific guns and ammunition, body armor, vehicles, first aid kits, etc. Training includes numerous skills like tactics, intelligence, accuracy, persuasion, and others. You get a huge number of opportunities to train skills. Hanging out gives you different vignettes with people; picking the same person repeatedly gets you a well-developed story.

The tone varies a lot. On one hand, your group is brutal. They will regularly shoot enemies in the face, including cops, security guards, rival gang members, and even restrained individuals. You can participate in multiple torture scenes.

On the other hand, the story often zooms into comical or farcical nature. Everyone bakes or makes tacos or goes to 'Mike Donalds' to have a 'Big Mike' (you can order from a huge menu; this happens a lot). You can choose not to kill a lot of people (your friends will still kill). People get shot over and over and get healed by a first aid kit. The most ludicrous was (Spoiler - click to show)someone being shot repeatedly point blank, then pinned down, their armor stripped off, then shot in the chest point blank over and over until there was a bloody hole, and they survived. This story has a planned sequel, so there may be an explanation (it is called out as unusual in the game). The zigzag tone was probably the one thing that I didn't like as much in the game, though it did make the violence more palatable.

Overall, the long length makes for a compelling story. Some complained that the 'main 3' characters of the gang (your supervisors) kind of steal the show from you in the latter half; while that's true, you still retain a great deal of individual freedom. It's clear why the game is so big and why the sequel has taken so long to make. I think there's a lot of replay value in the side stories here.

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.