Reviews by MathBrush

This is an Exceptional Story, an additional piece of content for Fallen London that is available to subscribers, or for purchase for an additional amount.

This story centers around a revolutionary (called the Growling Radical) who was essentially exiled from London for a time. He wants to come back and put on a performance that will shock the powers-that-be.

And that's all that really happens. There aren't too many twists in this story; he asks you to help his song, he puts on the performance, and you can influence a bit how things go.

In a recent survey, out of the 100 stories that require money, this story ranked 90th, one of the least popular. But the author has also written a story in 6th place, The Brass Grail, so it seems less like a skill issue and more like just an idea that didn't work out as well as hoped.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, an extra piece of content that subscribers receive and which can also be purchased separately for additional costs.

In this story, you, a detective (as most characters in Fallen London become early on), are asked to track down a missing Dachshund. Your client is a newspaper reporter that covers the Bazaar (a Bazaarine Correspondent).

But soon you discover that you are entangled in a web of espionage. A lot of the story revolves around decrypting messages with seeds you find (this decryption is carried out automatically, rather than solving a cryptogram by hand). You find several people out to get you, and you soon get embroiled into a massive conspiracy with supernatural terrorism and several Masters.

I'm a fan of mysteries, and this game does a great job of setting up several curious and mysterious things that later get pulled back in satisfyingly and surprisingly by the story; kind of like Checkhov's machine gun instead of Chekhov's gun.

Descriptions are vivid, especially of people. The masters are painted vividly, the clay men are humorous, the new assailants and missing people are unusual and diverse, and the locations are creative (especially the sugar factory).

I think one thing that I enjoy about this story (and Chandler's others) is that the player is at the center. Many of the other stories, including recent ones, have you at the edges of some great conflict, where you observe for a while and then make some monumental choice at the end. It's like you're in someone else's novel, but you play the side character who gives good advice at the end and changes the tide.

But in this and other Groover stories, you yourself are the main story. You are the problem for other people, the main driving force of the plot, the center around which other things resolve. Your actions feel weighty. Some other stories by other authors do this, too, like the Icaran Cup or Flint.

Overall, I enjoyed this one.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London. Exceptional stories are chunks of additional content for subscribers which can also be purchased separately.

This story takes a lot of strange terms, some of them very dark. One warning for a kind of content that might trouble a lot of people (even people who usually don't need warnings): (Spoiler - click to show)possible animal abuse. More specifically: (Spoiler - click to show)you can voluntarily choose to murder a sentient elephant and watch it die and get harvested for ivory. This is only a small side part of the story and not the main thrust.

In this story, there is a mysterious band of thieves that seems to be making enormous amounts of money, but without any apparent victims. Your job is to figure out who their victims are.

This ends up being tied to some of the deeper lore of Fallen London, specifically (names of factions it ties into): (Spoiler - click to show)Parabola, the chessboard, and the Red Handed Queen. It has some significant choices that gave me pause, and features a lot of duality, which is a favorite topic of mine to play in IF.

Overall, I would give this 4 stars, except it features a couple of concepts I personally enjoy quite a bit.

This is an Exceptional Story from Fallen London, a piece of additional content for subscribers that can also be purchased separately.

In this story, a group of the Tomb Colonists (older people who have pushed Fallen London's immortality too far) desire to experience true death through the ancient Totentanz, a mystical dance that releases the dead into a dream world.

The dance is connected with the Third City, a predecessor to Fallen London from pre-Columbian America that ended in a horrible tragedy. It's also connected to moonlight, which in Fallen London shows things how they would be, not how they are.

Most of the story revolves around assembling the various parts of the dance. This includes visiting a mad scientist, hunting down a mysterious woman all across London, and attending a high stakes auction.

The concepts are interesting, but some of the interactions feel a little like filler. Definitely a good one for fans of the tomb colonists, though, or Mr Wines.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, a kind of additional content that subscribers get.

This story features a prison with three inmates. The prison, a fixture in many Fallen London stories, is a giant stalagmite that has been hollowed out. There is an infestation of sorts in a higher level, so prisoners are getting moved lower down where there is, unfortunately, less room.

So you are sent in undercover to determine who should be released. The characters are a notorious pirate captain who may actually be a decoy, a retired spy, and a sentient tiger (a not uncommon kind of character in Fallen London).

The writing is excellent overall, but the storyline, I feel, tries to be too many things at once. It's a character study, it's a mystery, it's survival horror, it's political drama, it's romance, and I feel that there's just not enough room in the story for all these threads to be pulled together, especially since the interactivity means that some plotlines won't be followed up on.

This is a Fallen London exceptional story, a chunk of additional story-focused content available to subscribers (or on its own, for a heftier sum).

This story focuses on a new brand of makeup being sold door-to-door in an MLM format, with people recruiting others and getting bonuses for it. The makeup is based on the Neathbow, colors in Fallen London that have magical effects (like forgetfulness, remembrance, dreams, emptiness, etc.).

The collective is trying to disrupt Victorian London society by giving greater power to the lower classes. The establishment is not happy about this.

You become one of the recruits, but you become embroiled in a dispute from the far past. Features cats, royalty, Egypt, a striking main NPC, and the other side of mirrors.

This is an excellent character piece, but that is its only distinguishing quality, unless you are especially interested in social reform.

This is an Exceptional Story, a bonus piece of content for subscribers which can also be purchased by itself at a premium.

This story centers on spiders. There are a variety of spiders in Fallen London, from the sorrow-spiders that hatch in eyeballs to their larger cousins like spider councils or senates, huge beings formed from conglomerates of smaller ones.

This features the spiders of Vesture, a kingdom on the Elder Continent. Fallen London takes place in a giant cavern called the Neath, which has a variety of locales (such as Hell). The Elder Continent often seems to intentionally evoke North Africa as well as Eden, and is connected with immortality and life.

Vesture is a kingdom made of an alliance between spiders and humans. This story examines that connection, entangling you in a royal family's dispute about how to handle the death of a great, vast spider and the fallout that will bring. Family loyalty and tradition vs progress are the main themes.

I enjoyed the story, but felt a little constrained. There are some very meaningful choices (including a permanent companion and very different endings), but I didn't feel like I really shaped the story, mostly witnessing someone else's story and stepping in at the last moment. I prefer the exceptional stories where you take a more prominent role, even if it's all still scripted.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, a kind of content that comes out once a month to people with a subscription, or can be purchased later for a significantly heavier cost.

This story has a quite charming premise. The city of Fallen London is ruled by Masters, hooded, alien figures that each have a different 'domain'. Much of the progress in Fallen London's main storylines centers on the Masters and how much you know about them, so info on them is generally considered rare and precious.

This story focuses on Mr Stones, whose domain is all things beautiful, especially diamonds.

A smuggler needs help with a diamond and Mr Stones. But instead of robbing him of a diamond, he wants you to 'plant' a diamond from the surface. Why? Because (Spoiler - click to show)it's a cursed diamond, one that brought empires to downfall. Specifically, it's the Hope Diamond. Things go wrong, though, and you end up trapped with the smuggler, a furious Mr Stones, and a clay golem-turned-Quaker, kind of like a bottle episode of a sitcom.

You can end up learning quite a bit about Mr Stones himself, probably the biggest backstory reveal we've ever had on him and just about the deepest possible level of lore.

Mechanically, there were options to try to save certain people and whether to trust or betray. It was generally satisfying, and I think this one is worth playing, but overall it didn't exceptionally stick out. This may be due to the overall high quality recently.

This is really a very inspiring game, but I haven't been able to complete it yet due to some weird issues.

You are sent back in time to your grandmother's life, who was Cinderella but able to make potions. You explore a large city, discovering various potion recipes and hidden secrets and memories while making money to buy things for the ball.

The puzzles are engaging. I used a lot of hints, but only because the game is so large; it's generally fair as long as you examine everything.

There are a couple of weird bugs though which the author is aware of but are really hard to fix. These bugs include items sometimes stopping working, making progress impossible. By restarting several times, I've managed to get through each individual stopping point, but never all at once.

This game is, I believe, written in a custom parser that the author has used in other games. It works well here, with elegant javascript integration.

You play as an adventurer/junior magician gathering spell ingredients for you boss. The spell ingredients are all food items.

The map is laid out visually, making navigation simple. Areas vary in complexity from mostly-empty to containing multi-level structures with puzzles in each level.

The primary puzzle-solving technique is inspired by The Wand by Arthur DiBianca. You say a magic spell in your grimoire, and point your wand at something for that spell to take effect. The spell language follows patterns that you have to discover.

I haven't completely finished the game, finding only a little more than half of the ingredients on my own and 4 more with hints, but the game lets you stop at any point, and I've gotten up to an E for Exceeds Expectations.

The puzzles are rich and interesting and systematic, and vary from trivial to complex. I didn't connect on an emotional level, more just skimming the surface, but that's more due to personal taste. Overall, well-done and enjoyable.