Reviews by MathBrush

Some Choicescript games stand out to me in different areas. Choice of Robots has a real sense of freedom. The Martian Job has beautiful wordcraft. The Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck has memorable and original characters.

This game had perhaps the most satisfying story I've played so far. Part of that is my personal tastes. I love mysteries, and Christopher Huang is one of my favorite mystery authors. This game is a superhero game, but it definitely has a mystery feel.

You play as a news reporter who must assume the mask of the hero when your (Spoiler - click to show)twin brother gets kidnapped. You have to face off against three superhero villains to get to the core of the plot.

The story has a definite narrative arc with a good buildup and one of the best denouements I've had in Choicescript games, which usually end quickly.

If I had a gripe, it's in the game having a lot of romantic options but having you start off engaged (though not married). It seemed kind of underhanded, though (Spoiler - click to show)upon replay I felt better about it.

I felt like I had real agency in the game. And Christopher Huang nailed something that I've found lacking in many choicescript games: making failure feel worthwhile. Failure in this game doesn't lead to messages implying "you are bad at this game". Instead, it leads to dramatic tension, the 'calm before the storm.'

Stats aren't superpowered in this version, making this less of a power fantasy. But that makes sense, considering you're a civilian that only recently took up the mask. There seems to be no way to manage your stats to pass every check somehow. But it's okay.

I can see why some people might not like this game. But it has all the things I personally look for in a game.

I received a review copy of this game.

This game is basically exactly what the title promises. It is a sword and sorcery game with dinosaurs everywhere.

Strip away the dinosaurs, and it is polished but generic swords and sorcery. The only real weapons mentioned are swords; there is magic, but it generally just does whatever you want without any sort of system; everyone has a class of some type, either a bard or a ranger or a wizard. The enemies are (Spoiler - click to show)dragons and a necromancer.

It's also oriented towards a younger audience, I believe. The language seems intentionally simple, the romances involve mostly hugging and kissing (which is fine with me). Everything is telegraphed and/or on-the-nose. Although you are an adult, there are segments like seeking admittance to wizard school or looking up info on dinosaurs that are more reminiscent of junior fiction.

None of this is necessarily bad. I think this would make a great Wesnoth campaign, for instance. And it had a definite narrative arc and some great characters. I enjoyed my neurodivergent partner who disliked crowds and touch, as well as my velociraptor Rex.

I had the chance to be evil at one point, and I took it. The game didn't really seem to want to commit to me being evil, but I did anyway, although I betrayed my new ally in the end and sided with others.

This game is currently the lowest-rated game on the Choice of Games omnibus app.

That doesn't correspond directly to quality; the two Nebula-nominated games (Rent-a-Vice and The Martian Job) are in the lower third of the app store, and I enjoyed both of those quite a bit.

In this game, you play as a young heir to a railroad line. As temporary president, it's up to you to prove you can be permanent president. Also, your favor wants you to get married.

There are an enormous number of romantic options (at least 8, I think?). There is also a recurring monthly budget meeting, similar to Methuman, Inc. but less consistent.

An unusual feature of the game is that its difficulty is set by the very first choice, which is not advertised to you directly. It asks if you are ready for the game, which I thought indicated some kind of 'intro to choicescript' or stats explanations.

I'm going to break this one down with my 5 point system:

-Polish: The game is very uneven at times. It swerves between the railroad management, playing with your cat, and romances. I found several bugs, including raw Choicescript code, getting an ending saying I never had my company sold to a larger company when I did, and getting engaged, then having a failed proposal, then having a marriage to the same person all in a row.

On the other hand, it has to be weighed against the games big ambitions. The more a game attempts, the more forgiving I feel towards bugs. On the other other hand, even larger and similarly ambitious games like Creme de la Creme and Tally Ho seemed more polished.

+Interactivity:This is a bit hard to measure,as I accidentally chose the greatest difficulty. I felt like I had real agency. I got frustrated with the money management so I sold the company, and the story let me do it, presumably changing quite a bit. The romantic direction I pursued had several scenes set up for it which were clearly tailored towards just this person. I was able to enter into and back out of anything I wanted at any time (except once when my father offered me a favor; I didn't have the chance to turn it down).

+Emotional Impact: Well, I certainly felt a lot of things while playing. The unevenness of the game blunted the emotional impact, but I was genuinely invested in my character's life and quite alarmed by several developments (in my hard playthrough, I had disasters ranging from passenger to death to industrial sabotage to extortion).

+Descriptiveness: This game is very descriptive. I was able to vividly picture everything. This is perhaps its best trait.

+Would I play again?: Yes. The numerous branches and the different difficulty levels make me want to return to this one eventually.

The original Superlatives game (Aetherfall) is one of my favorite Choicescript games. It provided a tale of a small group of young Victorian superheros trying to survive without leadership and exploring a fascinating world built by the author.

This game more or less puts that at a distance. Your powers and friends from the first game are shoved away. Alternatively, you can start a new character without a connection to them.

This time, you aren't weak, you are essentially an envoy or almost an angel for higher powers. Everyone respects the authority you bring.

This makes the game (as others have sad in reviews and discussion on other sites) that this is less a direct sequel to the first game and more its own standalone game. I agree with that, and will evaluate it as such.

This game has a lot more big politics. The two main threads are a delicate balance between three parties (Earth, Mars and Venus) to a peace treaty, and a series of strange rifts bringing strange and violent people.

The political balance was interesting and delved into worldbuilding. The rifts scenario had a twist halfway through the game that made it far more interesting.

The writing for this game is good, I think even an improvement on the first. I wrote down or screenshotted a few things that I thought were especially good. The love interests in this game are detailed and have their own private dates and side quests.

Overall, as a game, I loved it. As a direct sequel to the first game, pretty good. I would feel comfortable recommending it even to people who haven't played the first one, if they're interested in things like major diplomacy and dating spies.

I received a review copy of this game.

This was one of the most enjoyable Choice of Games titles I've played. You play as a new recruit to a superhero society in Victorian London. It has an HG Wells feel, with brass mechanical creatures, airships, and aliens from each planet in the solar system.

You lead a team of superhero trainees in an attempt to discover the fate of the more trained superheroes, who have disappeared. Your team is very diverse: some essentially human, others from other planets, and another that's quite a bit like you.

The game offers a satisfying narrative arc and a variety of ways to interact. In one part, you can choose between three missions. In another, you explore a house for clues to a combination. In others, you choose how to allocate your assets and can even end up in a courtroom trial.

I thought it was great. Some of the achievments are a bit difficult to achieve, but I enjoyed it immensely, and look forward to playing the sequel.

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 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.

I just wanted to comment before the main review. I plan on reviewing every single Choicescript game. My 5-point rating system is weighted heavily in favor of these games. Every game I've ever seen from Choice of Games is polished, descriptive, replayable, and has some form of good interactivity.

So I don't anticipate giving any number of stars either than 4 or 5, unless there is something deeply offensive in one of the games.

With that out of the way, this game is fairy hefty in length and in content. You play as a young werewolf in a world where werewolves have been hunted almost extinction and forced into an internment camp on the east coast of the US.

Unlike most works that deal with 'other-humans' that are persecuted, like X-Men, the werewolves in this game don't seem to be a code for human ethnicities or sexualities.

Instead, at least in my violence-and-fury centered playthrough, it seems to be an honest attempt to see what it would be like to be a predator, thought sentient. My hypothesis is bolsetered by the large number of friends and others I see online who discuss and write about being sentient animals. The story deals with bloodlust, and in no way does it punish you for violence and murder, treating it as natural for wolves.

There are several romantic options, and quite a few opportunities to act on them.

The worldbuilding is the main focus here. There is an elaborate back story, characters with huge histories (there's got to be a spreadsheet or book of lore kept by the author somewhere), detailed topography (that book/spreadsheet has to have a map attached).

The plot is designed to get you through this worldbuilding and the main plot points. Others online commented that they felt railroaded in this game, and I can see where they're coming from. But I enjoyed the setting and the characters, especially the storyline around the main rival.

I received a review copy of this game.

This game is pretty different from other Choice of Games titles. Its core gameplay is driven by a series of monthly budget meetings, interspersed with an ongoing mystery/action plotline.

You play as the new CEO of of Metahuman Inc., being forced into the position after the disappearance of the previous owner. Metahuman Inc. secretly uses both magic and extraterrestrial technology to modify humans. Unfortunately, for legal reasons, they've lost all their previous tech an rely on you to decide what to purchase next.

The core budget cycle is complex. You can invest your funds into different stock portfolios, or develop new personal enhancements (your main source of income), or invest in research to make future products better.

The 'action' portions revolve around the missing CEO, and include opportunities for romance (I found the romance plotline I chose satisfying). The two intermingle as your business decisions impact your personal life, and your personal goals require you to divert business resources.

The first scene was a bit odd for me, as the game labelled me as duplicitous when I didn't feel I behaved that way, but then it took off into a satisfying sci-fi story. I got a lot of satisfaction out of this game, found the characters memorable, and enjoyed the storyline. Many COG titles feel rushed at the end, as (from my own experience writing them) you have to write so many endings that each one can get a bit diluted. That wasn't the case with metahuman.

I received a review copy of this game.

Edit: I realize now that this game reminds me of Actraiser, which had a sim-portion and a fighting-portion, and that was one of my favorite games growing up. This game definitely ranks in the top third of Choicescript games I've played.

Choice of Ninja was the 13th or so Choicescript game put out, and I found it one of the weakest games at first, but it grew on me as I played.

I happened to play this as I was watching Naruto Shippuden for the first time, and the parallels are easily visible. You play a young orphan raised in a village in the woods, and it starts with you having to pass a test at your school to become a full ninja. There is magic, most of which involves invisibility, but becoming a duplicate is another skill. There are other parallels, like escorting a crotchety old man and dealing with a friend on the dark side.

But in a lot of ways its more realistic. Evil monsters are hinted at but not shown. There's no real magic past stealth magic and duplicate magic. So the over-the-top magical fantasy of stories like Naruto are toned down, and the parallels become less and less as you play.

The last half of the game is where I feel like it came into its own. Other reviewers have said that this game is very linear, and choices don't matter, but I felt like my choices mattered quite a bit when it came to the plans on infiltrating the final fortress. It was fun.

That said, I don't think this one holds up as well as other older Choicescript games, especially when compared to Slammed!, which came out around the same time. Slammed! is in the top 5% of all IF games ever, to me, with a story that has you hooked from the beginning and gut wrenching decisions at the end.

So, as an overall IF game, compared to most games in IFDB, Choice of the Ninja is high quality and worth playing, but compared to other commercial Choice of Games stories, I don't recommend it unless you're playing through them all.