Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

B-minus makes surreal poetic games where you have to puzzle out the meaning, if there is any fixed meaning.

Some of those games work really well for me and others not as well.

This one from a few years ago has a navigable 'map'. It's made in raconteur, and gives an effect similar to Twine.

The map is a house with three wings, each with two rooms, each with an object inside.

If there's any way to combine the objects, I haven't found it. The hint of a coherent structure paired with incoherent elements confused me more than if there weren't any structure at all, kind of like the famous 'Cow Tools' Far Side cartoon.

+Polish: Worked great, looks good.
+Descriptive: Very well-written.
-Interactivity: Not sure what's going on.
+Emotional impact: Some good parts in here, I liked the grave dirt and the opening.
-Would I play again? I'm not sure what to look for here.

The Road to Canterbury was nominated for a prestigious award (the Nebulas, I think) in writing, and it deserves it. I felt it was 'okay' at first but as it went on I found the plot, characters and details to be great. It has extensively-researched details on life at the time of Chaucer, making the setting a delight to explore.

This is a good game, so everything else I'm going to talk about is just personal opinion and about my own tastes.

I felt that the choices in the game often sacrificed autonomy for a predetermined path.

That's not to say there aren't a lot of choices. You can bring a squire and knight together or bring them apart. You can seek to learn more about your brother's death, pursue a romance, fight duels, buy a racehorse (which I strongly recommend), etc. And your biggest choice, to encourage war between France and England or not, has many shades of nuance to select from.

But frequently it felt like the game forced my character into specific plot points, not by external circumstances, but by presupposing my character's motivations and desires.

This feels like it makes the overall storyline better (since there are assured plot beats) but it felt weird. For instance, near the beginning, you begin to overhear snatches of an interesting conversation. Without any choice on your part, your character decides to risk discovery by trying to eavesdrop. You get to pick how to do it, but you can't choose not to do it at all, even if it doesn't fit your character to that point.

Many such situations come up where it's just assumed your character will do something pre-determined.

I also had some issues trying to determine whether choices were based on sanguine (vs melancholic) or excess (vs temperance) or piety or generosity (vs avarice). For instance, if if you save money by drinking water instead of ale when a friend wants you to drink with them, is it melancholic (avoiding a large group), temperate (not drinking), piety (since you're only supposed to drink on feast days), or avarice since you aren't spending money? Sometimes it was clear, but sometimes it was confusing.

So for me personally, on my 5 point grading scale, I'd give it:

+Polish: The game is smooth and works great. Editing is perfect.
-Interactivity: Some of the stats didn't work well for me.
+Descriptiveness: Awesome. No wonder it won an award.
+Would I play again? I think I will.
+Emotional impact: The last few chapters were great emotion-wise. Lots of satisfying conclusions (for the specific threads I was chasing).

I've been exploring the ChooseYourStory catalogue a bit and taking the advice of previous commenters to check the content warnings so I don't complain about things I should have known about ahead of time.

This game was really interesting and really hard. I don't usually review games without finishing them, but I think it might be a long time before I beat this one (unless I just use the walkthrough).

You play as someone who wanders into a Walmart right when it's taken over by terrorists. You have to explore the various departments and collect items to help you and others escape.

I've probably only reached 1/3-1/2 of the game after a few hours and checking the beginning of the walkthrough. There are tons of items that you can pick up and manipulate, and the game is defiitely 'cruel' on the Zarfian scale, meaning you can irrevocably mess yourself up without knowing.

It reminds me of some of the Infocom games like Deadline or the one where you're a scuba diver, where you have to hit things in just the right sequence or you'll miss out on something important.

There's some grammatical and writing inconsistencies, which is why I'm doing 4 stars instead of 5, but I would definitely recommend this to fans of games that require careful note taking, experimentation, logic, and a lot of replay.

This game reminds me of nothing more than picking up some epic fantasy series like Wheel of Time or Thomas Covenant, one of those books that has a huge scope, intricate backstory, and tons of characters. It's a different feel than standalone fiction, and I haven't found a new series like that in a while.

Seeing it in Choicescript is great. This is a very large game. I remember thinking "Wow, this game is gigantic, took me a long time to play," and then realizing that I was just near the end of Chapter 2 (out of 4).

It's split into four chapters:

In Chapter 1, you establish your backstory and much of the worldbuilding and start your rebellion.

Chapter 2 is a long chapter spread out over weeks where you try to survive over a difficult winter. I had a very hard time with this, as I wanted to not steal, but it meant letting people die. Really good tradeoff in goals here, love to see this kind of interactivity.

Chapter 3 involves meeting a diverse group of people and discovering problems in your midst.

And Chapter 4 is the climactic battle, from planning to execution to aftermath.

This game has many ways to fail, but mercifully has a 'redo this chapter button', which I was glad for when I died on my first run through Chapter 4.

Playing the first chapter will let you know right away if this is your kind of game or not. What I love about this game is how the stats are completely just there to show the game remembers you, and passing or failing stat checks is less about solving a puzzle or getting rewarded/punished and more about building a story based on your choices.

Relationships occupy a lot of the game. There are characters with great depth who can never be seen if you just kill them off bat. All of the main characters show up enough that they get meaningful development and you know exactly what kind of things might offend them or please them, and they frequently are in conflict so you can't get everything you want but still feel good about your choices.

I liked this game, but fair warning it does take a long time to play. The author intends on writing 4 more books but it stands well on its own, especially when compared with other good Choicescript games that are essentially '1-shot' TTRPG adventures. I liked those too, but this is more like a whole campaign with solid backstory.

Every commercial Choice of Games entry I've played is well put-together, interesting, and felt worth my while. So when I rate them, it's usually on intangible personal feelings that may not translate to others.

This game has a cool setting. You are one of three apprentices to a master in Venice near the end of the 15th century. This game features encounters with several of the Medici's as well as Machiavelli (who is very pleasant) and several references to an exiled Leonardo da Vinci. Care is taken in presenting the setting. For fans of this setting (similar to that in Jon Ingold's All Roads) or alternate histories in general, I can absolutely recommend the game for its writing and style.

Mechanically, I have some questions with it. There are many stats, the bonuses to stats are small, stats are frequently decreased, most stat checks require multiple stats at once, and there is significant overlap in stats making divining the correct choice difficult (such as Boldness being an opposed stat and confidence being a skill, or charm being an opposed stat and guile being a skill).

I think these design choices were intended to increase the difficulty and prevent player boredom, something I struggled with in my own choicescript game. But the net effect was a feeling of frustration for me. Also, it's hard to know how to raise some stats. I took every opportunity to be romantic with Dangereuse and ended up with a 53% in the relationship, too low to get their support vs the machine.

I feel like games do best when, if you know what you intend to do, it is clear on what you must do to succeed in it; I think Emily Short and other early parser theorists stated a similar principle, where if you know the solution to a puzzle it should be easy to type it in.

I think instead of throwing stat difficulties in the way, it's better to do what games like Choice of Magics or Psy High do, where perhaps the person you love turns out to be a horrible person and you have to do things you hate to be with them, or you can be as powerful as you want but will accrue a specific penalty that is known long ahead of time.

I guess that's a counterpart to delayed branching (a principle in Choicescript where your choices have effects far down the road): being able to strategize.

Anyway, that's a long aside that's more about a class of games (including this game and my own) than any individual one. For this specific game, the trouble with stats made it harder to make plans and I ended up turning to the Machine to solve all my problems. Fortunately, the ending was well-written.

This is a pretty long retro-future game where you play in a post-apocalyptic world where deep mechanical tech underground is spilling up and a city is split between a corrupt government, a struggling revolution and outside infiltrators.

It has some rough patches and the narrative arc didn't feel well-defined, but its intricate worldbuilding and strong characters pushed it up to a 5 star rating for me.

My introduction to Kyle Marquis was through Vampire the Masquerade: Night Road, which (in addition to many excellent features) had a surprisingly detailed flight of vehicles.

This game also follows that pattern, with multiple advanced flying vehicles described in intricate detail (including the eponymous Empyrean, an experimental airplane that most of the game revolves around) and several motorbikes as well.

This game has deep, deep worldbuilding. There are multiple layers to the government, each with their own agents (often embedded into each other). There are multiple versions of tech, between the revolutionaries, the city itself, the rival city, your father, and the deep underground. It comes with numerous references and explains itself in game.

I was a little disappointed that the stats stayed relatively low, but I think that's because I accidentally spread them out too much early on. Also, I didn't invest anything in physical stats (instead focusing on cunning and leadership), and there are numerous areas where you have to be fast, strong, or a good shot. Fortunately, the game was graceful with failures and I was able to adapt.

Apparently, from reading older reviews, the game has gone through a big revamp. Originally, there were half as many main stats and they were opposed (like cunning vs leadership). Many people felt it didn't work that well, so the game was changed and re-released. That explains the proliferation of stats and the oddities of which ones are used when. I definitely think the current system is better than the old, and I can't help but wonder if the experience with a ton of diverse stats helped the author in writing VtM: Night Road.

The narrative arc could have been stronger. Instead of a long rise and climax, it felt like it plateaued after the first couple of chapters, with events of similar direness and complexity occupying the middle parts until the very last chapter or two. The game felt long, and the final chapter for me felt like a good wrap-up.

Overall, I was pleased with the characters and enjoyed my ending. I was a little confused, thinking that Wesh was a preteen, but that went away quickly. As a fan growing up of pulp sci-fi and hard sci-fi, I enjoyed the worldbuilding the most.

This game is polished and well-done, but I think I admire the coding more than the game itself.

You play as an executioner of some sort in a dark castle. This castle seems to me like a prototype of the one in Eat Me, with a similar cast of bizarre creatures and vaguely reminiscent layouts. But castles in games tend to be similar, so it's probably in my head.

You're required to find a head for your master in this game, so you have to explore the castle, finding what you can and trading it for better things.

The complexity comes from two things: the styling (boxes around progress links, none around 'aside' links, glowing words to represent runes), and the way that each character has a unique reaction to each item you carry.

+Polish: Very complex and smooth.
+Descriptive: Rich writing
-Interactivity: While there are some clues, it felt mostly like searching over and over for the right person to talk to.
+Emotional impact: It was unsettling
-Would I play again? It was good for a short game, but I think once is enough.

This game was a bit different than I thought it would be, and I wasn't sure how some parts of it would work, but it gelled well together and I had a great time with it.

Specifically, I thought this would be mostly about a giant mech war. Instead, this is mostly about a 'fish out of water' scenario where you, an accidental time traveler, end up in the 12th century Middle East (Aleppo, Jerusalem, Jericho, etc.) in an alternate world where perpetual motion exists and powers giant mechs.

The game covers a lot of ground, from finding your place in the world (I became a squire) to dealing with intrigue and romance (I romance a knight named Ygrite) to mech combat and a surprisingly complex castle management simulator.

Each part felt just a bit thin, but as an overall whole it worked well. What's best is the way the stats tied in well with roleplaying. In a lot of Choicescript games I have to constantly check the stat screen to have any chance of succeeding. In this game, I just picked a character type I wanted to be and the options were so natural I didn't have to check the stat screen until the end. I failed a few times in reasonable ways, but was able to achieve most of my goals.

So I can definitely recommend this as an overall great experience. The combat isn't the best combat, the management isn't the best management, etc. but the overall way it comes together is some of the best I've seen.

As a side note, it includes several things I don't see much in Choicescript games, including a choice of religions and how religious you want to be and a variety of options related to drinking and food.

This is the last of Groover's exceptional stories that I've played. This one is very large, taking me up to around 80 actions to complete.

In many ways, this mirrors Cricket, Anyone?. Both stories are quite large. Both have fairly silly premises (a last-minute cricket player replacement vs curing a rhyming disease with a mushroom-hunting pig). Both end up uncovering a side-conspiracy that would be a main theme in other stories but is only a sideshow here (Benthic vs Somerset in Cricket and the truth behind the auction in MKfaP), and both end in a wild descent into non-reality uncovering vast truths about the Bazaar.

This is a great story. It has a lot of customization (you have several companions with different dialogue snippets and must choose between which ones to take), interesting mechanics (like bidding at an auction and a portion told entirely through red-bordered cards), connections to past actions (Poet-Laureate gets checked here, as does knowledge of the Khanate, connections to the Gracious Widow, and much much more), and great lore (you can learn intriguing details about the fall of each of the five cities).

I prefer Cricket, Anyone? marginally, but this story is better than almost all others. Flint was my touchstone for a long time on what a good side story should be, and it's intended to be much bigger and wilder than the Exceptional Stories, but I think this story plus Cricket, Anyone? provide better storylines and lore rewards than Flint (although significantly less financial rewards). Worth buying at the full Fate price.

This game is thought-provoking, and I don't know quite how I feel about it one way or another.

At its core, it's a character generator with 10 options per choice. It's very short, with more than half the play time (for me) dedicated to the achingly slow text in the opening few screens.

It's posited as a generator for the Lost Boys from Peter Pan. However, it always ends up with a darker twist:
(Spoiler - click to show)you are actually creating white supremacists.. The game ends with a scene from your character's childhood, now with a different shade of meaning from the opening scenes.

Production-wise, this is excellent styling, music and css animations, the kind you'd expect from the author of Babyface.

Content-wise, I'm torn. On the one hand, the feeling I get from the game is that (Spoiler - click to show)it 'others' the white supremacists by making them seem like creatures very different from us, the reader, someone with with we have no connection and no relation. I worry that that hides the deeper issues, as I feel like most white supremacy is hidden inside otherwise-normal looking people, and by relegating it to the 'frightening other' in media we neglect looking within ourselves. On the other hand, the narrative is designed in a way to humanize its characters and track their journey, so maybe I'm wrong.

The other issue I think about is the way some things are lumped together. For instance, I know (Spoiler - click to show)many white supremacists, if not the majority, use religion as a pretext. But not all people espousing Christian values are supremacists or terrorists; in fact, white people are less likely to be Christian than either black or hispanic people in the US.

Both of my objections are framed from my own perspective and stem from my own interpretation of the piece, so I can't say it's anything related to the author's intent. Still, it was interesting.

+Polish: It was very polished.
+Descriptive: The text is well-written.
-Interactivity: The slower opening was a bit offputting, and the many menus made me feel like I somehow had less freedom from so many indistinguishable options.
+Emotional impact: It made me feel a lot of different things.
-Would I play again? Technically I did play again once, just to remind myself before writing the review, but I think this is more or less a one-shot game.