Reviews by MathBrush

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 is a Choicescript game which feels like a streamlined, story-fied text version of some war game like Alpha Centauri or one of those boxed set tabletop games with hex maps (but only in spirit; it's shorter and more linear than those games).

You have stats like energy reserves, fighter pilot strength and fighter pilot numbers, etc. There is no romance at all, and all of your decisions are on how to manage your fleet, its strengths and its political positions.

I enjoy simulation games, but this one had a few flaws that prevented total enjoyment. I had trouble deciphering why some of my actions led to some of my skill changes. One complaint I've had with a few Choicescript games is that it can be difficult to tell when your stats are being tested vs when they are being changed.

Another issue is the lack of narrative surprises. For me at least, everything was telegraphed from very early on and never really changed. I read something about tips for writing heist movies and novels once that I think applies here. Paraphrased, it said, "Either the audience knows the plan ahead of time or the plan works perfectly, but never both at once." There just wasn't enough dramatic tension.

Fortunately, the strategic elements were engaging and well-thought out. Overall, worth playing if you know what kind of game you're getting into and enjoy that genre.

I received a review copy of this game.

This is the 'old school' Choicescript at its best, like Choice of the Dragon. This is a power fantasy stretching over decades from your time as a student to (in my game) your final question to the legendary Dragon Sage.

The game is set in a fantasy version of China. The author is a blackbelt in Shaolin Kempo Karate. I wondered about cultural appropriation a bit, but the game turned that on its head near the end in an enjoyable way.

You have quite a few stats, and you can get them very high. Following your stats lets you win several fights. There are other challenges where you need to play to your strengths, but I found that consistent roleplaying let me solve these challenges the 'right' way every time, as opposed to a lot of other games I've seen where you have to just guess what the author's thinking.

There were several romantic options in this game, but I didn't have spend much time with them, as I chose an arranged marriage and devoted most of my time to monkly things.

The game isn't super long but it felt like a complete story arc with a significant investment in the overall story. I look forward to reading the other games by the same author.

I received a review copy of this game.

Choice of Games started with Choice of the Dragon, which was a great game but pretty short at 30K words. From there, it's grown to where there are now games over 1 million words long. In the last year or two, though, they've commissioned two shorter games as a sort of free sample for their omnibus app (those games are Sky Pirates of Actorius and Zip! Speedster of Valiant City).

Besides those three games, this is the shortest among all Choice of Games titles at 56K words. It's also one of the earliest, the 6th game ever made.

I think it suffers a bit from early experimentation, which produced some amazing games and some that were more lessons for the future.

This is a very funny game, don't get me wrong. I enjoyed trying to keep my tenants from demonic rituals or getting possessed. But some parts really show their age.

For instance, there are only three main stats in the game: one relationship stat (with your boss, non-romantic), your Ruthlessness, and your Activity level. These, along with your income and work-life balance, are the only things visibly tracked by the game.

This hampered the classic Choice of Games scenario where you can strategize your statistics, making difficult choices between them. Instead, it felt more like a branch-and-bottleneck twine game, with exploration and trying to find 'the right option' in each case. Those things aren't bad, but it's not what I was hoping for here.

Also, the story kind of puts a snarky and competitive viewpoint on you, and I wish I had an option to choose not to be like that. But those kinds of options are the things that make games longer, and again, this is one of the shortest.

Gavin makes great games in general, though. He's written several Exceptional Stories for Fallen London and Hana Feels is one of my favorite hyperlink games, and one that's touched a lot of people.

I received a review copy of this game.

This game has some very unusual features for a Choicescript game. But I'll get to those in a second.

Like Treasure Seekers of the Lady Luck, this is a Choice of Games title where you find yourself abducted by alien pirates, met with a few friendly faces and others out to get you, inducted into the party, and sent on a heist. Both are named after the ship you find yourself on.

This one is a bit shorter, with 6 chapters to play through that go by relatively quickly. There is one romance, as far as I can determine, and one major mission you go on.

As opposed to Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck, which had a crew of very diverse aliens, this game has humans (mostly), making it a bit harder to differentiate between the crew members.

As for the odd features, I had a feeling when I was playing at first that the game was intended as some kind of intelligent test. It had a lot of pass/fail logic and math puzzles at the beginning, and it included math conversations that (as a math professor) I felt were worded in intentionally confusing ways.

To my surprise, in a later chapter, you actually do take an intelligence test, quite a long one as well. It was pretty frustrating to work through and get every question right only to be stymied by a low relationship check later on with the person I'd spent the most time with.

There were a few stray coding oddities (I received an achievment twice, and the Choicescript code for your significant other was left as {so} instead of ${so} at one point, so it displayed incorrectly). But the intelligence puzzles were technically impressive, and I could see several people purposely seeking out this game as perhaps the most puzzle-heavy 'official' Choicescript game I've played. (The Race is a Hosted Game, meaning it wasn't vetted through the long Choicescript process, but it also contains numerous puzzles).

This story had me in the beginning and slowly lost me over time. I was pleased with the overall result, but it didn't have staying power for me.

To begin with, this game was all the Arthurian characters, but with Welsh names, like Bedwyr for Bedivere and Emrys for Merlin.

Also, for the first half of the game, it seems like a non-fantasy, more realistic version of King Arthur, with Merlin being basically just a Roman-educated scholar and troublemaker and the Sword in the Stone just being a symbolic trophy laid on a table.

It offers you romance early on, and has some good stat variability (I put all my stats in Violence, Bravado, and Christianity/Rome).

But all of that changes in the later part of the game. I encountered only a few romance options, and the realism took a sharp left turn into (Spoiler - click to show)wolf-demons and spirits, and somehow all of my stats got cancelled out into one big neutral mess, all almost exactly in the middle. I've never had that happen in a Choicescript game before; I'm certain it was from my own actions, but it was very odd.

The game has a lot of good features, such as the distinctive Celtic feel and a habit of doing omniscient narrator sections in italics.

I received a review copy of this game.

I've been approaching this game and review with some trepidation. I've known Joey Jones for quite some time and admired his work (including the excellent Sub Rosa and the short but sweet Andromeda Dreaming). I was also aware that this game, like my own, was shorter and less-discussed in the forums and reviews than many recent Choicescript games. I was worried about writing a negative review for a game that took a great deal of effort from someone I respect.

I was pleasantly surprised by this game, though. I think I understand why it's less talked of by the fanbase. The best-selling Choicescript games are decadent games where there are no wrong choices and no consequences, power is yours to grab, a half-dozen people are interested in you romantically, and ultimately you have power over everything. These games aren't bad, but they have common themes.

This game goes against almost all of those things. You are essentially a bounty hunter in a grim London. You have very little money (or a lot of debt). You are frequently powerless. Romance is scarce. Each attempt at solving (or committing) a crime has a high chance of failure, and often there is only one right path to victory in a given situation. Your actions often lead to brutal deaths, and there are grim reminders of the harsh conditions of 18th century London everywhere.

But I found those same features intriguing, especially after playing a few silly-hijinks games in a row. The writing is historical and ornate, like water from an oaken bucket. The setting and language are meticulously researched, as is the money system and the kinds of people involved.

It's a fast-paced game. There are 11 chapters, I believe, but they went by quickly for me. However, this game has more replay value than most, due to its difficult puzzles. The fairness of these puzzles is a bit in question; could someone solve them without any prior knowledge? Some of them I did, but not others.

The most enjoyable part of my playthrough was freeing ten people from prison to join my gang, and learning their backstories. The most disturbing part of my playthrough was trying to decide whether to help the family of a condemned man to kill him faster or not to end his suffering.

I received a review copy of this game.

You know, I've found a pattern with Choice of Games titles. On quite a few of them, the first chapter or two is pretty dismal, almost to the point where I don't really want to play any more. But they've always paid off in the long run.

As someone who's written one of these games myself, I think I know what's going on. I had never written longform fiction before, only parser games. But the standard in non-interactive publishing and Choice of Games is to write the first chapter first and keep going, getting paid as you hit milestones.

For me, that meant I approached Chapter 1 as inexperience and untalented as possible. By my final chapter, I had 2 years of writing experience and study under my belt. My first chapter is, frankly, hideous.

When I write parser games, on the other hand, I write the whole game at once, starting with a skeleton and expanding it. The opening scene is often something I add at the very end when I realize it needs 'something more' to kick it off.

That might explain why this game, Choice of the Ninja and others have such flat openings that don't connect with the rest of the game. On the other hand, experienced Choicescript writers like Hannah Powell-Smith or experienced fiction writers like Natalia Theodoridou have strong opening chapters.

I bring this up because the opening of this game stinks. I only had one choice that affected my main stats (I think you can affect more stats if you play it right, but it was odd), the computer was a real jerk and it felt flat overall. The humor seemed fairly dumb, intentionally.

As I played longer, I got to go on interesting missions, I got caught up in the storyline, it was fun modding my ship, and the humor improved. All of the annoying parts of the beginning turned out to be important plot points in the end.

This isn't the strongest game in the Choicescript lineup, but as an entire game, it was actually fairly satisfying. It kept me guessing right up till the end and had good plot twists. I still don't really like the idea 'jerky computer companion', though, but I think some people will like that. And it feels longer than other games from its time period.

I received a review copy of this game.

Edit: The point where I started enjoying the game was when it let me fulfill my desire: I always wanted to be the element xenon.

This is a fairly-well put together Twine game with background sounds. You are driving down a road late at night, and you need to abandon your child in the woods.

The writing was descriptive and the game was fairly polished, but it felt a little short for the heavy themes being developed, and many choices lead to early deaths, making it more of a gauntlet structure.

As a small, self-contained Twine game, though, I think it's successful. Maybe I just wanted a longer and more involved version of the same story?

This game is part 2 of the 3-part Claw, Shadow and Sage series.

I really enjoyed the first game, and this game lets you import your save directly, with a lot of different opening scenarios depending on how you ran the last game.

This game opens with a couple of chapters of a jailbreak sequence, a genre I enjoy but which sees little play in interactive fiction.

Once you escape, you (in my playthrough; it branches a lot) joined a camp of essentially outlaws trying to survive in the wilderness.

As opposed to the brutal Colonel Williams in the first game, the standout character in this game is Maker, a werewolf scientist who stays in her human form a lot more than she ought to and seems to be around anytime trouble starts.

I look forward to the final game, when it's released. This game is very replayable, and has several romances with adjustable levels of detail in your relationships.