Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

To be up front, this is probably the VtM Choicescript game I’d be least likely to recommend to the general public.

This game is very high quality, but it doesn’t focus on the mechanical aspects of the VtM nearly as much as the others. For me, and I expect many people, the draw of these games is to try out the systems.

Furthermore, choicescript games in general are often easiest to enjoy when the effects of your choices are clear and obvious. This game has a lot of branching text, but much of the variation is in the emotional aspects of your character’s thoughts rather than major events (compared to similar games; there is still major event branching in this game, just not as much). Also, there’s some more strong profanity on this game than I prefer.

With those caveats aside, this is an excellent psychological introspection game. More than the other vampire games, this dives into the inner mind of a vampire. I think the game was describing itself in this quote (only available in certain paths):

“Alex had a knack for putting together campaigns that would test your morality more than your STR and DEX, and they would frictionlessly lead you to dilemmas that forced your group to ask: So, who are we? What do we stand for? What do we play for?”

Another, later quote takes a rare wink in the fourth wall:

“ For a moment, the idea that you might be a made-up character yourself takes root in your mind and seduces you with the possibility. What would it be like to be a fictional character—just another collection of ink and paper in a book with its own backstory and motivations? You're full of so much mundane detail that when the plot needs you to do something, they can pull you out and have you do it without any messy internal conflicts dragging you down—that's the fantasy, anyway.”

The game is about you as a vampire who was abandoned by your vampire-sire, and later taken in by a man named Markos. You live in Athens, which is gripped by a conflict between those who want vampires to continue the Masquerade, hiding from humanity, while others, radicals, want to tear it down and reveal all.

This author is a previous Nebula nomineee, and it shows. The story is tight and excellent. However, it is somewhat dark and can be depressing; failure at the end is not only possible but likely.

Some have described the game as rushed, and I think that’s because of the focus on the inner mind. The typical events of a game, like fights, betrayals, etc. are given less focus while your own doubts and hopes are played out over a longer time.

I had thought of giving this 4 stars, but I honestly enjoyed the storyline quite a bit, especially some parts about sunrises.

This game is by Inkle, a studio that has made numerous interactive fiction games. While this game has many non-textual elements, the text is a very important part of the gameplay and the core mechanic is a large textual language puzzle. It took me 16 hours for one playthrough, according to Steam.

The main idea is that you, in an fictional futuristic setting, are an archaeologist exploring an ancient, highly-advanced civilization. They settled a nebula with 'moons' connected by jets of water that are navigable by boat. The main thread throughout the civilizations' history is the use of a language: ancient. This is presented as a series of sigils, usually ran together, that you at first guess and then eventually become certain of (through a mechanic where the game tells you if you got it right after you use it a few times in a row). No spaces are used in most words, making finding where words start and stop the hardest part later on.

I'd like to split up this review a bit into different categories, starting with what was, for me, the weakest part:

3d Navigation and pacing
I bounced off this game at first because of this. One thing that a lot of commercial IF games lean into, especially ones by authors transitioning from indie to AAA-adjacent, is to bulk up the play time, is splitting up stories with long sections of travel. This is done in 80 Days, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, and here, too. This leads to a lot of very dull moments. 80 days helped make up for it with quick transit animations and making the movement part of the overall puzzle, while in most of these other games it's just dead air.

This game splits up content in two different ways. Large chunks each take place on different worlds, split up by ship travel, which has no hazards and no decision making outside of binary choice points and occasional random treasure. The smaller chunks on each world are split up by 3d motion. This uses invisible hitboxes that don't always line up with what you can see; this is especially apparent in 'open worlds' that look easily navigable but are secretly linear. I found myself frequently running into walls and getting stuck. Amusingly, I realized that the space part and the 3d part were very similar to Kingdom Hearts 1, just without the enemies.

Conversations happen in real-time. Speed is adjustable in the menu, but there is no scroll-back and pausing is difficult. I generally like text games because they can be picked up and put down, minimized, multitasked, and easily played around others without being intrusive. For this game, I had to give complete attention at pretty much all times, and even then I missed quite a bit of dialog looking away to itch a scratch or to answer my kids' questions.

Continuing on my scale of not liking to liking are things that I liked a lot but don't really factor into my rating:
Graphics and audio

I think they did a great job here. Voiceover is really lovely, the music is heartrending and sci-fi feeling. The art looks a lot better than most 3d games, and loads well on my potato laptop. The artists and sound designers really did well.

Character and Plot
This is generally very good, with some slight caveats. Characters are very distinctive and mostly memorable. The protagonist has a rich past interconnected with many corners of the Nebula. The plot contains multiple independent strands circling the big mystery: where did these civilizations come from, why is everyone here, and what's going to happen to them?

Our main character is kind of a jerk. I know subconsciously it can be easy to perceive strong female characters as aggressive when compared to similar male protagonists, but I believe our character has attributes would be jerky for men as well, especially in regards to her interaction with the robot Six. It was actually refreshing in a lot of ways, but I think 'jerk with a heart of gold' interests me more than 'jerk with a heart of jerk'. The strong personality does lend to some fun role-playing through.

The plot threads were very intriguing, including the mysterious workings of your home city, the cryptic machinations of you employer, some kids trying to find their place in the world, etc, as well as your progressive discovery of the ancient world.

I felt like the ending in my playthrough came at a time where I had a lot of loose ends, and not a lot of choice to go back and work on them. And the final reveal, while visually stunning, left quite a bit unresolved as well, especially given how much build up there was. I know that it can be hard to simultaneously give people choice as well as a satisfying plot structure (which is one reason, I speculate, that a lot of Choice of Games with award-winning stories often don't sell as well as those with straightforward power fantasies), but I've seen a few people do a great job of this, such as the 'Truth' ambition in Sunless Skies. That game separates your quests into different categories and has clear victory conditions, so you know if you're going to leave threads unfinished. It also provides a very weighty, powerful, and conclusive finish to the final story. I feel like Sorcery! 4 also had a very satisfying ending. This game, Heaven's Vault, was not bad at all with its ending, better than average for sure, but could have been amazing.

Puzzle mechanics

I really enjoy languages. I've studied French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Greek, Latin, Japanese and a little Hebrew, some more than others. So I was definitely up for a challenge here.

As someone who has struggled with many languages, I have to say that the experience in this game is much less like learning an actual language and much more like learning a code alphabet for English. Emily Short, in her review, said "a great deal of Ancient is English in a chiffon-sheer disguise", and I have to agree.

However, this isn't necessarily a negative. Language take forever to learn. I've been studying written Japanese for 3-4 months now and still struggle with basic pronunciation. For the average English-speaking player, learning an actual non-English language would be far too difficult.

So the game simplifies it. 'Ancient' has none of those bizarre ultra-common connector words that can mean so many things (like 'zwar' in German or '就' in Mandarin). Most sentences, especially early ones, follow simple noun-verb-object patterns, with some light prepositions added in later.

Most words are ones that can be easily identified with pictographs. Themes of light, travel, people, fire, water, air, earth, plant and metal dominate the vocabulary. In another distinction between in-game and real-life pictographic languages, there is not a significant 'drift', where everyday words have bizarre derivations based on non-written considerations (like the fact that 'mother' in chinese is woman-horse due to homonyms). Interestingly, the pictograph for 'man' is the same in 'Ancient' and Chinese, although I don't know if that's a coincidence.

Some features are distinctly English, such as the way that past and future tense are conjugated and the use of helper verbs. The game uses symbols that directly derive from modern earth culture, like (Spoiler - click to show)question marks and x's

These features make word-solving easier. Even then, it would be impossible to just begin with a blank slate, make guesses, and hope you're right later. It'd be the worlds' hardest cryptogram and sudoku, a big pile of guesses waiting to collapse. Instead, the game gives you a huge leg up over real-life translators by giving you four options to guess from, 1 of which is always correct. Which every one you pick is indicated by a ? in future uses. Once it's used 3 or 4 times, the game confirms your translation or denies it through your robot or your own intuition. This is probably the main feature that makes the game far easier than learning a real-life language, and it is, in my opinion, what makes it actually fun.

By the end, individual pictographs are all easily identifiable, so the trick is giving you longer sentences with no spaces, so you have to identify words by their structure. The language is very systematic, and I was thrilled to puzzle out some pieces, although some I struggle with, especially (Spoiler - click to show)the difference between a period . and a colon :. It can become very difficult to find the border between words, and you can't figure out new words unless you surround them on both sides with established words. I often had to save longer texts to come back to after I learned more words.

I adored the translation. For me the highlight of the game was finding a huge (Spoiler - click to show)book that never seemed to end. I translated over 20 lines, took a break, delivered it somewhere, and translated more until it made me stop.

As mentioned earlier, the game ended kind of abruptly for me and I had some unresolved translation, but by then I felt like I was going to have to compromise anyway on what I had hoped to achieve in the game. I didn't feel compelled to do another playthrough, but I may try again some day.

Overall

Overall, it was worth the money. I got it on sale. It provided me 16 hours of content and could easily go up to 30 or more, with a large chunk of that being just reading/translating. That's much more than most free/indie interactive fiction. I didn't really like the 3d movement aspects at all, and I feel the ending could have had more narrative weight, especially (Spoiler - click to show)talking more about loops, and the repetition aspect. But the plot still pulled me forward the whole game, and for a language puzzle, it was the best I've seen out there, and the dialog, art, and sound were outstanding to me.

For my star rating system, it was polished, descriptive, had good interactivity, I felt emotionally invested, and I will likely play again some day. Just not today.

This is an Exceptional Story, a part of Fallen London that is available to subscribers or purchasable separately at a higher price.

In this story, you are robbed by two unusual thieves: a pair of sisters of advanced age. You are quickly drawn into their shenanigans, and plot a heist with them.

The main focus of this story is the relationship between the two sisters, and their individual meditations on mortality and age, as well as the loss of ones dear to them.

The heist itself, and your group, is relatively straightforward, leaving more focus to go into immortality. The groups you encounter here are the urchins and the Gracious Widow, with this story giving some chunks of info regarding her that are otherwise difficult to obtain. I'd primarily recommend this story to people interested in the Gracious Widow specifically, or who have considered what it would be like to get a new lease on life in their old age.

This is an Exceptional Story, an additional piece of content for Fallen London that is available to subscribers, or for purchase for an additional amount.

This story centers around a revolutionary (called the Growling Radical) who was essentially exiled from London for a time. He wants to come back and put on a performance that will shock the powers-that-be.

And that's all that really happens. There aren't too many twists in this story; he asks you to help his song, he puts on the performance, and you can influence a bit how things go.

In a recent survey, out of the 100 stories that require money, this story ranked 90th, one of the least popular. But the author has also written a story in 6th place, The Brass Grail, so it seems less like a skill issue and more like just an idea that didn't work out as well as hoped.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, an extra piece of content that subscribers receive and which can also be purchased separately for additional costs.

In this story, you, a detective (as most characters in Fallen London become early on), are asked to track down a missing Dachshund. Your client is a newspaper reporter that covers the Bazaar (a Bazaarine Correspondent).

But soon you discover that you are entangled in a web of espionage. A lot of the story revolves around decrypting messages with seeds you find (this decryption is carried out automatically, rather than solving a cryptogram by hand). You find several people out to get you, and you soon get embroiled into a massive conspiracy with supernatural terrorism and several Masters.

I'm a fan of mysteries, and this game does a great job of setting up several curious and mysterious things that later get pulled back in satisfyingly and surprisingly by the story; kind of like Checkhov's machine gun instead of Chekhov's gun.

Descriptions are vivid, especially of people. The masters are painted vividly, the clay men are humorous, the new assailants and missing people are unusual and diverse, and the locations are creative (especially the sugar factory).

I think one thing that I enjoy about this story (and Chandler's others) is that the player is at the center. Many of the other stories, including recent ones, have you at the edges of some great conflict, where you observe for a while and then make some monumental choice at the end. It's like you're in someone else's novel, but you play the side character who gives good advice at the end and changes the tide.

But in this and other Groover stories, you yourself are the main story. You are the problem for other people, the main driving force of the plot, the center around which other things resolve. Your actions feel weighty. Some other stories by other authors do this, too, like the Icaran Cup or Flint.

Overall, I enjoyed this one.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London. Exceptional stories are chunks of additional content for subscribers which can also be purchased separately.

This story takes a lot of strange terms, some of them very dark. One warning for a kind of content that might trouble a lot of people (even people who usually don't need warnings): (Spoiler - click to show)possible animal abuse. More specifically: (Spoiler - click to show)you can voluntarily choose to murder a sentient elephant and watch it die and get harvested for ivory. This is only a small side part of the story and not the main thrust.

In this story, there is a mysterious band of thieves that seems to be making enormous amounts of money, but without any apparent victims. Your job is to figure out who their victims are.

This ends up being tied to some of the deeper lore of Fallen London, specifically (names of factions it ties into): (Spoiler - click to show)Parabola, the chessboard, and the Red Handed Queen. It has some significant choices that gave me pause, and features a lot of duality, which is a favorite topic of mine to play in IF.

Overall, I would give this 4 stars, except it features a couple of concepts I personally enjoy quite a bit.

This is an Exceptional Story from Fallen London, a piece of additional content for subscribers that can also be purchased separately.

In this story, a group of the Tomb Colonists (older people who have pushed Fallen London's immortality too far) desire to experience true death through the ancient Totentanz, a mystical dance that releases the dead into a dream world.

The dance is connected with the Third City, a predecessor to Fallen London from pre-Columbian America that ended in a horrible tragedy. It's also connected to moonlight, which in Fallen London shows things how they would be, not how they are.

Most of the story revolves around assembling the various parts of the dance. This includes visiting a mad scientist, hunting down a mysterious woman all across London, and attending a high stakes auction.

The concepts are interesting, but some of the interactions feel a little like filler. Definitely a good one for fans of the tomb colonists, though, or Mr Wines.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, a kind of additional content that subscribers get.

This story features a prison with three inmates. The prison, a fixture in many Fallen London stories, is a giant stalagmite that has been hollowed out. There is an infestation of sorts in a higher level, so prisoners are getting moved lower down where there is, unfortunately, less room.

So you are sent in undercover to determine who should be released. The characters are a notorious pirate captain who may actually be a decoy, a retired spy, and a sentient tiger (a not uncommon kind of character in Fallen London).

The writing is excellent overall, but the storyline, I feel, tries to be too many things at once. It's a character study, it's a mystery, it's survival horror, it's political drama, it's romance, and I feel that there's just not enough room in the story for all these threads to be pulled together, especially since the interactivity means that some plotlines won't be followed up on.

This is a Fallen London exceptional story, a chunk of additional story-focused content available to subscribers (or on its own, for a heftier sum).

This story focuses on a new brand of makeup being sold door-to-door in an MLM format, with people recruiting others and getting bonuses for it. The makeup is based on the Neathbow, colors in Fallen London that have magical effects (like forgetfulness, remembrance, dreams, emptiness, etc.).

The collective is trying to disrupt Victorian London society by giving greater power to the lower classes. The establishment is not happy about this.

You become one of the recruits, but you become embroiled in a dispute from the far past. Features cats, royalty, Egypt, a striking main NPC, and the other side of mirrors.

This is an excellent character piece, but that is its only distinguishing quality, unless you are especially interested in social reform.

This is the final German IF Grand Prix 2022 game I played. It's a static pdf that's a gamebook.

You keep track of an inventory, health, money, and time. The main gameplay revolves around rolling dice for combat with slimes and kobolds, as well as, later on, some human combatants.

There are several 'grind zones' where you can fight with enemies and gain wealth as long as you like.

I found the game fairly tough to play as intended the first time through, with only 5 health and a lot of enemies that have a 33% chance to beat them per roll, and losing 1 health per loss. But it was fun.

I felt like the setting was often a bit generic, kind of like a random JRPG (you have villages with inns for recovery, slimes are the main enemy, etc.)

Overall, not life-changing but fun for a short time.