Reviews by MathBrush

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.

I was interested upon seeing this game, as I had heard of the author a lot before due to his frequent participation in discussions on the CoG forums and for the name of one of his WIPs (Mass Mother Murderer) and his saga of going to another company at one point.

So I really wondered what to expect here.

What I got was a tale that at its core is about belonging. You play as a young person in a crappy dead-end job with no money and no future. Following a fallen meteor, you stumble upon a demonic-looking microphone that promises you riches and fame in exchange for an unknown price.

Following the microphone's prophetic urgings, you audition for a death metal band, winning the lead spot over a serial-killer obsessed would-be singer named Larry, who instantly becomes your nemesis.

The word that came to mind the most as I played the game was 'alienated', and later when Larry was explicitly described as alienated, I felt validated. I also thought of 'disaffected'. Our main character suffers from many fallacies that I learned as part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Their biggest fallacy is 'the fallacy of control', where either they have a complete lack of control in their own life and suffer the whims of others, or they have total control and everything is their fault.

We see this in the way our character mentally divides people into 'good' and 'bad'. 'Bad' people are like the cop and the manager or Larry. They inflict bad things onto our protagonist which we are unable to resist. All bad things in our lives are the fault of 'bad people', who have no redeeming features.

In contrast, our band members are 'good people', the kind of people we always dreamed would find us. 'Good people' never get mad at you for anything, are completely understanding, nurture you, find you strong but also help out at all times. If we can only find 'good people' and keep them from finding out how bad we are, we will be happy; but in this fantasy, even if they find out our problems, they won't care. (Wayhaven has similar fantasies)

Our character really reminded me of an alienated youth I worked with once. He was handsome but thought himself ugly, and had good male friends but said that women hated him. I had quietly asked some of the girls his age what they thought of him and they said positive things, so I decided to observe him. He came into a class and the first thing he did was tell a joke about how much he hates women! I couldn't believe it. Step 1 of getting people to like you is 'don't say you hate them'. That reminds me of this character; both don't think that they have control over their lives, so if people don't like them, it's not because of their own actions, but because they're 'bad people', and all you can do is wait for a 'good person' to come along.

Anyway, I think a lot of people will find this character relatable. The story has an actual really positive overall arc, almost wholesome. Our character finds community and fulfillment.

The writing is intensely physical and sensory-based. Dripping blood, cold mists, trembling knees. The prose isn't purple, as it uses simple sentences, but is focused on these physical feelings to the extreme. That made it more compelling to me; I liked the writing quite a bit.

The choice-structure is unusual. I was annoyed at first that I found it hard to tell what choices had what effect, but I slowly realized that the first option always increases Toughness, the second one always increases Charisma, third Intelligence, and fourth something I don't remember. This makes replays a lot easier. It's not completely trivial, though, as each action also has an effect on which band member likes you, and that's not always fixed in the pattern.

Stats could use some tuning. Relationships start at 50 and end at 60, so the numbers 61-100 are essentially useless. That could be fixed by just adjusting all the numbers to be bigger (both for boosts and checks) or switching to additive stats the way that the main stats are.

I did encounter a few minor bugs, which I'll pass on to the author.

I think this game was less popular for a few reasons, the main being the low wordcount size (I've seen that in my own games of the same size!) and the way that the blurb and art don't quite match the game itself (I didn't know it was a rockstar game until I started, I thought at first it was a superhero game). I could recommend it to several people though, especially on reddit where people often ask for games with found family, or where you have imposter syndrome, or where you can be a jerk or have someone be a jerk to you.

This parser game takes you to a mountain town in Europe where you have to foil an evil villain. You'll explore a casino, tunnels, hotel and lair, have a car chase, use gadgets, and commit sabotage.

I started this a few times and stopped each time. The game is really open early on and the parser isn't 100% responsive so it was hard to know if I was on a wild goose chase or if I was close to figuring out the right thing.

I ended up trying a third time and followed the hints file pretty much exclusively. There were a lot of clever things in there that I probably wouldn't have thought of on my own.

The game leans heavy into genre stereotypes but it feels like it comes from a place of love, making for a generally enjoyable parody.

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, a piece of paid content available to subscribers when it came out but now only available through individual purchase.

In this exceptional story, you are invited to the most popular gala of the season! Well, invited is a strong term. More like being compelled to be there. As a servant. In a hotel built of literal nightmares.

Unlike many other exceptional stories, this one is very long and also location-based: you work on a hotel with 5 or 6 floors, each with their own rooms and tenants, and their own deck (fallen london features a randomized deck of encounters). There is also inventory management: as a servant, you must carry laundry to the basement to be washed, and then return it; go to the kitchen to order food, pick it up, and deliver it; and fetch items.

This provides for a sense of mundane drudgery, but that's contrasted by both the setting (all the tenants are horrific cosmic horror entities, vicious powerbrokers, or hapless victims, and reality and your mind warp around you) and by the text (Chandler Groover explained in a blog post how every bit of text that might seem repeated is actually written fresh, so while the actions are repetitive the text never is).

It also plays around with Fallen London mechanics, using up way more actions than a usual Exceptional Story but 'paying' you in a variety of objects you can pick up around the place, and using unusual 0-cost actions for the finale. Your Nightmares score, something you usually try very hard to get less than 8 (because it usually sends you to this very hotel) rockets to 14, 18, and much much higher. The 'unaccountably peckish' attribute, something that usually must be deeply avoided (it spawns black cards in your deck that are unavoidable and set you on a quest to permanently delete your character) is played with here in a way that felt cool.

It has extensive lore connections, primarily to anything involving dreams.

Many people rank this as the best Exceptional Story. I think there is no clear superior to it; other Chandler Groover stories and the ever-popular orphan story HOJOTOHO have their own positive features that make them competitive.

Edit: I like this comment from Fallen London discord:
"I know so many folks have praised Bloody Wallpaper's themes and setting, but the thing that stuck out to me most about it on top of those hideous joys is the way it plays like an old school parser IF. I thought it really managed to capture the tone and playstyle of a totally different format, and that was such a pleasure"

This game was part of Iron ChIF, and it is a good showing for a game written in a short time period. I particularly loved the setting, characters, and the voice of the narrator.

You play as a fairy attached by a string to a mysterious stranger who has a device that labels things in an unfamiliar language. You are accompanied by an elf and a human who are fighting off gobling while you, the fairy, guide the human to different objects in an attempt to reassemble ancient machinery.

Hilariously, you don't know the names of anything, so your inventory in the game can have a gizmo, a whozit, a doodad, etc.

I had trouble getting started since the game requires leaps of intuition, but without hints I was soon seeing patterns, taking notes, and having some good successes.

One thing this game does really well is reward you for right actions. I remember reading an Adam Cadre interview where he said that every piece of text the player sees should be rewarding, and that happens here. Never do you pass a milestone without getting more lore, more characterization, or a funny moment or some kind of action.

While I didn't vote in the competition, I believe both games were great. The other game did a better job, I think, with the theme, but this game did better, I think, with the core IF elements.

This is one of the more recent Choice of Games titles. In it, you play as a contestant in a series of games to become the Monarch's Eye, a title that is like being a bodyguard or right-hand man.

The contests are extensive and important, with each one occupying its own chapter as well as having establishing chapters, preparations, and fallout. They include physical and mental contests.

Along the way, you try to balance the two main factions in the country, merchants (rich) and artisans (laborers). You can favor one side or another and date representatives from different groups.

Gender is a major theme in the game, with the Monarch switching favored gender every chapter or so and a whole system of titles invented for the game.

Some people have expressed frustration with the game forcing you to honor the Monarch in most choices. You do occasionally have a chance to oppose them. Other criticisms include the game not signalling the effects of choices very well, making it unclear why you fail when something goes wrong.

Overall, I enjoyed some of the romances and I liked the actual contest parts quite a bit. I was glad I purchased this.

This game was written in a short time as part of a competition for using the Dialog language.

It reminded me of both Hadean Lands in its setting and Heaven's Vault in its handling of translation.

You find an alien ship crashed on a moon next to your own crashed ship. In it, you discover a device that tells you the names of things in the alien language.

Using this, you can begin to decipher the alien words and piece the puzzle together of how to survive.

I played this without hints until the final puzzle, where I got stuck. My main issue that I had was (Spoiler - click to show)I thought the red sphere and blue sphere just needed to 'charge' and so you had to point them at the same thing for 3 seconds, then it worked. That got me the message I needed from the blue sphere but made the red one usually repeat itself, except when I pointed the red one at a whole sentence when it would do one word of that sentence at a time. So I thought then that it was just a thing that repeated three words of a sentence and would take shorter phrases and just repeat them to fill up those three slots.

Overall, it was satisfying and is one of the better language puzzles I've seen.

I had a couple very minor issues with implementation. One was that the 'shiny label' in the first ship room seemed important, but X LABEL didn't work. I think that occasionally other parts of objects weren't implemented by themselves, but I can't quite remember the rest. The important command (Spoiler - click to show)TOUCH WITH often resulted in the slightly confusing message (Spoiler - click to show)You can't put anything on __. The other thing was that clicking on a word brought up a prompt to rename it but didn't add cursor focus to that prompt, so you had to click manually. That might need tinkering with the javascript to fix but it isn't a serious impediment in any case.

Overall, it's impressive a game this complex was made in such a short time.

This is the only Grand Guignol game that I tested.

This is a large and complex choice-based game with a strong emphasis on place and inventory. It has stylized text and background images, and uses a variety of fonts to indicate different character voices or special events. It has an inventory sidebar and uses graphics and animations to track your 'panic'.

You play as someone visiting an old abandoned asylum in an attempt to recover treasure from within. Once you get there, you discover that things are much worse than you could have ever guessed: this aslyum is haunted!

The author mentions in a note that this story, which was started 25 years ago, evolved to be one where the patients are victims of mistreatment by a cruel facility.

The panic meter is the key factor in this story. Getting a scare can raise it by 1 or 2. But confronting a ghost can fill up almost half the meter, which can lead to instant death in some cases. Fortunately, you get one 'free life' to keep going if you do, but it can be useful to keep a lot of saves and only push past warnings when you're sure your panic can handle it.

I found the panic meter engaging, keeping me more on my toes and more engaged in the gameplay, rather than just trying every option one by one. At times I found myself lost in the maze of links, but I eventually constructed a mental image of what the asylum looks like.

This is a big, polished game and was a pleasure to test and play. There are a few bugs here in there in the current version but the author has already described plans on fixing them after the competition.