Reviews by MathBrush

I'm actually very torn on this review. I think I'm going to end up recommending this on Steam but not giving it 5 stars here, because the two sets of reviews serve different purposes.

Fool! has brilliant writing. I've read all of Shakespeare's plays multiple times (I got on a real kick in college where I'd read one of his plays after every other book I read), and there are some parts of this game I'd easily believe came from one of his books. It has a lot of poetry and jokes.

The overall backstory seems to be based on Henry IV parts 1 and 2 but in a different setting. There are battles between England and France, a somewhat rebellious Prinxe Hail and a rebellious northerner nicknamed Hotfoot.

In the midst of this, you are an aspiring fool who starts out with an audience of three wide-eyed kids and a stage marked by horse manure and drunks' vomit. Throughout the game, you build up your reputation and make friends (and enemies) along the way until you can end up as high as the King's Court or being one of the most famous players in the land.

It's a large game, maybe 4-6 hours long if playing intently.

With all these good things going forward it, it's hard not to recommend it. But I had to battle quite a bit with the stats. I frequently could not for the life of me guess when a choice was sanguine, bilious, phlegmatic or melancholic.

"Let's see," I'd think to myself. "This option is about cheering up my friends. That's sanguine, right?" Nope. It's phlegmatic, because you're trying to balance your various responsibilites.

Okay, trying to be famous is usually bilious right? No, this time trying to be famous is melancholic, because you're being cynical or cautious about it.

I was trying to roleplay as a confident and brilliant braggart (high blood/bile), and made it to act 3 with almost maxed-out sanguine (after restarting, something I almost never do, and battling back and forth for a while with the stats), and then a series of encounters somehow flipped it so I had extremely low blood and bile. I literally pounded my fist and shouted 'no!' in frustration a couple of times.

My reaction to the stats seems isolated. Fool! is fairly high on the bestseller list on the Choice of Games omnibus app and has very positive reviews on Steam and on the Choice of Games forum. The funny writing, the excellent quality of humor and even silly stuff like the ape companion make me feel confident that I can recommend this game to others and they'll feel like they got their money's worth, and I intend to do so on steam. If you're into Shakesperean comedy or want to max your Bawdiness or Wit then this game is absolutely for you. I don't regret playing it, and intend to return to it in the future.

I received a review copy of this game.

This game helps fulfill a childhood dream of mine. When I was younger, I always had access to and eventually bought a lot of guidebooks for RPGs. I focused on Dungeons and Dragons (I had over 20 AD&D 2E books as kid) but enjoyed White Wolf a lot. Sadly, although I really wanted it, I never found a group to run a campaign with and never tried playing Vampire: the Masquerade.

This game is exactly what I hoped for if I had played such a campaign. A clever story cooked up by a master DM (or the VtM equivalent), a large number of encounters with chances to grow my powers, and fun dives into lore and characters.

This game is designed to keep you on your toes. In an interview, the author said that his favorite concept in VtM is that just surviving is incredibly hard, and just dumping characters in a big city and seeing if they can live for a week. This is exactly the kind of scenario you have in the game.

You play as a vampire who is coming into Tucson after a long absence. The Prince there brings you into His service and asks you to complete several tasks. These tasks are each there own chapter, and there are 2 sets of 3.

You have many stats (over 30), with your initial stats determined by your clan (together with a clan weakness; mine was zoning out due to beauty). All stats are useful throughout the game, though mental stats are more useful early on.

Between mission you can spend your money (on housing, which is very useful, or cars, which the writer seems really really excited by and describes in incredible detail, with over a dozen options including exotic sports cars), upgrade your stats, or buy new equipment. You can turn NPCs into 'ghouls' who help you with everything. I got a ghoul early on and she factored into literally every mission from then on in an integral way.

True to the source, the game is heavily focused on stats and strategizing. The most important stat is hunger; high hunger makes you bad at everything, including finding more food to eat, so getting high hunger can cause a terrible spiral until you get back home and buy some cheap food. Moreover, using your coolest powers (i.e. 'disciplines') raises your hunger. You can use this to your advantage by using powers to hunt food, immediately wiping away your hunger boost.

I would describe this as a 'deluxe' Choice of Games title, if that descriptor existed. It has incredible graphics when you meet people, it has a great IP connection, and it is LONG.

I play a lot of IF games, and I can finish even very long material in an hour or two. But it took me an entire Saturday and much of the evening before to play this. It's like several shorter Choicescript games bundled together. To get a better idea of its length, I was thinking 'this game is huge' as I was getting close to its end. I was a little disappointed I had been able to raise my stats as high as I wanted, but it was okay. Then I realized that I was only halfway through the game.

There is some strong profanity in the game. I didn't run into any explicit sexual content. I received a review copy of this game. The violence level is about what you might expect from a game about superpowered vampires engaged in a war.

(Edit: I originally put this review on the wrong page)

I honestly enjoyed this game quite a bit. It kept all the things I liked from the first game and fixed some of the drawbacks.

This is a reality show-format game, like Slammed!, so a lot of the game is choosing what kind of image you want to project and going along with it. There are several romance choices, and I felt like I had more agency.

Now, it's interesting what different groups find appealing and don't. I saw some people on the Choicescript forums get mad at this game because it's possible to make wrong decisions and 'lose'. In fact, you can actually buy (with in-game cash or real money) hints on how to win.

At the same time, I saw a well-thought-out and clear review on this site talking about One Eye Open, and saying that, while it was well-written, it was not that interesting because it didn't have difficult puzzles.

So on the one hand, there is a group of people who want games to mold to their desires and be winnable no matter what. And there are others who want games to frustrate and challenge them. I started in the second camp but now enjoy both types, and I think most people have some overlap between the two.

In any case, this game has some difficult challenges. The characters and plot are written with broad strokes, and that's because, like many early Choicescript games, it was written by boiling down an entire genre.

At 180,000 words, it's not the biggest game, but playthrough length felt substantial. I played steadily and it still took a few hours. I think this one's worth playing, even if you haven't tried the first one.

I received a review copy of this game.

It's more or less impossible for me to review this game objectively, because (although almost certainly unknown to the authors) this game is tied up in the story of my life.

Enormous backstory behind spoilers for space:(Spoiler - click to show)
In 2015 I was desperately in search for validation in life. I had graduated with my math PhD with the hopes of being one of the best and brightest young researchers out there. However, I found my papers rejected again and again, and realized that I was in over my head.

Feeling like a failure and stung by the reviewer's comments that my exposition and overall writing were poor, and recently interested in playing interactive fiction, I decided to throw myself into writing interactive fiction and become a great writer.

When I began, I had a chip on my shoulder and viewed well-known and commercial authors as distant, vague entities, to be envied and imitated. My first game was well-received in general, but was noted, again, by reviewers as being somewhat lacking in the writing department. I vowed to do better.

Around that time, I joined the euphoria IF community, a discord-like website (that is now, I believe, defunct), where many of the great authors and up-and-coming ones congregated. I wanted to fit in, and here were the people I wanted to be like.

A lot of good came from that. I made my first transgender friends, which cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had from my youth and almost complete lack of experience with anything outside of the gender norm. I found out that a lot of famous people, like Emily Short, were just normal, kind individuals who happened to be very talented at writing.

But a lot of the community had different standards and ideals than I did, and I began changing in subtle ways to fit in, and eventually I realized I didn't like it and cut it out. At the same time, a lot of those same people joined the writing team of this game. As one of those not invited, it deepened my envy and pride. I thought negatively about the game, and felt a kind of smug assurance when I heard it had done poorly.

Since then, I've re-evaluated a lot of things in life; got divorced, changed careers, went back to my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I've found self-value in my church and in my high school teaching, interacting with students. I got a book deal and published a novel, and realized that it wasn't what I wanted to do. And that commercial writing isn't what I want to do. I find joy in writing the games I like, helping others write them.


But some old habits are hard to change, and probably will be forever. When I heard this game was free, I felt my old demons stirring up inside of me. I downloaded it and wrote pages of notes on why I disliked it or it was bad.

I finally realized, though, that my own personal hangups weren't a basis for a good review. And pushing through to the end revealed many good facets.

So what is this game about? Like Sunless Seas/Skies and 80 Days, its closest competitors, it's a narrative game with little storylets spread around a world map, coupled with some stat management in the background.

[Note: I had a lot of trouble finding info online about this game and was frustrated many times, so I'm going into tons of detail here. Spoilered for space]

(Spoiler - click to show)
You walk across America, and have 3 main activities:
-Collecting stories, which can occasionally deplete one of 3 stats. Later on, collecting turns into 'upgrading' where a story is retold to you by a stranger and becomes higher quality
-Replenishing those stats by finding work or buying food
-'Feeding' stories to one of 16 different wanderers on the map.

The feeding part is the bulk of the mid and late game. The strangers have detailed art, and they ask you for stories in one of 5 categories: sad, funny, inspiring, scary, and exciting. The stories don't come labeled, and it can vary from playthrough to playthrough, so you can either guess and check what the type is or try to remember from the first time.

Each character has 3-4 chapters, with 3 being the most common. In each chapter, you have 5 opportunities to find stories that fit their requests. As the nights progress, higher quality stories are needed. When you complete a chapter successfully, the character moves across the map and you gain their story or upgrade it. If you are unsuccessful, they still move but your progress is saved.

The character's stories, as I found out through experimentation, count as wildcards, level 3 stories that can satisfy any request. It can be amusing at time to tell the story of a character haunted by the phantoms of war and have the listener laugh and say how good a joke it was. I beat about 10/16 characters' hardest levels by saving up these wildcards for the final chapter.

My overall impression of elements of the game:

(Spoiler - click to show)
The 2d art and sound in this game are wonderful, with a very Americana atmosphere and some startling changes in the characters.

The 3d art is obviously the result of a lot of good effort, but it felt fairly repetitive after traversing the land over and over.

The writing is very good on a small, prose level, but weak on overall structure. The stories you collect are short little nuggets, and leveling up doesn't give you a new story to read, it just says essentially the title of the new version.

Everything in the game is allusions, allusions, allusions. You're supposed to know tarot cards and their meaning and names, as the font is too small to read if you don't know them. Most of the conversations with the characters goes like this:
-The player: Tell me about love.
-The character: Love? I've loved before. It's a strange thing, love. One day you can love, and what day you can be out of love. Me, I've been both.

There's a reason for that. One is that the writing is necessarily modular in nature. The authors didn't know what order the responses would be given in in-chapter or even if they'd be given at all, so none of them contains any essential information and they don't form a cohesive in-chapter narrative.

The other reason is that it seems to just be the direction they were given. The weakest part in the game is its overall direction/combining the various elements. I frequently thought as I played that I'd love to have all the elements separately: the stories in a book, the music on a CD, the art on a webpage. It's very disconcerting to see a beautiful transformation in the artwork at the same time that the story ends with one of several variations of 'Well, goodbye, I won't see you again.'

The game's controls and the style of play are very cryptic at the beginning. It helps to hit h and look at tips or escape to find controls. If you can push past the first part, it will start making sense.

Overall, my experience only improved as I played. As for my personal story above, (spoilers for uninterested):
(Spoiler - click to show)I came to realize as I played that I didn't need to hold onto the old envy, although I don't know if I'll ever be able to get rid of that feeling for good. I wouldn't have enjoyed writing for this game and I wasn't suited for it. I like on-the-nose fantasy and sci-fi, and I'm unskilled at literary-style text because I haven't valued it or practiced it. The game's direction leans against my values, with casual nudity included in art, strong profanity, and frequent diatribes against God, including by preachers. Getting my wish would have been a disaster for both me and the game, leaving everyone dissatisfied.

I received a free copy of this game, but only because it was on sale.

This quite large Gothic horror game reminded me of quite a few games and stories over time.

In its early phases, it has much of the feel of Dracula or the Mysteries of Udolpho (one of the stories inspiring Jane Eyre and Northanger Abbey). You are in a small town where a beautiful and sensual Lord or Lady (depending on your choices) presides and where strange disappearances happen, like that of your uncle.

The bulk of the game (15 or 16 chapters, each substantial) reminded me of Anchorhead, or of Udolpho again, or of Curses!, my favorite IF game of all time. A giant mansion filled with odd and horrifying characters and objects (like a mysteriously strong 90 year old butler, or a door wrapped in wrought iron vines that seem to prick your finger no matter how careful you are).

The game overall tends towards 'weird fiction' in the latter half, a genre commonly identified with Lovecraft but which here seems to align itself more with other works such as Algernon Blackwood. There are no cults here, no bizarre combinations of consonants and very little of madness. Ghostly horror is more of a theme.

There are several rewarding romantic opportunities. Like all of Choice of Games' titles, there is a lot of diversity and inclusion, but unlike some games that reviewers have complained of, all of the diversity here is very well-explained and genre-sensitive. After all, a strange manor in a strange town where the owner is known for startling and forward-thinking views is the perfect place for a non-binary character or for same-gender romances, much like the early vampire novel Carmilla, which is even referenced in-story.

Gameplay revolves around choices to be trusting or distrustful, to be physical or charming or spiritual, to investigate more or to help others, etc. There are several layers of mystery, and the game seems very replayable. I'd especially like to replay as a completely skeptical investigator.

There are some questions that I still have, and hope to explore more (especially about a figure you see in the very first chapter).

Overall, I'd say that this game in the Choice of Games canon occupies the same place as Anchorhead in the parser game canon: a long, replayable, evil house horror game that is very popular and basically great for everyone to play.

I received a review copy of this game.

If you told me there was a game whose villain was catapulted by reality tv into the presidency, who had had several spouses and relationships, who ran on a platform of locking up his enemies and keeping 'others' out of America, who employed his children in government positions, I would have told you that it was a heavy-handed ham-fisted commentary on modern life.

Well, this game came out in 2014, a year before Trump started his first campaign. So it's interesting to play a game that directly speaks to current issues without being affected by them.

This is my favorite game of the series, probably because I'm emotionally invested by now. You have the chance to work with former enTheYour first game let you save a city, the second let you be known to America, the third lets you shape the future of the nation.

This is a hard game, and it's definitely possible to lose. You can buy an in-game hint system for $.99 (or use in-game money if you got rich in the other games), but I followed a playthrough I found online (although they made different choices than me, so I had to adapt).

You can play this game separately from the others, although I'd recommend starting at the beginning. You could always play the first chapter of this game to get a feel for it, though.

I received a review copy of this game

This game is firmly in the drama camp. It had a lot of action and intrigue and less, if any, humor.

The setting is detailed and vivid, and is the best thing about the game in my mind. Its set in a Borgia-era Venice, albeit with different names, and you are part of the crime family. Your parent has died, and there is a power play between you and two siblings. You are the only one, however, who is a blood mage, an illegal type of necromancer who can see and influence spirits.

This is in the category of Choicescript games like The Martian Job or Rent-a-Vice where there are a lot of ways to go wrong and it doesn't feel like you have complete power, as opposed to pure power-fantasies like Creme de la Creme (by the same author) or Choice of Robots.

This game has more options to violent or dark than most Choice of Games titles. Murder is a possible solution to many problems. And there is no way to please everyone. One of your siblings is an ineffectual pacifist and the other is a violent war hawk. At least twice in the game you get urgent messages from multiple people and have to let someone down.

I had a satisfying romantic arc in my game. Some reviewers have complained that romance is less of a focus, but the game was updated this June to have additional romance.

This is a long game. While having a lower wordcount than Tally Ho or Creme de la Creme, the playthrough length feels comparable. I felt like I was playing a quality game. I am glad, though, that the tone is lighter in Creme de la Creme.

I received a review copy of this game.

My rating for this game went back and forth quite a few times while I was playing it.

This is a very long game. I played this over two days. Its wordcount is 610,000. There are only 2 other published Choice of Games titles bigger than it.

Tally Ho, one of the games that is slightly larger than it, has a shorter play length, due to having more branches. This game has 9 very long chapters.

It's really three games in one, each of which could be separated into its own, shorter game.

The first is cat life. You are with a family and there is a kid and a dog and a wild neighbor cat you can interact with. Over and over again, you choose where to sleep, how to get the best scraps of food, and how to treat the humans and other pets. This is fairly entertaining at first, but gets pretty repetitive by the end.

The second is Claire (the mother) and her political career. She is an MP trying to win power in a party that centers on ecological concerns. You can influence this by affecting her mood during talks, distracting her during important moments, or trying to 'show her a sign'.

Similarly, the husband, Andre, is working on a musical career. He's pretty bad at it, and the grouchy neighbor behind you is a musical producer. You can influence him like Claire.

Of all the plots, I found the beginning cat bits and the political segments the most interesting.

One frustrating aspect was the large number of overlapping stats that were constantly being both tested and changed. For instance, is looking sweet to get food a test of being manipulative v demanding, of being audacious vs cautious, of being feral vs domesticated, or of contempt vs affection? Or is it a way to change one of those stats?

I became invested in the storylines eventually. I know one of the paths can lead to divorce, so I managed to avoid that. I imagine there are many branches possible, so I may have to replay.

I received a review copy of this game.

This game has been at the top of the bestseller charts for Choice of Games since it came out last November. I've been interested in it for quite some time, and it exceeds my expectations.

The best Choice of Games stories are those which allow your decisions to matter with meaningful branches (like Choice of Robots), which have a strong narrative arc (like Slammed!), have a lot of customization (like Hollywood Visionary) or which invite strategy (like Choice of Robots again).

This game excels at all of these features. Set in a fictional, more open version of Europe some decades past, this game features you as the scion of a disgraced family, sent to a finishing school to redeem their failures. At school, you can attend to any number of activities, including academic studies, meddling with teacher romances, witchcraft, leadership, and quite a bit of romance (with 9 possible romances and 10 possibles marriages, including marriage of convenience and a royal).

The last few chapters can really throw some gears into your plans. I planned on restoring my family's honor and marrying the headmistress's child, and achieved both of my goals.

It really captures the essence of the boarding school story, like Jane Eyre's early chapters or an ethically-sourced version of Harry Potter. This game allows quite a bit of customization with regards to genders of romanceable characters, and your own appearance and personality.

It's also very long. While it has a smaller wordcount than the enormous Tally Ho, my playthrough length was longer than any Choicescript game I have played, lasting several hours (although I read everything carefully).

In a way, it was a lot like epic fantasy. Not the Hero's Journey (it's not rigidly in any tradition like that). Instead of a hero from a destroyed village, you're a student from a destroyed family. Instead of gaining experience through battles and sages, you engage with rivals and teachers. And instead of facing Mt. Doom, you face the truth behind the school, which is just as destructive.

I was provided a review copy of this game.

I'm a big fan of the Sorcery series, with part 3 being my favorite.

This one is an appropriate ending for the series. It's huge, absolutely huge compared especially to part 1, and the magic you can gain here is powerful and mysterious.

The ending sequences can be nervewracking and difficult. The art is great, and the music good.

While I like this episode, I still prefer part 3, as part 4 is a bit one-note with its feel of a final confrontation.