Reviews by MathBrush

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 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!

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.

This game is a bit off the beaten path for most Choicescript games I've played. It's long but eschews most numerical stats, instead giving you a variety of personality traits that come in threes and which you can switch between (I think, I was never quite sure).

There is a lot of worldbuilding here. There are many races, including one of scaled magic users and another of cannibalistic giants.

There is a pair of kingdoms with two rulers, each of which has their own consort. The consorts are the only people that know the identity of the heirs, who are camouflaged by being raised in orphanages. The current consort is the consort of both houses at once, which causes problems.

We follow four protagonists, with two making up most of the game. The first main protagonist is an orphan raised in one of those orphanages. The other is one of the scaly magic-users, embarked on an expedition to save their people. The two others appear in the prologue and in intermissions.

The stories are primarily relationship-centered, and not romantic ones, more like friendship, clanship, bullies, etc. There are some fights and several action scenes, but they mostly revolve around whether to help or protect others or to be selfish. I liked that.

For most of the story, I enjoyed the writing, characters, and worldbuilding, but I felt that the plot arc was kind of flat. It started off with bold moments and then just kind of simmered for 12-14 chapters, occasionally rising up and down. Important things happened, but it didn't feel as coherent as it could, especially with switching viewpoints so often.

In the end, it is revealed (massive spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)Our two protagonists are actually the same! The scaly one is a partial reincarnation of the orphan's soul. This definitely raised my opinion of the game, but I'm not sure it makes up for the slow-paced early development.

Being part of a series means that slow development early on isn't too bad, but the ending of this game bursts with combinatorial explosion. It's no wonder the author hasn't finished the sequel; just resolving the loose threads from that last one would make the first chapter enormous (I had a similar issue when I helped revive a WIP by a different author, with permission, and my first task was to resolve an enormous combinatorial explosion with about 120 options on what kind of club activities you were going to have at a school festival).

So, as this game stands itself, it was very enjoyable, great writing and development, but could use better pacing/rising tension for my personal tastes.

I was given a review copy of this game.

While this isn't the Hosted Game with the highest wordcount (coming in at 380K words), it's really big gameplay-wise, as it uses simulation-style gameplay to get a lot of mileage from less words. I played it over 2 weeks.

You play as the head of a mercenary company, and you have a variety of stats like intelligence, stamina, health, etc. You also have money, guards, healers, etc. Together with you are your stalwart companions Arlo (level-headed and kind) and Anne (cutthroat and mercenary). You can also add other characters to your roster.

Rather than a strong central storyline, the game progresses through missions. Each mission has some fights you have to do and some gold. Missions often have ethical problems; a common one is 'will you help these people and lose money, or get money by letting them suffer?' Sometimes it is more complex, though, like 'will you help this group of people if it hurts another group?' There are also investigation segments where high intelligence or wisdom lets you take new conversation options.

There are tons of missions. The game was nudging me strongly towards retirement at the end, but I had about 4 or 5 big missions I could have done as well as a few tournaments I missed early on.

In between sessions, there is plot, as your advisors come to you with questions. I enjoyed seeing Arlo's backstory in a side-quest; perhaps one of the quests I missed had Anne's. I retired as a noble with Vera by my side.

There were bugs, as others have noted. I had negative soldiers at one point. Sometimes choices felt weird in ways that are hard to nail down (at one point I died and had to restart at a checkpoint while at other points I died with no lingering bad effects). But the overall quality of the game overwhelmed that negative point for me.

I also found the writing sparse and even dull at first, but as it progressed the quick dialog and fun characters grew on me, even though it never became very descriptive or florid. I think the author grew in skill while writing this.

Overall, I think I could recommend this to others. I think it has a demo, and gameplay is pretty similar throughout, so I'd recommend people to check out the demo and get it if they like it.

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.

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.