Reviews by MathBrush

This game (the first Fallen London Exceptional Story of 2020) deals with an auction at an abandoned taxidermist's estate, where the mysterious Vicomte de V________ shows up (where rumours abound that his reflection cannot be seen in mirrors, that he likes his meat VERY raw, etc.)

Interactivity is unusual in this story, and it seems like Groover is still playing around with new ways of getting interactivity in the Fallen London format.

(Only mild spoilers follow about the story structure, but I'll tag them in case people want to be surprised)

(Spoiler - click to show)You are provided four different new lodgings in this story, each of which you have to move into at different times. In each lodging, there is at least one repeatable story you can use to farm things, as well as an unlimited draw deck that lets you either explore the lodgings or attract the Vicomte's attention. If you attract too much attention (or do it on person), he comes.


Following that, there is a final confrontation and denouement.

The rewards are interesting, seemingly strongly focused on the bone market. I gathered more bones than I've gotten anywhere else in the game, as well as substantial amounts of Nightsoil of the Bazaar and (the biggest thing) (Spoiler - click to show)a Soothe and Copper longbox.

The different lodgings all seem like 'haunted' versions of regular lodgings, which I thought was nice.

I wasn't captivated with this story, but the mystery was a good one, and the finale definitely made me more invested. Also, having a permanent lodging as a reward is also nice.

The overall concept is a great way to take a familiar concept and make it work in the game's universe. It reminds me of Dr Who doing similar things, using sci-fi to explain stuff like witches.

This is not my favorite Groover exceptional story, but not the worst, and definitely better than most other exceptional stories

Here's my score:
+Polish: Eminently polished
+Interactivity: I'm intrigued by lodgings, and seeing them used in this way worked for me. The card deck required some stumbling around to operate, although I suppose all the details were in a handy pinned storylet.
+Descriptiveness: The lodgings were distinct and unique, and the Vicomte himself was disturbingly written in conflicting ways that left me unsettled.
+Emotional impact: Mostly unsettled and surprise at the ending.
+Would I play again? I would definitely be interested in seeing other paths.

This is a good game overall from a great author, so I have no doubt that most people will enjoy it.

I had a good time with it, but I wished for a bit more. I love the works of Kreg Segall, and I love Shakespeare, but I felt like this game missed both my favorite parts of Kreg Segall and my favorite parts of Shakespeare.

You play the child of a local nobleman who has arranged your marriage to a much older noble. Your father is in ill health and also in ill temper due to predations by forest bandits and advances by rival nobles.

You escape (in cross-dress) to the forest where shenanigans ensue.

I found the ending satisfying, but the start felt a little slow and bloodless to me. I admire Segall's game design most when it offers a variety of competing goals and interests, while I felt like the only real goals here were 'deal with your dad' and 'find someone to love'. A lot of the story felt constrained to hit certain plot points (such as having to eavesdrop on your father, having to remain in your disguise at points where it would be logical not to, etc.).

These choices would make sense if they were forced by being faithful to Shakespeare, but very little of the play is in the game. Only lovers in the woods, the existence of fairies, the play and a few side references are in it. But we miss out on the warm-hearted buffoonery of Bottom, the complex feelings that come from desperately loving someone who always spurned you but now woos you under the influence of a spell, the contrast between the ridiculous and silly poetry in the villager's play compared to the intelligence of Puck, the mystery and elegance of the fairies in general, the silly puns and slapstick humor of the villagers, and the nobility and grace of Theseus and company.

So I guess that while this game is satisfying, I feel that it just missed out on too many good opportunities from the author and the source material.

I received a free copy of this game.

This is a great game. I've played 4 Kyle Marquis games now and have noticed a pattern. They tend to be very large games with intricate worldbuilding, have high stakes (usually involving the creation or destruction of the world), have a large cast of characters and feature some kind of alternate tech timeline.

In this game, you are in an alternate world where the Byzantium Empire is dominant during what would be Victoria's reign instead of the British Empire. The world features more domes than spires and more bronze and gold than iron and steel.

This world is very different than ours, with explicit Gods and a history numbered in the thousands of years. But an experiment changes everything, plunging you into prehistory.

There, you enter a village where you can play a sort of 'city simulator', deciding to focus on arts or defenses or trading. In the meantime, you have to deal with rival civilizations, some of them non-human, and with the threat of an enormous silver mountain in the sky coming to destroy the world.

The game did feel a bit bogged down in the middle and the climactic battle at my village was over just an action or two faster than I thought it would be, but it was fun. I also had fun investing a lot of relationship time with Vecla when I though she was an old worm before discovering that wasn't the case.

Finally, this is a very long game. Took me well over 2 hours to finish, reading fast, and it is definitely replayable.

When I was a kid, I read tons of Dragonlance books. My brother and I owned over 100, read them, laminated them.

I always liked them better than Forgotten Realms because the Dragonlance characters were more human. At the beginning of the Dragons of Autumn Twilight, everyone is pretty low level. Raistlin doesn't even know fireball.

But the Forgotten Realms books were always super over-powered. A character murders gods and becomes a god. Elminster goes to a fireball competition and explodes a fireball the size of the sun. Stuff like that.

This game is more like Forgotten realms. You play as an incredibly powerful archmage (much more powerful than a level 20 D&D character) who is ready to ascend to Godhood, but someone is sabotaging your plans. You have to find a way to keep yourself alive and in power long enough to ascend (or to take over the world, or many other goals).

There is intense worldbuilding, with dozens of characters, creatures, spells, artifacts, etc. in a traditional RPG style setting (dragons, plane shifting, wizards, bards, knights, etc.)

I'm usually all over this kind of thing, but as I said earlier, there a couple of flaws for me.

-The narrative arc is flat. There's no real growth; you start out as super-powerful, then become more super-powerful, then even more super-powerful. By the later chapters, it makes more sense, and feels better, but the first few chapters made me feel like I had nowhere to go and no real stakes since I started out having already 'won'.

-The character is pretty much evil or close to it, but I didn't really get a motivation for it. I can compare this game to Endmaster's Eternal in some ways, a game I recently played that also has a notably villainous PC (although Eternal is much darker overall), and even though Eternal had an even more evil protagonist, it's motivated more because you're a servant sworn to work for a master. In this game, you answer to no one and nothing. Many of your choices are just evil for evil's sake. I guess it's the difference between being an anti-hero (like in Eternal or Champion of the Gods or Metahuman, Inc. or even Megamind) vs being a straight-up villain.

But these are minor quibbles. The writing is clearly good. The game is very large, one of the longest (in playtime) that I've played for Choice of Games, and most of the problems I mention go away after the first few chapters.

So if you play the demo and enjoy it, it only gets better from there and is worth the price.

As a final note, the game does a brilliant job with changing the stats screen to reflect your situation, and I wish there was some 'best stats screen' or 'coolest Choicescript trick' award I could give the game for that.

This is the last 2020 Adventuron Christmas Jam game I played, and it was pretty good.

There is a large map and several independent puzzles to solve, as well as many red herrings that add to the interactivity instead of taking away.

You are an elf who has to find a present Santa lost before catching up to all the other elves on vacation.

Everything was competently coded. I had a little trouble occasionally guessing verbs but not a great deal. The art and writing are good, but I feel like everything was 'good' but could go even further somehow to be 'great', like it's missing some final ingredient. But I'm impressed over all!

This is a smaller game with about 4 rooms but a lot of tiny puzzles.

The girl you're baby sitting has gone missing and you have to find her. On the way, you find that Christmas needs your help! But just for a second.

The puzzles are fairly small and mostly well-clued. The game makes it clear that searching things in various ways is the path to success.

The achievements are perhaps the best feature, basically puzzles that would otherwise be unfair are not part of the main story, instead giving you achievements to reward your curiosity.

This Adventuron game has more words than any other I've seen. It's firmly in the Wodehousian vein, with a butler named Gieves and hijinks caused by upper-class British misunderstandings.

It was quite clever and parts of it were very funny (including the ending). It suffered from a certain problem that many humorous games have, which is that the author clearly had some very funny solutions in mind, but that requires several leaps of intuition that aren't always fair.

Overall, though, this is a hefty game with good writing and clever puzzles. I think this would have done fairly well in IFComp, placing in the top half.

This is an Adventuron Christmas game where the Reindeer are knocked out by your 'special potions' that Santa keeps in barrels. You have to recruit someone else to help!

The art is superb here, adding a lot to the game. The puzzles are a mixed bag, including a logic puzzle and a visually-based minigame where you have to guide pigeons across windy terrain.

Overall, I found the writing to be funny. The whole thing felt a little light, which makes sense since I suppose additional time went into crafting visuals. But it's worth a fun and silly 30 minutes, and I didn't run into any implementation issues.

In this brief Adventuron game, you have to set a trap for Santa to make him give you a present.

In writing, graphics, and gameplay, this resembled nothing more to me than a single puzzle (or maybe two) in a Scott Adams game. Everything is stripped down bare, and you have to get things exactly right for the game to recognize your answers.

It works overall as a puzzle, but here is my score:

-Polish: Everything is bare-bones.
-Descriptiveness: Same, the writing is minimalist and mostly just lists of present objects.
-Interactivity: I found the main puzzle frustrating, not in figuring out what to do, but in figuring out how to communicate it to the parser.
+Emotional impact: Despite the above, I found it fun to solve.
+Would I play again? It's brief enough that it could be fun to check out next year.

This is perhaps the most complex Adventuron game I've seen.

You play as a falsely-accused elf who has to find 7 missing presents. There are two main areas (an outside one and an inside one) as well as an endgame area. There are numerous NPCs, as well.

This game has its own share of Sierra-type-logic (such as there being 4 different sharp-bladed instruments, each of which can only be used on one thing) and adventuron implementation issues (the biggest being error messages not disambiguating between default statements for correct commands on non-interesting present items and correct commands with non-present items).

Fortunately, there are helpful hints in every room. Even with that, though, I had to comb through the itch pages (I found three different ones: the regular page, the submission page, and some comments in the community page for the jam) to finish off the game. Art's very good, and fortunately no puzzles require the art, for people who are visually impaired.