Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game was entered in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam for 2026.

I came in expecting a large, sprawling game, as most of the authors' games have been, which gave me a crumb of trepidation as I've had less time recently. Fortunately, this one was intended for beginners and so is fairly brief, with the time and work going into polish rather than size.

This is a very trope-y, old-fashioned Native American adventure in the vein of Indiana Jones (and old black and white serials and such). Cultures are mixed together (including Egypt and Native American cultures) and there is a distinct lack of respect for native people, to the point that it feels like the character doesn't see them as human. As I discovered, this is intentional to the piece and is addressed in what was to me a satisfying way.

The puzzles were satisfying and relatively straightforward. I got stuck twice, once because I for some reason kept typing (Spoiler - click to show)SQUIRE instead of SQUIRT and didn't notice it, and again because of what I think is an intentional soft-lock where I used an item too early (fortunately, I had saves, and the game warns you that you may need to save. Even if I hadn't, it wouldn't take too long to replay to that point using knowledge of puzzle solutions).

Overall, I found this game fun. It wasn't super-descriptive, but that could be a bonus for any second-language speakers or young readers just learning about text adventures.

This Hosted Game places you in the role of an extradimensional incomprehensible monster who is forced into earth in the body of a small infant, forced to hide from a horrific hunter.

It then skips far ahead and focuses on events in a small town between you and a cast of characters including your sister and her weird 'friend', a single mom waitress, a mysterious drifter, a cult leader, and a grungy store clerk.

Much of the story revolves around your choices to act more human or to act more like your true self, as well as the ever-looming threat of the hunter.

To me, this felt a lot more like an 'official' Choice of Games game than most Hosted games, with its 4 or 5 opposed stats, frequent adjustments, frequent pass/fail checks, and, like a lot of the Nebula-nominated CoG games, a more-or-less set 'main' storyline with the player's actions more determining their internal state and relationships.

The characters are well-developed and you have a lot of scenes with them. I focused on romancing Roach, and it was one of the more well-developed and in-depth relationships I've seen in Choicescript games. There were a few chapters where I really wondered, 'what on earth are we doing here? Just kind of chilling?"

I had expected the game would deal with a sense of alienation a lot, but as others have mentioned, that's not a huge focus.

I think this will most appeal to people who like nuanced and morally ambiguous romantic partners, good writing, and either very powerful or weak/afraid protagonists (ironically, we are both here).

This game has you face the most pernicious of puzzles: checking out at the grocery store.

You have a wide variety of items you have to balance, include the screwdriver of your friend Nils (this is a joke that I wonder how it would be translated; screwdriver is 'bohrmaschine', this this is Nils' Bohrmaschine, a pun on the name of famous physicist Nils Bohr).

You navigate the various buttons and weighings and so on. Then the game gets weird. (complete spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)Trying to leave, I found myself entering again, starting the game over again. I feel like that was due to the screwdriver which acts as Chekhov's gun and Schroedinger's Cat at the same time. So I tried again, this time changing things up, since in my first playthrough I scanned a deposit slip and ended up with a negative balance, but this time I didn't. Also, this time I saw a portal and entered it, which gave me a third playthrough. This time I didn't scan the deposit slip and didn't leave anything on the 'waage' (scale?). I was able to leave normally, although I had to enter my pin twice.

This game really shows to me how close the relationship is between westerns and samurai movies (and how much they consciously imitated each other), because it has so much in common with older western films: the old, bitter gunslinger hired to escort the city slicker, always running into outlaws who tested his quickdraw, making acquaintances with local prostitutes and having the one friend from a race that's persecuted, with a lot of bar scenes and the sense of unwashed clothing.

This game focuses mostly on the story and the setting, leaving choices to vary what is written in that set storyline rather than having significant branches that are left unplayed on each route. You are a samurai escorting a young scholar as a bodyguard while simultaneously stepping in to help when called. Partway through the game, you get a big mission you're asked to take care of which I believe extends through the entire series of books (the sixth is coming out soon).

It's a gritty game. It's listed as having mature themes; you kill tons of people and an animal or two in the book, and one of your stats is 'perverted'; it doesn't go into sexual detail or close details (that I found), and doesn't go into huge detail about the blood, so in some ways I found games like Evertree Inn (a fantasy tavern mystery) more mature than this game, but gore and detailed sex aren't my preference in games, so I was happy with that.

I had heard controversy before about the game sexualizing minors, and that is true to a certain extent and definitely feels unnecessary. The minor you're accompanying is set to the gender you like to romance, and, when a girl, is described as being barely over 4 ft tall and having some baby fat. Depending on your choices, your character can be described as teasing her and making her blush by discussing your escapades with older women, and there's a part of the book where your character ogles what turns out to be an (Spoiler - click to show)older version of her. So it kind of skirts around the issue, but it's unpleasant. It's like playing a game where a character keeps thinking about eating his boogers or has the option to pretend to eat a booger. Even if there's no booger eating in the game, why have it at all? It's so small that just 3 or 4 paragraphs would need to be changed to take it out of the book as a whole. It reminds me of reading David Edding's books as a kid where a 40 yr old guy marries a girl he protected her whole life once she hits 18; as a kid I thought, 'huh, I guess that's something that happens in books for adults' but later found out that David Edding locked adopted kids in cages in the basement and beat them so maybe that was just the author being weird.

The other characters are pretty interesting. There's some fantasy racism baked in (your character is racist by default, part of the 'gritty' aspect) and the character of the unfavored race (called 'kondos') is a well-written and interesting nuanced character with a balance of danger and vulnerability. Your companion, when they're allowed to be a kid, has a real fun blend of being obnoxious and helpful, powerful and clumsy.

Overall, the game is like red onions, a very strong flavor that is overpowering but can enhance the flavor of the rest of the dish (being the Choicescript stat system and setting) as a whole.

On a side note, the Japanese is a bit better than life of a sensei, but even as a weak japanese learner I can tell a little bit is off. A mountain pass is called 'pasu' in katakana, and I knew there is no way Japan, a mountain country, wouldn't have a native word for it, and I was right, they're called 'toge' 峠. Similarly, the lion temple was just called 'laion/raion', the romanization for lion, which is the right word for the actual animal, but as a mythological temple I figured it would borrow from the chinese word for lion shi, and looking it up it seems like 獅子 (shishi) would probably be more appropriate.

Anyway, long story short, if you want to play as a greasy drifter with ambiguous morals and a penchant for trouble, this is the game for you.

This game has an impressive 22,000 (!) ratings on the Hosted Games app, more than any Choice of Games official title and only surpassed by Wayhaven.

It's one of the older games, too.

It's similar to Life of a Mercenary, which is set in the same world and comes afterwards.

Despite the smaller wordcount of this game, it is quite large due to re-use of text and terseness of description.

You play as a young boy who is in awe of a famous knight name Sir Robert who is known for travelling the land, fighting in tournaments and earning 'boons' from mayors and governors who run them. You, along with your rascally best friend, sneak out to watch him.

Together with a ragtag band of friends, you enter a tournament open to kids. Eventually, you become Sir Robert's squire, and grow and train with him.

The game includes a war section, then a tense part involving Sir Robert. Finally, you become the main hero, able to wander around the map for 360 days, making money, buying items, and entering tournaments.

This builds up to the final Great Tournament, ran by the King Himself, who is willing to grant any boon to the winner.

There are a lot of romantic interests, including the royal princess and some scrappy fighter women.

Combat is generally taken care of for you, with occasional strategy choices. There are a lot of stats that you can boost. The time leading up to the actual great tournament has the most options.

Like the other game by this author, I found the characters interesting but the setting and locations rather dull. I can't picture any town; the castles could be made of crystal or mud and I wouldn't know. The only focus is the characters. And with that, it succeeds; this is a fun game and I would be happy to recommend it to others.

But, I feel like Choice of Games has some strong rivals for this kind of play. Vampire the Masquerade: Night Road comes to mind, which is just as strong as this in terms of stats and characters but more polished in terms of sensory writing.

Overall, I was glad I played!

Most good Choicescript games at 250K words are either fairly linear with a long story or very branching with a short story, and this is the latter.

This is a mystery game, unusual for Choicescript since the format revolves around replayability and playing a mystery twice generally spoils the mystery. This is partially solved here by having many separate mysteries that intertwine and by having a customizable character.

You can choose between different races like elf, dwarf, brownie, etc. and you can focus on skills like magic, combat or perception. I went as a brownie with full magic. The game was very generous; I never ran out of magic despite using it at every opportunity.

The cast has several very distinct characters, many of which can be romanced. I went with Daisy, a gnome. The game has sexual encounters but provides few details, focusing more on conversation.

Each chapter is brief, playable in 20 minutes or less for me. You can choose where to go, what to do, who to talk to, etc. The last two chapters involve more direct conflict.

Overall, I was impressed by the real-feeling conversations, the ability to keep a central plot despite strong non-linearity, and the well-thought-out setting and real-feeling stakes.

This is a rare Hosted Game that is entirely comedy-focused.

You play as an English teacher (a 'sensei') who goes to Japan, lured by the promise of a lot of yen (you didn't really understand the conversion rate, unfortunately) and a fun time living in a new place.

You meet your principal, teacher, and students, and get to it. Most of the game involves giving lessons or watching other people give lessons and interacting with your fellow teachers and students. The romances that I noticed were all with teachers and staff, many of whom are European (including a French woman that I romanced and a Scottish man who was somewhat of an enemy).

There are a lot of funny parts. The game is very self-referential, calling itself out for using fake_choice and having an extended sequence at a party where the principal urges you to reset the game while everyone else is deeply confused.

Some humor didn't land with me due to my personal experiences. A long-running gag is that the principal has bad English, not conjugating his verbs or declining his pronouns, and his writing is in dialect (so like writing 'za' instead of 'the'); in addition to this, he is long-winded. He sometimes has perfect English, but only when quoting what I presume are the author's favorite movies (which come up as tests all the time, to see if you the player are familiar with them). The choppy English grated on me for four unrelated reasons: 1) it didn't sound to me like the way people learning English talk, since they generally memorize several useful phrases perfectly and mess up on unfamiliar things instead of constantly getting the same mistake all the time; 2) I've had really great friendships with lots of East asian people who struggled with grammar and so it was weird to see our player be dismissive of what feels to me like an endearing trait; 3)every time the player talks to the principal, you have the chance to speak in complex sentences and vocabulary to purposely confuse him and feel superior; 4) I don't really enjoy reading 'dialect' where the spelling of words is changed to match the pronunciation. Ironically, I found that the Japanese used in the game (untranslated, but written in roman characters) showed many more characteristics of a weak language learner. Only very basic phrases like one might find in an old travel book were used, and no conjugations or clauses like those found in most ordinary sentence (like this one) were used.

Now, this doesn't mean "I say this game is wrong and people shouldn't play it", because it's meant to be lighthearted and you can be friendly to the principal. I've looked up a lot of discussion and reviews of this game and haven't found anyone that cared about it all, so I just happened to have a combination of traits where I found it grating.

Another experience I couldn't relate to was being annoyed with the students. I'm a teacher and have tutored the elderly and taught English classes to Cantonese speakers, and I think it's a ton of fun! But our hero, even with the flexibility choice games afford, is constantly bored of class or daydreaming while others talk.

The cast of other teachers was very memorable, with personalities that felt real to life and enjoyable.

Going to the areas around Japan was fun. In fact, most of the rest of the game was really enjoyable, the only other grating thing is that, playing as a straight man, there were a lot of options to be a kind of horn-dog loser. But fortunately, you can opt out of those.

I'd recommend people just try the first scenes. The humor and writing is very consistent, so if you like it you'll get a lot of it. Despite my complaints, I recognize the technical proficiency in the game.

This game is a superhero Choicescript game whose main draw is that it lets you deeply customize your character’s superpowers through a point based system with different difficulty levels. You can be a super intelligent rich person with a robot suit, or a speedster with time powers, or a psychic with mind control, or combinations of the above. Or you could fly or have huge armor or all sorts of things.

More than that, you can choose to be good or evil! You can use violence to get what you want or peaceful ways. You can stop villains or join them, attack heroes or befriend them.

Customization-wise, this game is deeply impressive. However, I felt the story, while competent, was weaker. I remember thinking “this dialogue is stilted”, and when I searched other reviews they said the dialogue is stilted as well, so it’s not just me. And the story arc feels a bit flat. I beat the game after an event that just felt like another chapter, not a culmination of things.

But it wasn’t unpleasant or bad. The sandbox aspect was fantastic and I can heartily recommend this to people as a superhero wish fulfillment game with strong mechanics.

This game is a remake of a text game that came out before I was born, back in the early 80s.

The author has fully updated it, but it comes from a different tradition than the IF tradition I typically interact with. So in some features it's definitely an upgrade over most IFComp games, and in others it lacks features that I missed.

You play as a detective hired to break into a house and free a girl that has been taken hostage. Along the way, you'll encounter some chemistry, several animals, criminals, and some fun retro electronics.

The game's big features are its graphics, some of which are animated. It opens with a typewriter scene that spools out the backstory before jumping into a deserted town.

Other nice features are the game letting you hold down a button to see convenient names for interactable objects. The two-word parser (occasionally three-word) will block you from typing if you start entering an invalid command.

One nice part was finding an old electronic game of a sort I had recently been thinking about and talking to my son about. It was one of those retro ones that has the images literally baked into the screen and all the game does is choose which one lights up.

There are numerous achievements you got. The first time I died, I got around 12 achievements. It was pretty fun!

Other things went against the grain of what's considered common wisdom among the groups of authors of games I generally play. There's a 2-hour timer, frequent deaths, and no way to save. It doesn't recognize the command X as an abbreviation for EXAMINE (but LOOK ____ works). To fit onto an older platform, the text is sparse. I didn't end up finishing, as I had trouble with a crafting puzzle near the end where many actions result in death, and on replaying I found new deaths that set me back.

This design seems to me to be intentional; this is a commercial release, and players want things to feel substantial. By forcing replays that make you memorize a 'best path', it significantly increases playtime. The original Adventure did something similar with the time limit on the lantern. So, for someone looking for one game to occupy some time, these features help. For someone looking to play a lot of games in a short time, it can be frustrating.

This game has a target audience and I think they'll love it. If you can name a British microcomputer from the 80s, you should definitely try this game. If not, it still has enough charm that it could be worth your purchase.

I was given a review copy of this game.

This is a long simulator Hosted Game, similar to Life of a Mercenary, which I played recently. In this game, you are a medieval lord who has recently ascended to the throne.

You have 3 main stats (combat, knowledge and social), a revenue stream, soldiers, and four advisors, one for each main area of interest in your life.

Most of the game consists of a free-form ruling sandbox where you can visit the temple, train or recruit soldiers, read books in the library, or, most often, just hold court.

Holding court causes random events to occur. Frequently you have the chance to pass judgment in trials or decide how to invest your money.

Occasionally there are big story moments. One includes a mysterious meteorite. Others allow opportunities for marriage (I went for a political alliance marriage with a neighboring lord's daughter).

Near the end, the story becomes more prominent and sandbox options decrease. In the early game, it feels much more 'game' than story; in the end it switches and is almost all story.

This is labelled as a grimdark game but I would say it's fairly mild for grimdark. The grimdarkness comes from the opportunity to do things like cheat on your spouse or be villainous by killing peasants, and story elements involve differing amounts of blood and gore. The content warnings include rape but I didn't encounter that in my playthrough.

Overall, I generally understood what stats did and story elements seemed fairly clear. I did at first think it was going in a pretty boring direction with religion (the standard 'haha we're enlightened medieval people who realize that religion is fake even though our world has supernatural elements'), but near the end it took on a lot more creative role which I liked quite a bit.

I did feel like I was meandering a lot in the middle, having exhausted every single book in the library. There were numerous opportunities for big spending early on that I skipped and few in the middle. Overall, though, I liked the money balance in the game.

Compared to the most similar hosted game that I've played, Life of a Mercenary, I'd say that this game gives you more power, authority and agency, while Life of a Mercenary has a lot more character focus.

Glad I played this game; I spent around a week on it, and instead of binging it I just popped it open to play through a few days in-game, and I found it great as a time-spender when bored.