Reviews by MathBrush

Ḫattušumna Laḫḫa

This is a translation game, like a real-life version of Heaven's Vault or like The Gostak with a dictionary. It contains three connected mini-games imagined as 'tablets', all written in Hittite, transliterated to roman letters.

The presentation uses a great deal of graphics and typography, and the end result looks good. The user interface is clean and helpful, with a clickable compass rose and dynamic dictionary on the right side that presents a list of conjugated verbs which can be clicked on to type where to go.

I've played many games in non-English languages. Google translate is of course key, but I often use the IF Postcard in the respective languages as a starting point. Here, those basic commands are provided. I could see games having an interactive version of the IF postcard in the sidebar in the future.

Playing this game felt very different than playing other foreign-language games. Typically, the German, French, Spanish and Italian games I try were intended for fluent speakers in their respective language. On one hand, this is much harder as the words are quite complex (some Spanish authors love to do dialect, for instance). On the other hand, the game engines are often designed to respond to 'lazy' inputs. Verbs and nouns are often not conjugated or accept multiple endings, and markers like cedillas and umlauts can be omitted or replaced with shortcuts.

These games are designed to teach the player and to to be simple. So, for instance, the first level has simple puzzles like darkness and a ladder; the second one is a fetch quest, and the third is learning about social norms. Yet some of these easy puzzles are actually quite complex for non-native speakers, the kind of thing I often dread when playing such games (if we need chopped cheese for a quest and find regular cheese, do we assume the character will chop it themself or do we need to do so? etc.)

But the game has several layers of english help. Error messages are written in English, and point out the problems in our sentence formation. (I did have one issue early on where the game said the scribe had an error in a word and I assumed that meant the actual game scribe and that I couldn't refer to the object, but I had just used the wrong case ending). There are english translations of each word you click on, and invisiclues in English. I used no clues in the first game, but as I was trying to finish late at night, I used more clues for the other.

The third game contains nothing but reading and a logic puzzle, which I found most interesting in trying to read the clues, rather than the actual puzzling part.

The game is fairly violent, but it's all at a remove, since we are separated from the text by imaginary time and real language barriers.

This game is much more enjoyable than most education games I've played and much more smooth and player-friendly than most translation games I played. Hittite seems like a fun language, with some familiar aspects and some strange ones (like the particle starting every sentence).

Finally, this game is not like the Anpa Ma game from last year where the player has to use dictionaries and struggle alone, and beating it is a major challenge. This is a gently guided tour, non-trivial, but something most players should be able to do.

Mad Warrior

I played this one around 9 or 10 times. I eventually tried editing the json file that Mr Patient mentioned in his ifdb review (when you save), which showed me that all the game code is in your appdata folder, and perusing the code was way more fun than playing the game.

Like Epistemophilia, this game seems written by someone disconnected from the mainstream of IF who simply pursued their passion without knowledge of things that would smooth player experience.

It's a dungeon crawl, breaking barrels and chests for potions and keys while equipping weapons and attack bats. It's kind of like Diablo but with less story and variety. There are 24 floors of the dungeon.

It's held back really hard by its clunky system. What's implemented is fairly smooth, it's just that it's infuriatingly tedious. Almost every room has items. When you pick up the item, you have to open your bag first. To leave the room, you have to close it. Sometimes, your bag is full. Did the author playtest the full game? Did they open and close the bag 256 times and think, "This is what players will love?" I'm sorry that I'm being rude, but playing your own game multiple times is a great test. If it's not fun for you to play, or you find yourself adding ways to skip things, then players won't really enjoy it either.

Editing the JSON let me see more. At lower levels, there are bosses, and defeating them heals you and gives you more inventory space.

Some enemies inflict status effects that can only be healed with specific items. In worst case scenarios you can use an escape rope to get to the top to buy a bandage or antidote or heal. Dying is more likely.

Combat is randomized. Some exits are weird. There's one room you go INTO on the 2nd floor, but going OUT puts you in a room you have to go OUT of again and puts you on the first floor with no way back.

Overall, I found things pretty over-tuned in the difficult direction and tedious. If the bag open/close thing were removed I'd instantly increase my rating for the game. I just can't get what the reasoning is. It can't be realism; it's really easy to have a bag semi open you can slip things in and out of. And realism would mean that to drink potions we'd have to OPEN POTION and DROP BOTTLE and in between we would OPEN MOUTH and SWALLOW. I really doubt it's for code reasons; if that were the case, we could just silently add routines to OPEN BAG before TAKEing anything and CLOSE BAG afterwards.

There are hints of a story, and the characters near the bottom are more interesting.

9 Days in a Van with your 3 Best Friends

Like at least 2 other people on the forums, I decided to play this game next because it was the longer of the last 2 unreviewed games.

This game has great design and UI and an authentic-feeling storyline, mixed in with some tedious but quickly-played grinding. You play as Dante, a fill-in as drummer for a band in 1991 driving cross country and living off the money they make during the 9 days of Spring Break. The grinding part is that you have to model driving cross country, choosing one exit at a time whether to keep driving or to pull over and get gas, and how much gas, and snacks.

The other reviews mentioned the game ending abruptly when the band broke up after money management didn't work out. I figured I'd try to end the game as early as possible by just playing poorly. I never talked to the band, just read books (loved the quotes) and listened to tapes, and kept going. At every point I drove as long as I could without spending money, driving on fumes and barely eating (the lentils were good).

I ended up making to Seattle, our goal, and played the last day, and then the game ended with me in the future reminiscing. The cut to the future part was abrupt since we had had dream sequences quite a bit, and I thought this was another one (maybe a giant banner called 'epilogue' would have helped). But I felt satisfied with my plot arc. I looked at the endings. I got the most boring one where I didn't keep in contact with anyone from the band (also, this game isn't twine, I think it's custom).

This brought back a lot of memories. I was in a jazz band in high school (an official school one) but was sheltered and never went out with friends. After a performance the drummer asked if I wanted to 'drag state' with him and his friends late at night (Utah's most populated areas are basically aligned vertically along I-15 and State street, and State was the big, populated road in SLC, which was the 'big city' to my suburb-raised eyes. 'Dragging state' meant slowly driving up and down the road.') The drummer was a blond kid with emotional control issues but seemed really cool. The game he and his friends played was taking off your shirt and hanging out the car window as long as you could in the frigid Utah winter air, then once you chickened out and pulled back in you got slapped as hard as you could by everyone. It was a glimpse into a world that I had never known. The lights did look beautiful and the air smelled so good late at night in the Utah winter.

The game also reminded of that exact same drive they describe (well, almost). I, too, have driven along I-80 from the Bos-Wash area (for me, Philly), through the rural and church-focused plains and hills of pennsylvania, across Indiana (always the worst part of the trip due to the change in what can be sold across state borders), across the Mississippi (which was much larger than I expected, opposite of the MC in the game), some other route I don't remember (I've been through Wyoming, maybe there?) and eventually to the west coast and Washington (I always remember a very specific place on the way to Washington or in Eastern Washington where the road is in a flatter area past some hills/mountains and there's a field of sunflowers, and for some reason the road takes a sharp 90 degree turn left in the middle of nowhere. I always wondered why).

That's why I didn't mind the grinding as much. It's real. The first day or two you might have music planned or fun things but near the end it's just a hypnotic state where hours fly by and all you care about is the next exit.

Fun game, good memories. That kind of music wasn't my scene (I was terrified of hearing damage and avoided loud music and concerts at all costs), but the nostalgia feels right.

Caribbean Nightmare

I originally tried the German version of this, then gave up and waited for the English release.

I've played several games by this author. They tend to have gigantic maps with a ton of puzzles and allow play by dropdown menu or by parser entry. They also tend to be a little underhinted and a tad undercoded, but with enough hints to help out.

This game was better than usual. I liked its 4 chapter structure. I did end with only 2600 points instead of the full 3130, so I must have missed something, but I found the storyline more engaging and the puzzles more interesting than before. It just felt like things were mostly thought through well. I did find the pseudo-jungle maze a bit annoying, though each part of it eventually gained another exit, making it easier to distinguish them.

There were a few unfair-feeling puzzles, but many of the puzzles were very fair. Maybe using the flashlight is a bit unfair since there are so many places you can check (and using the rag or even knowing it exists), but for the flashlight there is a bit of a hint for part of it. There's a lot of dialogue in the game, which I think significantly improves it.

The idea is that you have amnesia on an island and have to explore it, finding shipwrecks, a parrot and a monkey, zombies, dancing skeletons, and, of course, treasure. There's a giant plot twist in the middle that changes things significantly.

Overall, I found myself enjoying the game. There is still some strangeness; UNDOing at one point instead reloaded the entire game and then ran through all my previous commands, but left me in a completely different place with a completely different score. Tying the string to a tree and then taking the string made things weird (as I didn't use 'UNTIE'). So it wasn't perfect, but it was fun.

Maximilien

This is an interesting game. I've decided to write my views based on a games individual merits rather than investigating them for potential AI use.

Maximilien is a highly polished game, and is destined for a future Steam release according to the author and website. The author's name on the IFComp page links to a page about the game, and that includes a page about the author and the creation process.

That polish includes several pictures, many of which are morphed or animated with various techniques, giving distortion or fire effects. The opening screen includes a particularly detailed-looking demon embryo thing, made in the author's style (who has been doing digital art for years).

The story is that you are living in Boston in the 1800s and have horrific and surreal nightmares that end with you waking up covered in blood. You have to investigate what's happening to you. Investigations increase your progress on 4 tracks of knowledge and hints, with each track giving different ending possibilities. I got the bad/possession ending, but I thought it was good.

You investigate through a map where you can choose where to go and spend action points on each of 4 days. You also have an inventory you can read, and there are several text-box entry 'tests'.

The original was in French, and the translation is extremely ornate and rich. Combined with the necessarily non-linear nature of the investigation and the surreal jumps in location and space, it was often difficult to keep track of the story. Here is an example of the ornate text:

After a moment of eternity, I finally rise with a soft hiss. A sweep of my gaze lets me take in some twenty yards, where I make out a tangle of tombstones merged into the night. I curse myself for not having made use of one of the two fellows’ lanterns ; and despite a careful look, I cannot see them. A curtain of trees a little farther off, its shadowed rim standing out against the sky, seems to mark the cemetery’s boundary. A little path of pale gravel stretches before me, in one direction toward the tree line, in the other toward the thickening mist at the heart of this resting ground.

or another:

The spectacle unfolding before my eyes defies even the oldest myths, whose obsolescence could not withstand the apprehension of the world through the prism of the most enlightened minds. Even the most unbridled imagination could not have engendered such a syncretism of credibility, belief, dreams, and nightmares, in this vision my senses transcribe with a pernicious exactitude, as only madness can produce.

Writing styles and preferences differ from person to person and culture to culture. For me, I like precision of language, where simpler words are preferred and complex phrases are only used if the provide clarity. All of the sentences make sense, and the meaning, once deciphered, is interesting, but like I said, combined with the jumping around and the surreal environment (and the distortion and warping of the text as play progresses), it can be difficult to follow the story thread.

The story that I did perceive is interesting. It reminds me of the Cognomen of Edgar Allen Poe game from a few years ago with its city investigation or aesthetic. This game includes a lot of details about Judaism, Boston and I think Ukraine.

Overall, I had a polished experience. I didn't feel compelled to replay, but I admire the effort put into the game and found the villain compelling.

The Count and the Communist

The original French version of this game was one of my favorite games of 2025 when it originally released. Alas, mine is the only review on IFDB. Hopefully the English version will meet a broader audience.

The design is daring. Every page has ASCII art, either of people, a map, or something else. These drawings adapt to different circumstances, changing clothing and items carried.

More daring is the command input structure. Like Superluminal Vagrant Twin or Skybreak!, it's a menu-based parser system. It also has many parts that require typing a period followed by enter to get to the next page, which slows down things a bit. In French, it was perfect, as my slow reading speed benefitted from a slow input system. In English, I found it annoying, until by the end (5 or so hours later) I was quickly double tapping the keys.

Everything is accessed through menus, including saving and looking around. Again, some shortcuts were very annoying at first. EXAMINING and USING items that are carried requires an entirely different menu than objects in the area around you. Yet the game is long enough that, by the end, these menus can be mastered.

The game is very long, taking place over about a week. You are a communist spy supporting the Red faction after the Russian revolution, and you are sent to a count's household in France to support him as a laundress. The game tackles themes of communism, misogyny and homophobia in the early 1900s.

As a spy, your main job is to gather information. At first you are strictly limited to a small set of rooms, and you quickly learn your duties as a laundress. SAVING often is good as UNDO doesn't work here (due to the complex structure producing the images).

Over time, you gain access to many more areas. This game is huge; the wordcount is higher than Never Gives Up Her Dead, though much of it is from the ascii images. But over and over more areas and events unlock in the game, including complicated devices (some requiring pdfs of old French war manuals) and code transcribing.

The attached hints are absolutely useful, especially later on. It is possible to beat the game without doing everything; I didn't bother doing the last 3 optional puzzles as I had played the game all night for 2 nights and was reaching midnight and wished to finish.

The characters are well-developed, including the beautiful spy Marceline who leads you and the complex housekeeper whose young dreams of fame and success have been subverted by the cold Count.

The communism propaganda is huge here; our character spends every night trying to teach herself communist theory. Tons of conversations and lessons on communism are had. It is essentially like playing a religious crusades game with heavily Christian themes, except the all-consuming religion driving one to violence has been replaced with communism.

Overall, I think this is a fantastic game. It is clunky, sure. Some puzzles are not fair without hints, true. It is probably too long and too hard for IFComp. Fine. But I think it's a fantastic game, and my time playing it was worth it.

This game was very interesting. I am actually really impressed out how it handles complex geopolitical issues. (I’m going to over-exaggerate somewhat but this is the impression I got):

It’s hard to confront topics like racism, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, colonialism, and other issues in games. People can get upset, it can come off as manipulative or stolen valor, it can be appropriation, it can be done wrong.

This game doesn’t worry about that at all. It’s like, “What if we put Hitler and Martin Luther King Jr in a room and give you a machine gun and you can just blow away anyone you want to? Or, form a polycule? What if it shows the Chinese as Triad gangsters that smuggle goods and also as murderous oppressors of the Tibetans, but also the most murderous individual Chinese oppressor had a serial killer alternate personality that you thought was super hot and you wanted to kiss? What if you plundered Jewish antiquities in Palestine to avenge a dead Jewish woman while making out with a hot Arab man who is part of a swingers couple?” Well, the first one was a metaphor but the other two are real. I don’t know if this is excellent representation or horrible representation, but it gets the job done.

The game centers around the recovery of 6 artifacts in the 1930s, with you as the swashbuckling archaeologist who recovers them along with reams of potential paramours. Each one features its own mini-games like ancient riddles, dangerous traps, a small-town murder mystery, tower defense minigame, etc. Every chapter is action-packed.

I thought the writing was good and the plot was good, and the characters interesting. For some reason, though, I found it a lot of work to get through. At no point did I think it was bad or low quality, it just felt like each chapter was really meaty, more like a million word game than a 400K word game. I think having just 6 chapters total + epilogue might be part of it, as well as a lot of branching that comes back together quickly (like conversations where you have to lawnmower through most items before moving on).

I’m interested in the second game. I wonder where things will go next. I think my kill count in this game is one of the highest I’ve ever had; I have no idea how I wasn’t arrested in America after gunning down ten or more people during a standard police investigation.

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

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.

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.