Reviews by MathBrush

This game has some great ideas but needs some polish.

In it, you play a tavernkeep in an inn inside a city built inside of a giant hill of ice that is the lair of a now-dead ice dragon. The game opens with a big chunk of encyclopedia-style worldbuilding that is optional. Amusingly, the links you click comment on how exciting and cool the worldbuilding is.

In the game itself, you repeatedly explore a tavern and talk to NPCs with varying results every time. As you do so, you uncover more and more of a mystery.

I love mysteries, fantasy, and surreal things, so this game has a lot going for it. But there are quite a few typos, occasionally raw twine code (I saw 'if(0>0' somewhere), and there was never a real payoff for all the random things. Some of it paid off, but most of the interesting parts of the game seemed to just have no meaning by the end. I wonder if multiple endings could have been better.

Overall, though, I love the concepts, but I think the execution needs work.

This game seems to have been completed as part of a university program, possibly at University of Central Florida. The game list mentors but not beta testers, which would make sense.

If this game was made for a university program, it would probably be at the senior project or thesis/part-of-thesis level. It is a large game, with custom art and a UI designed from the ground up.

There is a lengthy, mostly-linear opening sequence that allows you to customize yourself. This part is an interesting story about how you, a deceased god, have been temporarily reanimated as a statue (a nod to Galatea, which is referenced in both the credits and in the name of the game itself). You go to a house occupied by the president of the 4th dimension in order to investigate your murder.

There is then a much longer segment where you can explore several different locations, some of which have worldbuilding and some have suspects. Some state is tracked in interesting ways.

The game ends with an accusation. You can accuse anyone; the game calls these 'fake endings' but doesn't list any 'true' ending. That, with some other comments in code, leads me to believe that this game doesn't have the full scope the author intended, and it may possibly be expanded in the future.

Overall, I had a very positive experiment. There were only a few flies in the ointment. Perhaps the most obtrusive one was the the '>' symbol used as a 'next' prompt. While keyboard presses can be used to move the game forward, you can also click that symbol, which is pretty small and hard to hit. Then, when you have choices, that symbol appears in front of each choice, but it is no longer clickable; instead, you must click the choice next to it. This led to me 'misclicking' a lot, and could probably be solved by just adding the word 'next' after the clickable '>' symbols and then making that the thing you click instead of the '>'.

The other issues were a missing image (studying the portraits led to a missing link) and maybe some scattered typos (I had the impression, but would have to go back again to check). I think this is a good game, the author seems talented, and whatever program is assisting the production of games like these seems to be doing great.

This game is an unusual format for IF, so it makes sense it was put in Spring Thing, a competition known for its interesting experiments.

In this game you control a 2d sprite walking around a game that has been unexpectedly paused right before the big fight. You can talk to people, asking them about each other, and swap items with them.

Then, you can unpause the game through various means (the easiest being (Spoiler - click to show)giving the Crown of Agency to someone). This gives you a 'what happened to everyone'? ending.

Overall, I found the game charming and some of the interactions pretty funny.

Where I had a bit of trouble is the 'flatness' of the game. Essentially every important choice is available all at once right from the beginning, so if you want to see everything, you have to click through 8 or so people to ask each of the 8 about themselves and each other. If you just want to focus on the other mechanic (swapping things), every swap is available from the beginning, and only 1 or 2 swaps are important in the game itself (not counting the ending).

So for me, there was a very, very long period of just trying everything and not getting any plot advancement or mechanical changes. It was almost like browsing a 'behind the scenes' book for an MMORPG.

There are an enormous number of endings. I found 5 or 6, then got help to find a couple more, but the state space is so big that I felt too exhausted to find every ending. I did enjoy the ones I found, though.

I guess one thing is that, even though all the characters have very different backgrounds and personalities to me, all the text started to kind of run together eventually. I think that's because, like I mentioned earlier, everything's open at once so there's not really a narrative arc to the overall game (except for the one thread involving (Spoiler - click to show)Jimmy). That's okay and it seems intentional, but I was less engaged than I otherwise would have been.

I'm glad this game exists and think this kind of experimentation and fun is great.

Alana Joli Abbott is a prolific Choice of Games author, having written Choice of Kung Fu (a very good game), Showdown at Willow Creek (very short but fun), and Blackstone Academy for the Magical Arts, which I felt had good ideas but less exciting execution.

Also, I had previously played another pirate game (by a different author) from choice of games, "7th Sea: A Pirate's Pact", which I thought was fun but that didn't highlight the exciting parts.

This game, for me, improves on Abbott's other games and on the other pirate game, because it's fun. It highlights all the best parts about the pirate life. We get ghost ships, flamboyant and treacherous captains, refined but insidious Crown operatives, sea monsters, owning a fleet, getting a hook for a hand, etc. Very little time is spent on the trivial or boring.

The stats are great, too. They're clear to understand, you have many opportunities to increase them, and they're clearly differentiated early on.

There are some things I didn't like too much. I tried to get a haunted ship at the beginning, but failed too many checks in a row and lost miserably. But the game handled it with optimism and reassured me as the player that things would be okay despite my setback, and that gave me the confidence to keep playing without retrying.

I'm not sure exactly how much branching there is; the way it's written and the wordcount given makes me think you largely experience the same set of events each playthrough, but the game offers you a lot of freedom in your intent. And there is definitely some branching; I completed the entire game without finding the identity of one of the people in the relationship bars (probably because I refused to work with the Crown at all).

Overall, lots of fun, can recommend.

This is one of the shortest choicescript games sold by Choice of Games. Coincidentally, at 72,000 words, it's longer than any parser game I've written. But in the world of choicescript games, it's fairly slight.

But it uses that time better than most short games. You have a variety of stats that are clearly differentiated from each other during the first chapter, different factions to support against each other, a resource (money) that can be used for many things, etc. There also is a play between supporting science and supporting the wild countryside.

But each thread is somewhat underdeveloped. You play as a sort of private investigator with a single case: finding a missing young woman. This case will take you to the houses of the rich and poor and to the Ute indians, which seem to have been researched fairly well (at least, the relationship between them and the settlers is similar to what I've seen in histories from that time and area).

There's only one case, and romance options only have a few opportunities to interact with them. Your overarching goal evolves a lot in a few short chapters, making the game lose focus.

Of all the < 100K games, though, I'd put this down as one of the best, along with Choice of the Dragon and Choice of Broadsides. I just think that a length between about 200K-400K would have allowed more space to to develop the core ideas.

The one other thing that keeps me from completely recommending it is that the game frequently puts you in spots where you have to pick between using stat A, using stat B, and running away; since there are several stats, this means you often just have no luck.

This game is well-written on the line-by-line level or even scene-by-scene but doesn't know what it wants to be. It starts out seeming like a promising kid's fantasy, then changes to a bit older (you're told that all the patrons at the science society are hot and get divorced all the time because of it), then into more slapstick comedy, with some magical adventure thrown in.

The main thrust of the game is that you saw mermaids as a child and want to join the Marinological Society to study them when you are grown. You need to pick a patron to support you (and the game informs you that patrons are often romantic partners), then you go to the island to look for evidence of mermaids.

Parts of it were actually pretty great and/or funny, while other parts were a bit more weird. Instead of skills you have only opposed stats, and once you pick a patron if you want to please them it determines a lot of the choices you have to make.

There were some big choices to make near the end, and I ended up alone and sad, but at least I kept my promises.

This one was hard to review: didn't like it at first, liked it a lot more near the end, but not sure about it overall. So I'm going over my 5 point scale in hope it helps me.

+Polished: I didn't find any bugs or typos, which is normal for Choice of Games.
+Descriptive: The game was certainly descriptive and vibrant.
+Interactivity: There were a lot of options to fiddle around with: your sound, your relationship with your frequently-annoying brother, whether to sign with a record label or not, going solo. The ending was somewhat abrupt but fit in with the rest of the story.

Some people have pointed out that a few key points are forced on you. In one very late game move (involving relationships) (Spoiler - click to show)you find yourself in a relationship with a famous artsy person. This wasn't a problem for me, as I was pretending to be Paul MCcartney the whole game, playing bass etc., so I was fine dating 'Yoko' and splitting up the band by going solo. I suspect that a lot of the choices I made worked out for me because it was the 'ordained path'. A lot of the reports I had heard from other people seem to confirm that (for instance, the game seems to favor your brother).

+Emotional impact: I had fun. I disliked it at first but grew to like it.

-Would I play again? I feel content with my choices, and it doesn't seem like there's a lot of wiggle room, so I'm not sure I'll revisit this one.

This game has a little bit of history, much of which I don't know. It's a sequel to the original Choice of Broadsides, a navy battle game, but by a different author, Paul Wang, author of some games I enjoy quite a bit (mostly fighting games).

The original game was low in wordcount but long in feeling, spanning an entire career in the navy by having quick narration and choices that could affect months or years at a time.

This game is longer than the original but feels shorter. It is a 3-chapter game that essentially retells a specific part of history of the War of 1812, as described by the author at the end.

I believe it is related to the free games Zip! Speedster of Valiant City and Sky Pirates of Actorius as being commisioned by Choice of Games as shorter games to offer free on the omnibus app. I may be wrong there.

I think that the reason this game feels shorter is that it reads much like the intro to a longer game. Like I said in my review of Zip! Speedster, both games feel like instead of being constructed small from the get-go, it took a larger setup and shrunk it. There are very few possible changes to stats, and the plot arc seems to start slow and never really take off.

I saw a comment on Twitter by Dan Fabulich that suggested the timespan in-game can contribute to a feeling of length in a game, and I think that's true. This game takes place over a couple of months and covers the lead-up, action, and denouement of a single action.

In any case, the historicity was fascinating, but I don't feel this game succeeded in its 'small package' design. I do enjoy the author's writing quite a bit, though, and as a game free on the omnibus app and relatively short I feel that any fan of history should try this out.

This game placed highly recently on an 'underrated choicescript game poll'. It's pretty easy to see why it placed highly and why it's underrated.

The strikes against it are it's size (it's in the bottom 20% in terms of size) and the fact that it is centered on younger kids (Choicescript games that appear to be for kids tend to sell less, including my own).

The good things are the writing, the stats, and the strategies.

Writing-wise, the game has an episodic structure (about 5 mystery cases) and a lot of freedom in how your character can approach them: greedy, secretive, friendly, etc. Each of the main characters seemed fully-fleshed out to me by the end. The finale seemed fairly abrupt, but it makes sense for a game that is more a string of episodes than anything else.

The stats were great. It was generally very clear which stats applied to what, how to raise them, and where you stood.

The game kept it interesting by strategizing. Staying secretive sometimes benefits everyone but sometimes keeps you from getting money or making certain friends. Similarly, having integrity locks you out of many options but feels good.

Some events had risks you could take with rewards or failures that were logical but unknown ahead of time. I like this better than randomness (from playing a random game earlier today), but it still provides some tension like randomness does.

One nice thing I've noticed through playing Choice of Games entries is that they're willing to take chances with games, leading to some nice results like Nebula-nominated games or niche works that appeal very strongly to specific people (like Cannonfire Concerto, for me).

This game, I think, is an example of an experiment that didn't work out too well. Specifically, it relies heavily on randomization. You can train in 5-6 different kinds of pitches like curveballs and fastballs, and then a big chunk of the game is you facing different hitters with you pitches. It lists the chance for each pitch of getting a strike, a 'ball', or them hitting it, and using the same pitch several times in a row makes the batter more likely to hit it.

I appreciate the idea but both gameplay and roleplay-wise I wasn't really feeling it. In general, I just chose the best strike option, although I realized near the end that choose the lowest 'in-play' option was a different strategy. But then much of the story ended up as a result of these randomized choices.

I don't think randomization is horrible, but most games that use randomization well are games that have frequent save points and involve repeating the same tasks over and over (like gambling mini-games, RPG combat grinding, etc.). In this game, with no save points and no second chances, it's rough, and that's playing as a 'power player' (the game's easy mode).

Outside of that, the game has a lot of threads towards interesting ideas but doesn't really pursue them in depth. I did enjoy the freedom to go to a completely different country for a chapter and playing on the moon was cool. The last few chapters have a focus on preparing for your life after baseball and that was by far my favorite part, as you strategize things that might hurt you in one area (like your friendships or future income) but help you in another. Very cool part.

I can't help but compare it to Slammed!, which for me did a better job with making a story about humans. Ironically, my character in Fielder's Choice was very analytical, and when I first tried out sports broadcasting I was told to back away from the stats and focus more on the human element, and I think that this game itself could probably benefit from that advice.

I received a review copy of this game.