Reviews by MathBrush

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.

I've long heard rumours about the quality of this Exceptional Story, and that made me hesitant to play it, as I didn't want to be disappointed.

I shouldn't have worried. This exceptional story is of high enough quality that I thought at one point 'this is the first time I've seen a real story in a Fallen London game'.

Now, that's not quite true, as there are great stories throughout Fallen London and Sunless Skies. But the format usually favors a series of vague allusions that come together in the end to give you an overall impression, although very little is said in each bit.

Cricket, Anyone? is different. It's very large, for one thing. I swear I spent over 80 actions on it, and anxiously waited to refresh my actions throughout the day.

The structure is intriguing as well. Once you get through a couple brief opening storylets, you enter a long cricket match where you make strategic options and, in between inning, investigating the bizarre machinations of the different teams and the trainer.

The story unfolded beautifully; the structure and writing rival a lot of the great sci-fi, fantasy, or modern lit short stories I've read before. There are a series of reveals that individually feel small until you realize what it's building up to and you see that it should have been clear all along. This happens several ways, with the stakes being upped over and over until it's some of the weightiest lore material in the Fallen London canon.

I came in with everybody saying this is the best Exceptional Story ever and was both skeptical and nervous about being disappointed, and I can only say that they were right.

This was a really hard game to rate, as I went back and forth between 4 and 5 stars. It's definitely one of the best Choicescript games I've given 4 stars, and I think the rating comes down to my experiences with it.

In this game, you play a fox in a Japanese-themed culture whose family is slaughtered by a vicious farmer. When you reach 100 years old, you gain the power to be a fox spirit.

Choices in the game generally revolve around your personality (helpful vs demonic is a big one) and whether you encourage war or not. There are several competing goals (immortality, peace, and romance) and I'm not sure you can complete all 3 at once (I ended up with 2).

The writing is engaging, but a lot of it depends on how interested you are in being a fox. Having seen fox spirits as enemies in other games, I found it fun to be one in this game.

I had trouble engaging with the stats, though. I had very high cleverness but kept failing stat checks about knowing things or being smart. Then near the end I realized that most of those checks were for 'worldliness', which was low for me as I was a godly disciple of Inari. Even after I figured that out, though, there were many many times where I had no clue what was being checked or failed things I thought I'd be great at. Part of that is probably because I was trying at first to be a devout trickster, but most trickster options lower devoutness. So I think my own choices led to that lack of engagement.

The game had a great sense of being an animal in the human's world, which is its best aspect.

I wouldn't have minded having stats look higher, too. Since every choicescript game is different, it's hard to tell if you are good at something if you have, for instance, a 65 in that category. But that's just personal taste.

Overall, well-written and a truly fun set of final chapters. It felt large, and reminded me of the setting of Choice of Kung Fu (which I think also featured Fox Spirits; they'd make a fun session played one after the other).

This the third Exceptional Story of Groover's that I've played, and I definitely liked this one more than most Exceptional Stories.

In this one, you become entangled in a slug race which, due to the nature of slugs, takes over a month to finish. In the meantime, you must travel all over London to interfere with the race, investigate the mysterious woman behind the race who always plays tango music, and look into the backgrounds of the competitors.

The game was quite a bit longer than I expected, with an extended opening, three phases of the race with two different activities in each phase, and a long and moving finale.

The rewards were good, the lore about hell and the Carnelian coast was good, and the slugs were excellent. Also, I enjoyed having an option to 'Fight the lettuce'. Definitely recommend this one.

This is the first of four Chandler Groover exceptional stories I purchased for research for my new game (I've played his other story Paisley already).

Exceptional Stories are mini-games built into Fallen London's overarching scheme. They tend to have both in-game rewards and interesting storylines.

This one starts off well enough, though not entirely exciting. It's mostly hunting various monsters throughout London with a lot of Groover-esque mentions of food or eating until you end up finding and interrogating a suspect.

I thought it was a bit short but well-done, and then I discovered that that was only half the story. The rest takes you out of London and uses some unique mechanics, bizarre rewards, and difficult choices.

The Lore was good, the related art and the ideas behind the items given were good. It wasn't as good as Paisley (which makes sense, given the time frames) but is better than most exceptional stories.

Worth playing for the memorable monster in the second half and the rewards, especially if you are an early player (if not, you may be more interested in the Lore-heavy option that forfeits those rewards).

I'm fairly certain this is the largest commissioned single-author interactive fiction game ever released.

80 Days has 750K words, and Fallen London (with over 30 authors) has 2.5 million.

The Hosted Game (another label from Choice of Games that essentially helps authors self-publish) called Tin Star has 1.4 million words, making it a little bigger.

This game is 100% in the Wodehousian vein. You are a rich and fairly lazy young man (or woman) who is, unknown to themselves, about to join one of London's prestigious clubs, the Noble Gases.

The story is told with a framing device where you are in the club, explaining to others how you arrived at your present situation. You have the option to retell each of the eight chapters, essentially giving you free save points.

One playthrough of this game took me over 4 hours, and seeing even half the content would take more than 10 hours.

The content branches quite a bit. In each chapter you generally have 4 or more options on how to spend your time, each of them conflicting with each other. In fact, the main mechanic of the game is constantly sacrificing one of your interest for another.

I found it overwhelming at times. I strove to be a subservient and friendly person who constantly tried to please his family, yet ended up with only middling relations with them and everyone else more or less displeased at me. The game allows for that, though, with very interesting writing happening when you fail. I intend to play through in the future.

I spent a great deal of one chapter at the opera (at the expense of other parts). In real life, I love the opera, so it was a little sad seeing my character found it boring. The references in the game are very funny and thrown in everywhere (I even saw a reference to Shakespeare's Cymbeline, which I didn't expect).

To me, this felt like 4 or 5 games in one. By focusing on all the family events and good moral character, I skipped out on all the chances to be a thief, much of the romance, and much of the club activity, but ended up having fun with my aunt's foster orphan and my lovelorn cousin.

As a final note, this is part 1 of a 3 part series, and so most threads are loose by the end of the game.

+Polish: I can't imagine the awful process involved in proofreading and editing a million-world novel with adjustable pronouns. I found no errors, I don't know how.
+Descriptiveness: The writing is lush and filled with snappy dialogue, clever allusions, and funny asides.
+Interactivity: This game takes the same approach as Animalia when it comes to branching: branch a ton and just write a ton of words for every choice, so every playthrough is different but long. It's the hardest approach, but I really respect it.
+Emotional impact: Several choices made me very nervous, and several pieces of dialog made me laugh.
+Would I play again? Definitely. It's like a whole new game, I might as well. I could be a crazy jerk lady-thief if I wanted to.