Reviews by MathBrush

This is the third Social Democracy game, a series that has proven popular outside of the usual IF haunts (even the history teacher of my school knows about them and uses them in curriculum).

They are card-based games where you have to run a government and worry about both party and government resources and budget and policies.

They tend to go over my head, as I have not diligently studied government policy. Playing this one, I trundled along my way until the senate lost confidence in me, businesses lost confidence in me, communists lost confidence in me, and I was out of a job. Alas!

Overall, though, the production quality is very high and the concept is fun. As long as people are still finding use and enjoyment in these games, we might as well keep going (it would be fun to see one with a Chinese emperor like the Yongzheng one from the Qing dynasty).

This is among the larger french parser games I've played.

In it, you play as a doctor in a medieval type town that has left after a dispute with locals. But the mayor comes to beseech you to rescue people who have been consumed by a kind of dancing disease.

You go to investigate, and find a huge world filled with a ton of people, all of whom want help. Your main quest can be found far away in a big city, where four people can give you their idea of how to help the dancers.

In the meantime, you can find the 'true' way to help the dancers, or solve numerous side quests.

The parser has a lot of difficulties; synonyms are missing, 'S' doesn't work as a shortcut for going south, many things have no description, most items are listed both in the room description and as 'you can also see ____', there's no response for 'parler avec...'. Outside of that, the room connections are asymmetrical and it's easy to get lost.

Fighting both the parser and the French, I finally achieved the method of curing the dancers, only to realize I couldn't find them anymore. I ended up finding them all gathered in one spot where I was unable to free any of them, making me suspect the game has a timer of some sort, at which point I definitely stopped playing, as while I enjoyed my playthrough I do not have the desire to repeat all my actions.

This game took me quite a while to finish (a couple weeks!).

It's pretty different than earlier games in the series. The first two games focused heavily on anime tropes, while the third one had a great murder mystery plus some 'training villagers' montages.

This one takes an entirely different tack. Judging from online reviews and ratings, it is very popular. To me, it appeared well-made, but didn't appeal to my personal sensibilities. It is a story of unhappiness and mutual mistreatment and of broken, toxic love, which while I have enjoyed stories that include elements of this, the persistent nature of it throughout the game wasn't my favorite.

Basically, in the other games you have an ex who is a psychopath that threatens to kill anyone who likes you, maims people, and almost kills you by carving words into your stomach, which hurts you for a long time. In this game, you end up together with them the entire time.

This includes physically being put on a leash (well actually it's a spiritual leash but she pulls you along). Also, you lost all your powers and your spirit animal, and you have no friends. Your leashholder physically gropes you and makes advances on you, which your character always has at least something of a positive reaction to (you have some choice but not all). You ex belittles you, forces you to do things you don't want, uses you, is emotionally unavailable, etc.

And that's 90% of the game. There's also a fetish dungeon, an election and a big supernatural climax to the story, but most is being dogwalked by a controlling ex who uses physical intimacy as a weapon.

I see people all the time on reddit asking for stories with controlling or toxic exes or really messy/bad romances, and this definitely fits the ticket.

The game decides a lot of your own choices and reactions. Like most of the series, most choices have a 'right' or 'wrong' answer (usually choosing what is most in line with your pre-existing character traits) rather than having significant branching. This makes for much longer gameplay; the game has 25 substantial chapters.

Overall, a lot of craftmanship was on display, but relationships are messy messy. It's more like Wuthering Heights or Chainsawman style of messy relationship than Jane Eyre or the Odyssey style messy relationships.

I liked this game a lot more than the first two in the series. Those leaned heavily on anime tropes and picked some of ones I don't enjoy as much mixed in with the ones that do.

This entry keeps the best part of the series (good action scenes, strong themes and well-distinguished characters) and less of the bad parts. It also adds new mechanics.

The first third or so of the game finishes off Samurai of Hyuga 2 with a detective scenario. I love mystery/detective games so that colored my perception of the rest of the game in a positive light. It has an unusual pattern; I've made classifications of IF mystery games before and written about them in posts, but this is a little different. IF mystery games usually have one of the following ways to model deduction (this is copied from a different post of mine):
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This game is most similar to 3, except instead of one quiz, there are a couple of dozen mini-quizzes to see if you're paying attention.

Sometimes the logic of the author wasn't clear to me, so I used a guide on and off, both here and to keep my attunement high later.

I felt more engaged in the game because of this. The subject matter was very heavy, but the interactions were more enjoyable than other entries in the series.

The second half of the game involves you confronting the next Demon in the series, a powerful general of an army. At this point, I got a bit confused, as I was reading in bits and pieces over a week. I somehow got roped into training soldiers for a competition, my ninja companion went away, and one of the general's samurai killed three other samurai, and I don't know why (probably because I didn't accompany them when given the choice). So I was lost a bit.

But, I ended up losing my nerve as a ronin while also training a bunch of new people. The goal became to identify each person's nature, what they needed, and to strengthen up.

Again, I liked this section a lot. Again, my mind wasn't always in sync with the authors, so I used a guide sometimes (but I do that with a ton of parser games, so...). I liked the ending.

This episode really turned around the series for me. I said that I wouldn't have continued past Samurai of Hyuga 2 if I weren't reviewing all Hosted Games, and that's true, but since I did try it, I'm glad.

Samurai of Hyuga 1 was a game heavily influenced by samurai films and edgier anime, with a main character ronin who has killed countless people as an assassin and is assigned to guard a smart child while hunting demons.

In this game, you play shogi! For most of the time.

It actually works out well. Our character is kind of OP, so it's hard to think of creative obstacles for them. Rather than having more fighting, they are first severely injured and then roped into a shoji tournament where you have to take down a variety of foes while also being an uneducated and kind of dumb ronin.

The game broadens the world of the series by bringing in European influences. There are some opportunities for serious romantic moments. There are also a lot of dramatic deaths and bits of violence, making it one of the goriest IF series (compared to things I've read recently, it's similar to Centuria or maybe Kagurabachi in terms of gore).

This book also continues the trend of being plagued with questionable japanese translation and indecent behavior toward minors. The most egregious japanese example was translating the gold in 'gold general', a shogi piece, as 'gorudo' (the katakana transliteration of the English word gold, which is sometimes used for the color) rather than 金 'kin', which is both the native word and the actual word that is printed on the pieces themselves (including in in-game screenshots). Like the first game, other characters insinuate that our character is sexually attracted to our minor charge, and our character can attempt to flood the minor's mind with sexual images and takes a peek at them while changing. This is while the game frequently reinforces how young our character is, with chubby cheeks and being really small. I was recently on jury duty where we gave a guy 60 years in prison for abusing a dozen or so children, and witness testimony included families where he was starting the grooming process but didn't finish, and we also heard his own testimony. It was strange how many actions in the game were identical to things I heard that man say or heard testimony that he did, with the kids shaking and talking about their lives being ruined and not being able to trust anyone ever again, etc. And the minor grooming parts aren't necessary for the story at all; the 'innocent smart person that you're not allowed to be with' could just as easily be a celibate young adult nun or a monk, which have existed in Buddhism for centuries.

In any case, I'll finish the rest of the series, since I'm doing a survey of all the hosted games, but definitely would drop the series on my own because of the bad memories it brings up (some of the other jurors were vomiting during the trial and I was crying a lot).

This Hosted Game places you in the role of an extradimensional incomprehensible monster who is forced into earth in the body of a small infant, forced to hide from a horrific hunter.

It then skips far ahead and focuses on events in a small town between you and a cast of characters including your sister and her weird 'friend', a single mom waitress, a mysterious drifter, a cult leader, and a grungy store clerk.

Much of the story revolves around your choices to act more human or to act more like your true self, as well as the ever-looming threat of the hunter.

To me, this felt a lot more like an 'official' Choice of Games game than most Hosted games, with its 4 or 5 opposed stats, frequent adjustments, frequent pass/fail checks, and, like a lot of the Nebula-nominated CoG games, a more-or-less set 'main' storyline with the player's actions more determining their internal state and relationships.

The characters are well-developed and you have a lot of scenes with them. I focused on romancing Roach, and it was one of the more well-developed and in-depth relationships I've seen in Choicescript games. There were a few chapters where I really wondered, 'what on earth are we doing here? Just kind of chilling?"

I had expected the game would deal with a sense of alienation a lot, but as others have mentioned, that's not a huge focus.

I think this will most appeal to people who like nuanced and morally ambiguous romantic partners, good writing, and either very powerful or weak/afraid protagonists (ironically, we are both here).

This game has an impressive 22,000 (!) ratings on the Hosted Games app, more than any Choice of Games official title and only surpassed by Wayhaven.

It's one of the older games, too.

It's similar to Life of a Mercenary, which is set in the same world and comes afterwards.

Despite the smaller wordcount of this game, it is quite large due to re-use of text and terseness of description.

You play as a young boy who is in awe of a famous knight name Sir Robert who is known for travelling the land, fighting in tournaments and earning 'boons' from mayors and governors who run them. You, along with your rascally best friend, sneak out to watch him.

Together with a ragtag band of friends, you enter a tournament open to kids. Eventually, you become Sir Robert's squire, and grow and train with him.

The game includes a war section, then a tense part involving Sir Robert. Finally, you become the main hero, able to wander around the map for 360 days, making money, buying items, and entering tournaments.

This builds up to the final Great Tournament, ran by the King Himself, who is willing to grant any boon to the winner.

There are a lot of romantic interests, including the royal princess and some scrappy fighter women.

Combat is generally taken care of for you, with occasional strategy choices. There are a lot of stats that you can boost. The time leading up to the actual great tournament has the most options.

Like the other game by this author, I found the characters interesting but the setting and locations rather dull. I can't picture any town; the castles could be made of crystal or mud and I wouldn't know. The only focus is the characters. And with that, it succeeds; this is a fun game and I would be happy to recommend it to others.

But, I feel like Choice of Games has some strong rivals for this kind of play. Vampire the Masquerade: Night Road comes to mind, which is just as strong as this in terms of stats and characters but more polished in terms of sensory writing.

Overall, I was glad I played!

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.