Reviews by MathBrush

This is a shorter Choicescript game from 2017. In it, you play as the avatar of the recently-dead god Wolf, in a pantheon shared with Spider, Gazelle, Eel, and Bear.

The game draws on mythology from several different cultures. It is fairly quick, but has several replay options.

Most of the game feels like a spiritual journey, like an ancient Odyssey. You constantly run into the avatars of the other gods, and you are essentially judged on which God you become the most like.

Simultaneously, you can choose to ally with a group of anti-God soldiers.

There are actually quite a few Choicescript games where you play as a powerful champion of the Gods and must decide whether serve them or destroy them (the most well-known being the aptly-named Champion of the Gods). I have to admit, it's a genre I'm a big fan of.

The stats in this game are communicated fairly well, although it can be hard to know when a stat is tested vs changed. There were some story threads I feel could have been deeper, but I feel that Avatar of the Wolf succeeded for me both as a story and as a game. It has the single-mindedness and simplicity that made me like Sword of the Slayer.

This was a fun game, and I thought about giving it a 5, but it has a few issues. But it's not that bad, and if the subject matter interests you, I'd go for it.

In this game, there are 20,000,000 or more 'moreaus', or sentient creatures resembling mammals which are the result of genetic experimentation. They are second-class citizens.

You, an ordinary citizen, have a rude awakening when your building is bombed. You have to navigate between two gangs, the cops, the press, and a ton of people (both human and moreau) who are very attracted to you.

I enjoyed the game overall, but it does have its problems. Pacing is one of them. In the beginning of the game, a bomb goes off so you stand outside of your apartment. That event takes up 3 of the 10 chapters just by itself. There's just not a lot of meat to the chapters, with only 1 or 2 significant things happening in each (but with each event having a lot of detail).

The characters are both expressive and generic in a weird way. They were memorable and distinct in my mind, but don't really express themselves strongly about things and don't have much backstory.

The stat gains and checks are reasonable (although there seemed to be a lot of 'cunning' checks which isn't a listed stats) up until the end, where as others have said it gets really hard. I died, but the epilogue was just long enough to be satisfying, especially as my death fixed essentially every problem.

This game contains explicit sexual scenes, strong profanity, animal-type violence (all of those in moderation) and many mentions of both drug use and suicide.

In this game, you play as a 'thrall' (a member of a servant caste) in a community where gryphon riders are trained for war against wrym riders.

One day, a gryphon mom rejects a small egg. You hatch it and raise it, which is against society rules.

Most of the game is about hiding and raising the gryphon, with a slightly smaller chunk involving the aftermath of being discovered.

The game has a very small number of stats for yourself (with several more once you get a gryphon), but manages to be fairly confusing with the stats. It's pretty hard to know which stats are being tested when.

The game itself is oddly toothless. It sets up some worldbuilding but doesn't do much with it. There is tension between 'thralls' and 'keepers', there is a war, but what is actually going on? Everything is so vague. Are you 12, or 16, or 24? (That may have been answered somewhere, but it's hard to tell). One second you can be what seems like a highschool kid, and another you can scare a guard by saying you've killed people. The wyrm riders are different from you, but how? Do they speak another language? Wear weird armor? You are in the wilderness for months. What does that do to you, mentally and physically?

Nothing really gets answered. And like other reviewers here and elsewhere have noted, there's not really a climax; you kind of wander around until the end, with the ending final scenes very similar to scenes from the middle of the game in terms of tension and result.

All that said, the best parts for me were the ones interacting with the griffin and training it. In that respect, this game reminded of The Last Monster Master, but with less systematic training and more individual personality.

This game was pretty good overall, but had some sticking points.

You play as a Broadway theatre owner in 1849. You mingle with many historical figures such as Horace Greeley and Herman Melville.

The main challenges are to balance the demands of the people with the demands of the elite; to work with the mayor and the real government or the Know-Nothing gang; to befriend or destroy Hamblin, the rival theatre owner; discovering a supernatural mystery; deciding what kinds of plays to run; and handling romances.

I thought the opening chapter was fairly boring, but by the middle I was invested in the story and found it entertaining.

Stats were a mixed bag. It was very confusing telling the difference between acting and showmanship, between authority/negotiation/producing, between streetwise and notoriety.

The game very frequently forces you to make choices then pick why or how you do it; I was writing down every time it happened but it was too frequent. It's especially jarring since these forced choices can directly contradict your play method. For instance, (Spoiler - click to show)I worked with Ned Buntline and the gangs from the start, with no interest in the 'fancy' part of town. But the game forced me twice to confront Ned about things, and forced him once to attack me, despite us doing everything together and me keeping his secret. Similarly, you are forced to accept a possible spy into your midst, you are forced to rescue an attacked news person, etc. The effect of all of this was to feel a lot less in control of the story. Of course, it makes the overall narrative tighter since the author is in control of most things you do, but it was frustrating.

The stats are very meagre, as well. After the first chapter, I had only 3 skills which were above baseline, each by only a single boost for a total of 3 boosts. If I had chosen differently, I could have boosted only 2 skills with the other boost going to an opposed stat (which could later be erased by other choices). The author solved that by making essentially every choice in the game winnable if you have even a single boost in a stat, but made it more difficult by obfuscating which stat helps with what.

Overall, though, it was a positive story experience, and made me interested in early New York.

I enjoyed playing the Heroes Rise trilogy by Eric Moser before [edit: it's been pointed out to me that Zachary Sergi, not Eric Moser, is the author of Heroes Rise; I would never have noticed without someone pointing it out!], so I was interested in seeing this game. I knew ahead of time that it's a 'mini' game, free on the omnibus apps. designed to be a bonus to whoever downloads those apps (together with another 'mini' story, Sky Pirates of Arctorus by Kyle Marquis).

Overall, I think this game is quick-paced, charming and fun. You play a super-fast hero who is getting old (sadly, their 'old age' is pretty much the age I am now) against an enemy called 'The Sloth'. You're married, but to a person who cheated on you, and there is another romantic option (but not one you are required to pursue). The other main things you can do are getting a shoe sponsor deal, running for mayor, or training your sidekick.

This game was good, but it felt like a regular 100K-200K story that had parts removed instead of being built for a smaller game. For instance, it has well-defined, clear stats and clever use of resources, but the opportunities to build and use those stats are limited, and there are quite a few (I think 6 major skills). Contrast this to the even-smaller Choice of the Dragon, with 2 major stats (although Choice of the Broadsides has 12, so it's not hard and fast).

Another 'big game made small' feature is the numerous story threads that aren't given much treatment: your relationships with spouse, sidekick, romantic option/rival, and the CEO of a company; your background with the Sloth; handling the outbreak of other minor villains; etc. I feel like if each theme got twice the screen time it could have been stronger.

I don't have any suggestions on how to write shorter games (I know a lot of great authors have tried it over the years to varying success). This game wasn't bad, and is free with the app, so if you're thinking of getting into Choicescript games, it's one of the better free options on the omnibus app.

This is a polished parser game entered in the French IF Competition. It comes with nice feelies and runs on retro devices as well as in-browser.

You wake up in a dungeon with four exits, wearing an empty scabbard and some armor. In each direction, there is some kind of threat: a trap, a monster, a guardian, etc. and you have to defeat them all in turn.

I thought this was fun, but also very hard. It includes some forms of interactions which I consider unfair, like having to die to progress. I was very happy the author provided a solution! (although one line of it provokes an error, but it's okay and doesn't affect the end result).

The author seems to enjoy IF a lot and I look forward to any future games.

This is another game from near the very beginning of Choice of Games, and I think this one works well.

It's different from more 'modern' games in that each playthrough is short and there are a lot of ways to mess up or die early. So if you screw up everything your game can be significantly less than an hour, with a 'successful' game being a lot longer.

But the shortness of the dead-ends go well together, since it encourages replay and (more importantly) this game has a lot of different paths to success. You can meet completely different characters in different playthroughs. I'd say about 30% of my two playthroughs was repeated material.

I enjoyed how the stats were clearly differentiated from each other. Although, the game kept relationship stats hidden. There doesn't seem to be any romance in this game (though sex is mentioned). Each stat gets used in a variety of ways.

The characters all have different interactions with each other, some of them detesting each other.

All in all, it was short and fun.

Well, if you enjoy games where you can play as a hard-drinking, cheating professor, stealing artifacts, snorting lines of coke and hitting on students, this is definitely the game for you.

That's not really my style. This is an early choicescript game. In the beginning, they had 3-4 pretty great games in a row, but they didn't really know what worked, and that resulted in a string of very short games with weak use of stats, unfulfilling scenes and hit-or-miss humor that was often miss. After that, they hit their stride with some games that are still awesome to this day (Slammed! and Choice of Kung Fu, for instance).

That said, this game is still well-polished, with few, if any errors, and the interactivity generally worked for me. I had to sweat over a few choices, and they had actual consequences.

At 68,000 words, this game is a tenth of their most recent game (Luminous Underground) and a little less than half of the average game.

The story is about you, an archaeologist, hearing rumors of an ancient Incan city, the 'City Lost in the Clouds'. You have to dodge Columbian militia and ancient spirits to explore the city, and then safely make it back.

This game was recently in the 'Most underrated Choicescript games' poll, and was second to last (before Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck, which I actually like). If you play even 1 or 2 choices of the demo, you'll instantly know if you like it or not.

This chooseyourstory game has a setup that's a lot more complex than most. You have an inventory, stats you can train, etc.

You are an ordinary man in an ordinary job when a mysterious package changes your life. You're taken to a spy agency and given a dangerous mission.

The opening segments have an inventory with clickable links, but later on that seemed to disappear in favor of choice-based inventory (like when choosing what to take out of your trunk).

The pacing is good, with a strong overall narrative arc. Some of the endings happen a lot sooner than others (I think there are at least a couple dozen endings), so it can be worth backing out and trying again, even if you get a good ending on the first try.

Here's my five-point scale:

+Polish: This is a pretty complex game and I didn't run into any bugs/spelling errors.

+Interactivity: I really felt like I could dig in and strategize and try different things. Even with unlimited undo's, you can get so far into some branches that it's hard to cheat the system, which is nice.

+Descriptiveness: Most of the characters are just spy stereotypes, but the level of action was good.

+Emotional impact: I felt interested in the game and enjoyed seeing what came next.

-Would I play again? On the one hand, the game has a lot of endings and different replayable parts. On the other hand, I feel like the whole thing could use just a little bit more 'something' to be completely compelling, like a really cool opponent or a love interest (or someone who's both!). I know that's not very specific, and maybe that already exists in one of the other branches, so this is totally subjective.

This game probably recreates my childhood experiences of reading CYOA books more than any other.

The chooseyourstory format is adapted more to CYOA books. Most Twine and Choicescript games have shorter text and more frequent choices that frequently meet back up later because it allows you to reuse a lot of text and code. Making a game where every branch goes somewhere different is usually too tedious to code, although some people have done it (like the game Animalia or Porpentine's Myriad).

But a lot of chooseyourstory games seem to get over the problem of needing to write a lot of text by just writing a lot of text, ending up with games with hundreds of thousands of words.

This game is meant for kids, I'd say between 10 and 13 or 14. You are sucked into a fantasy world where you meet strange wizards and adventurers.

There are few choices in this game but a ton of text in each one, and each choice branches a lot. Some are dead ends, but the engine lets you go back and retrace your steps quickly, which the game seems to encourage. This makes the small number of choices make sense, since each replay goes quickly, like paging through an old CYOA book.

I enjoyed it overall, and it gave me some ideas for my own writing.