Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

I was warned ahead of time that this game was different than the others in the series, and that's definitely true. It feels more like an intermission of the series as a whole or a denouement of the first two games.

The first game tells the story of you leaving home, meeting everyone, and getting your soul stone. The second game has your friends finding their stones and culminates in a raid on the enemy base. Both of these feel like a full 'act' to a larger story.

This one doesn't quite feel like that. There's a lot going on; you've found the revolutionaries against the high king, and yet again you get chances to trust or distrust them. There's a lot of time recuperating. Everyone reveals their darkest past, even you, and there's some library and magical artifact research about the history of the Dragons.

While it's shorter and less full than the other games, it does take the time to relieve a lot of dangling plot threads, especially the lingering 'backstories' threads. It allows the player to process everything that happened to them and their loved ones, and introduces your Soul Stone as more of a character.

I would not enjoy this as a standalone game, but as part of a longer series, it makes sense. Writing big games is hard enough; writing a series of over 1,000,000 words is an immense chore. Given that this is the third of five planned books, I suspect that readers will look back from books 4 and 5 and see that this book was a good breather (a lot of long-running plot heavy media do this; manga for instance, often do time skips or training arcs after heavily dramatic episodes).

So, overall, I'd say this entry gives me good hopes for the series as a whole, even if this particular episode didn't have a strong self-contained plot arc.

I liked this sequel better than the original game. In that one, you were a frail weakling protected by four big powerful love interests. I enjoyed it, and enjoyed the romance aspect (which was the majority of the game).

This game builds on those strengths and adds more. After obtaining a soul stone in the first game, you now are quite a bit stronger, able to directly steer events and take charge.

I liked the interactivity. Rather than focusing on success and failure of skills (which did exist in some form, especially when choosing how to attack), the game features more strategizing, especially 'who do you spend time with' and 'who do you trust'. There are several strangers, friends and foes who have propositions that you can accept or decline. There are definitely 'failure states' but the game did a good job (to me) of making a failing, struggling story just as interesting as a winning one.

Plotwise, we spend a lot of this game gathering the other soul stones and preparing for a raid on the evil Vampire Lord to rescue our friend (I only played one path, so there may be more variations). Like the first game, there are so many options that pace feels a bit slow when it comes to the plot, but big when it comes to people and characterization.

I'd say this game/series is best for people that want the experience of camaraderie/ a large group, and the feeling of becoming more powerful over time.

This is a popular Hosted Games from a few years ago, the first part in a long series.

The idea is that there is a powerful King who is a deathless vampire in possession of a Soul Stone and who desires to have the others. You, on the other hand, are simply a runaway from a village, judged for who you are (there are a few backstories available, this is the one I had).

While you are escaping your village, you find two strong, bold men and two powerful, battle-ready women who will do anything to protect you and help you, even putting themselves in danger. This is good, because you are quite possibly the wimpiest protagonist I have ever seen. I felt like the main character in the gothic novel Mysteries of Udolpho, fainting at a moment's notice. My character passed out from exhaustion, possession, getting hit, etc., got entranced or pinned down on multiple occasions, and had to be rescued over and over.

That's okay, because my big buff adventuring party was there to catch me in their arms as I fell, and to stare at me in concern, and to tease me with nicknames.

It was actually fun. Wayhaven has a similar vibe. I enjoyed being protected and romancing my big dragon woman NPC. It gave me ideas for future games; instead of focusing on failure when missing stat checks, to have your ROs save you, so you can choose to play as a strong person or as a helpless one.

This game doesn't really have that choice, you're helpless most of the time.

You might notice I didn't mention the main plot much. That's because 99% of the game is RO interactions. The eponymous soul stones only make appearances near the very end.

This game is just part 1 of longer ones. I've long noticed that WIPs and unfinished series are really popular in itch and Hosted Games culture. Having played more recently, I genuinely wonder if its because (besides WIPs being free), the open-ended nature of unfinished games and sequels lets people imagine a great sequel or ending that will almost certainly not be satisfied by a real one. The hope of one day having a great fulfillment to a game is perhaps more enticing to an imaginative reader, and, in communities with close access to an author, perhaps an ardent fan might influence the author into giving them the ending they want.

I'm interested in seeing how the next 2 games play out because very little plot happens in this game. I did have fun with my RO-centered damsel in distress simulator, and I can see why this series is popular.

This Twine game from 2018 takes place on a research facility in Norway. You are a special agent of the Penumbra organization, a tech firm with some connection to unusual or even paranormal technology.

You arrive at a research station to find out that a group of five people was decimated by an explosion involving a radioactive military cache. But everyone at the station is acting suspicious.

The game has a solid storyline and uses choices to depict the player’s changing amount of agency.

I liked the story. The only thing keeping me from 5 stars is that most of its components have been slightly better in several occasions: the setup, the choice style, the css design. But it was satisfying to play and ones read more by this author.

I was provided a review copy of this game.

This game doesn't follow established Choice of Games patterns or standards at all, and for good reason. It was part of a government program to use games to educate others. Its author, Rebecca Slitt, is an author known for the great Psy-High games and numerous Choice of Games-related activities.

But the government asked for a lot of specific qualities in the game: make it short, have less branching, have there be right and wrong answers for things.

There are a series of blog posts discussing this process, and they're really interesting to read. Rebecca Slitt is not Chinese, but worked closely with a team of Chinese individuals who were involved in other non-game components of the project.

The game itself is about a kid in a family of demon fighters. Most of your choices and stats revolve around how you approach family values like balance or respect for elders. There are moments where the game pauses and allows you to self-reflect through text boxes.

I had some trouble figuring out what choices would affect which stats, as a lot of the stats overlapped. As an educational tool, I think announcing the stat changes would be helpful.

I think the education worked. At first, the family seemed really strict, so I rebelled as much as possible. But over time I noticed that they were fair in the 'family first' mentality as they put me first as well, and that when I treated adults with respect, they rewarded me. My character's crush also seemed to like traditional people more. It was an interesting but effective strategy.

As a small side note, I was confused because we lived with Grandpa but the other family didn't treat him like a relative. It turns out that I had skipped a part where we had a roommate named Grandpa as a nickname.

Overall, I think it achieves many of its goals; as a government-funded education tool, I'd give it 4.5 stars. As a game for fun, I'd give it 3.

I was provided a review copy of this game.

This is one of the longest Hosted games, around a million words. It's packed full of characters, scenes, and equipment, with a lot of romances and little vignettes and a lot of visits to bootleg McDonalds.

You are a criminal in this game. You're inducted into a vigilante gang called the Archangels where everyone is assigned a codename themed around angels; you are a Raphael (one of several).

Gameplay is in a cycle where you plan a criminal event, then buy supplies, train, or hang out with friends and ROs, then enact the criminal event. Planning includes choosing people for a team, time of day of attacks, how risky to be, etc. Supplies include a long list of specific guns and ammunition, body armor, vehicles, first aid kits, etc. Training includes numerous skills like tactics, intelligence, accuracy, persuasion, and others. You get a huge number of opportunities to train skills. Hanging out gives you different vignettes with people; picking the same person repeatedly gets you a well-developed story.

The tone varies a lot. On one hand, your group is brutal. They will regularly shoot enemies in the face, including cops, security guards, rival gang members, and even restrained individuals. You can participate in multiple torture scenes.

On the other hand, the story often zooms into comical or farcical nature. Everyone bakes or makes tacos or goes to 'Mike Donalds' to have a 'Big Mike' (you can order from a huge menu; this happens a lot). You can choose not to kill a lot of people (your friends will still kill). People get shot over and over and get healed by a first aid kit. The most ludicrous was (Spoiler - click to show)someone being shot repeatedly point blank, then pinned down, their armor stripped off, then shot in the chest point blank over and over until there was a bloody hole, and they survived. This story has a planned sequel, so there may be an explanation (it is called out as unusual in the game). The zigzag tone was probably the one thing that I didn't like as much in the game, though it did make the violence more palatable.

Overall, the long length makes for a compelling story. Some complained that the 'main 3' characters of the gang (your supervisors) kind of steal the show from you in the latter half; while that's true, you still retain a great deal of individual freedom. It's clear why the game is so big and why the sequel has taken so long to make. I think there's a lot of replay value in the side stories here.

I was given a review copy of this game.

This is one of the lower-rated Hosted Games, but I liked a lot of aspects of it. It uses an open sourced TTRPG ruleset called Blades in the Dark, which assigns a difficulty to every action and has randomized rolls to meet that difficulty. You can fail with a complication, fail, succeed with complication or succeed. Complications raise meters for bad things like dying or losing your current objective. You can pay for better results by acting out flashbacks or by saying you had the right tool all along (which takes up inventory space).

I was a little bummed that this story was presented as a vignette, with 9 short chapters that build up to a big event but don't show the aftermath. I think with different framing it could feel like a complete game; giving it the tutorial setting makes it feel less engaging.

I do like the backstory, a gothic arcane city with a school filled with magical beings, ghosts and monsters. We play as 3 characters with two additional friends. The characters make choices to navigate a tower and retrieve a signet ring for their club, preventing them from getting expelled.

The mechanics had some highlights (I liked the 'Devil's Bargain's a lot) but I often felt like they interrupted the story too often. This is contrast to the last Choicescript game I played (Falrika the Alchemist) which had all story and almost no choices/mechanics. To me, I feel like there is a bit of a war between narrative momentum and mechanical enjoyment. They can work together (when a big choice has been built up the entire game until you finally make the choice, like in Slammed during the final fight), but I felt like in this game they were treading on each other, the big narrative story beats interrupted by choices at inopportune moments.

But I had fun. Each page was fun. I would definitely read more by this author.

I was given a review copy of this game.

I am working on reviewing every Hosted Game, trying to see what makes them popular and not. I started with some of the highest rated (like Fallen Hero) and am now working on the lowest-rated.

Falrika the alchemist has a 2.5 star rating and only 5 total ratings since it came out. What's it like?

This game is 173,000 words, big to me (I generally write < 100K words) but small by Choicescript standards. However, most of those high wordcounts come from branching. Falrika has almost 0 branching. Most chapters are purely linear, with perhaps a choice or two that usually has consequences only a paragraph long.

That means that you read almost all the text in every playthrough, making this game longer to play than even some 1,000,000 word games I've played!

In it, you play as an alchemist who has opened an Atelier. You are sent quests to make items that have a list of ingredients that you can pay for or hunt. Along the way, you get vignettes of other characters having arguments or quests. Then, those characters appear, and join your party.

I was deeply confused by a lot of the worldbuilding, as there were so many implicit assumptions and unexplained phenomena. For instance, there is a level system that is publicly discussed, people are assigned to RPG classes, and Teleportation Feathers that transport you from place to place, and the items in the recipes are hyperspecific (like a 'Mug mark 539' or something) but result in items completely unrelated to what went in. Everything made so much more sense when someone pointed out that it is a fangame of the Atelier series, which has all of these aspects.

The game feels very long. I remember thinking I surely must have gone through 1/4 of the game and then I saw 'Chapter 2'. There are 20 Chapters! It is episodic in nature, so there is essentially no continuity between chapters besides characters joining your party. I did like the Law and Order fanfic chapter. The episodic nature of the game reminds me of a guy I taught creative writing to. Everyone else would try little stories each week or beginnings of sketches of characters, but this guy had an obsession with both cars and Tiny Toons. He would write out episodes of basically 'top gear but with Tiny Toon OCs' where they would travel to a town, pick out an old car, trick it out, race it, and move on. Each one was 10-30 pages of script, and he had over 200 scripts. No overall plot ever happened, and we'd read and critique it during sessions, but none of the critique really changed anything, he just really loved what he did. We begged him to further the romance between two characters, and he did make a slight change showing they liked each other.

This game reminded me of that, just 20 chapters of episodic Atelier game fanfiction by someone who clearly loves the game.

The most biting criticism I ever heard about an author was when someone said, 'He clearly has encountered humor, but doesn't know how it works'. This game feels like the author has encountered and enjoyed video game mechanics, but doesn't know what makes it fun. It constantly tracks the amount of money things cost, but you don't make choices on how to spend money and it's not tracked in stats. It uses hyperspecific quest items you have to get for alchemy, but you have no choice (except in super-rare instances) on what order to get them in or whether you choose to buy them or get them yourself. It offers choices occasionally, as if aware that a game should have them, but makes them completely blind, random choices, like 'Go left or Go right'. It has relationship bars to track stats, but they start at 1% and only go up to 7% or 9% by the end of the game, and they don't seem to have any impact on your choices (you can pick one of out of 4 people to romance, but that seems to come down to a single choice at the end).

All characters have similar voices. Everyone is sassy and makes quips, with most of the humor coming from being random. The author often stops the game to make long statements about social conditions, including social media bullying and several-page-long essays about how parents shouldn't be strict towards their kids. Monsters will do this, with giant slavering dragons bursting out of the ground to stop and say things like, 'Oh, you think you are so good! Self-righteous people make me sick. You probably negatively affect others with your down attitudes!' (not actual text, just the feel of it). On the other hand, it's implied that the setting is low-tech, with the first fast-food restaurant in history being opened (themed on the one in Pompeii).

There doesn't seem to be much logical connection between what characters can do and the way the world works. Sometimes they use teleportation feathers for instant travel, and sometimes they trek over a long time. They invent an instant slimming potion but add 'only use it in addition to diet and exercise!' and have to get it FDA approved and a stamp on it that says 'Not approved for medical use'. What makes it magic? You could just drink water and include diet and exercise and it would make you lose weight. I just feel that the implications of a magical society aren't integrated at all.

The positives of the game are that the length lets you get very familiar with the characters by the end. A couple of the later episodes were interesting, with the gang shootout being the best, I think.

The author states that this was an attempt to put a VN in novel form, and that that explains the long sections of non-interactivity and the short, choppy writing style. I've played several visual novels that I've enjoyed that have quite a bit of real interactivity (besides famous ones, I like the French indie VN La Faille), so I feel like saying it's VN style doesn't necessarily lead to no choices. And the short and choppy text is usually used to to a VN's small text window. Here, with a whole text screen open, I feel like it would lend itself better to larger paragraphs with full line breaks.

Overall, I think that either a more coherent plotline with rising stakes or including the hinted-at mechanics like money and letting you buy things would have significantly improved this game's reception. Several people have stated on reddit that it's not that bad, so people like a lot of aspects of it. It could just be tweaked.

This is the second game in the Fallen Hero series. I'll give a brief, spoiler-free description first, and then dive more into spoilers.

This game has significant branching, so my playthrough may have been very different from yours.

The first game in the series set you up as the former hero Sidestep, a telepath who used to use that ability to detect incoming attacks and 'sidestep' them, but is now (for unknown reasons that are revealed over both games) a villain who uses telepathy to control and manipulate others, including the body of a coma patient that you use as a decoy. Your old hero friends don't know the truth about you, leading to some crucial and stressful decisions when interacting with them.

The first game leads up to your villain debut, while the second one deals with the expansion of your power and the progress towards your ultimate goals. While the first has limited romantic options, the second has numerous options, including villains and heroes, old friends and old enemies, etc.

Okay, into the spoiler territory/my opinion territory.

While I recognized the high quality of the first game, it didn't resonate strongly with me. I generally like upbeat media or 'light conquers darkness despite suffering' media (which is most media). I was never interested in grimdark or villain-focused stories like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. Fortunately, Rebirth (the first game) had enough personalization options that I could be someone that fits my model more (not a full hero, but not a killer of innocents, for instance).

This game, retribution, resonated with me much more, because what we find here is someone that deeply hates themself, that considers themself a fraud, an impostor, and is terrified of friends and others finding out. In some paths, Retribution can barely stand to look at themselves in the mirror.

I have major depression, which I have some support systems in place for, and I also tend to be my harshest critic, so this resonated really well with me. 'Oh, I'm pulling away from Ortega because if she knew what I was really like on the inside she would hate me and it would hurt her and I could never make her happy? Just like real life!' So instead of keeping the game character at a distance and treating it like watching a show, I instead immersed myself in the character and thought of it as therapy (which is easy, considering you go to therapy).

The puppet character is also a brilliant choice for an IF game. I may have said this in my review for the last game, but it makes it a lot easier to identify with the MC for any player, because we, the player, are playing a game as someone else and messing around with romantic options and ethical decisions with few consequences since our character isn't us. Similarly, our character has their own character/avatar that lets them explore relationships and actions safely.

I stuck with Dr. Mortum the whole time despite a fling with Lady Argent. I saw on a poll that Mortum is the least popular romantic option, but I had a great time. Romancing as the puppet and then getting closer together felt like making a throwaway reddit account that eventually becomes your main but you're stuck with a stupid username.

This game felt less strongly plot-driven and more open-worldish with significant threats (usually related to people learning about you). It's not actually open world, it just feels like there's a lot of time wandering around, talking to people, exploring, digging into things, etc.

The main plot points were great, it's like the author sets up "here's how we will manage your existence. Everything is precarious but we can barely make it through and live unless X happens." And then X happens. For me the biggest X moment was (remember I said this review had spoilers?) Ortega seeing me commit crimes. That was more terrifying to me as a player than my character getting in an accident. I know I have plot armor, but Ortega knowing about me could destroy the entire life I tried to build.

Like the last game, there is very little emphasis on failure through having too low of stats (though failure can definitely happen in a variety of other ways). That's got to be something I can incorporate into my next Choicescript game, though I'm not sure how; even seeing a great game like this up close and analyzing it, it's hard to figure out what to emulate from it, what makes it 'tick' or work so well.

One thing is for sure, it doesn't feel like there is 'one true path'. The long development time and high word count is due, I think, to the author taking different paths or character personalities and imagining what a full playthrough would look like with them at the center, so it feels like that's the 'real game'. This is in contrast to my own work and many other choicescript games, where you can, for instance, romance a side character, proclaim love for each other, and then they show up in normal game scenes acting the same as they do when you don't romance them. Retribution avoids that.

I look forward to the future games, but based on what I've seen here, it takes a lot of work to craft the different paths and it could easily be a decade or more before the series finishes. But that's fine; once it's done it's done forever.