Ratings and Reviews by autumnc

Dragon Age: The Last Court is a tie-in for the Dragon Age series of role-playing games from Bioware, taking place in an obscure part of Thedas ("the Dragon Age setting") shortly before Inquisition, the third Dragon Age game. In this game you play as the ruler of Serault, a small backwater town in a fantasy-medieval-France-like country, and deal with an upcoming visit from the Divine (the fantasy-Catholic pope basically). It follows the StoryNexus format, which involves drawing cards from a deck and picking actions within those cards which have random outcomes based on stat checks.

Overall, the tone of the game is very different from the other Dragon Age games. Dragon Age: Origins was a heroic fantasy, DA2 was a character-driven drama, and Inquisition was largely about high politics and history. All of these games involve making moral choices, which of course become flashpoints for fandom discourse. The Last Court is not like this. The central thematic element seems to be that things are weird and dangerous in this corner of Thedas, with an emphasis on the "weird". There are magic cults, creepy deep woods, a mysterious forest spirit, and so on, plus more mundane struggles like labor disputes and the "Great Game" of espionage and social sabotage. Personally, I'm not really a fan of the writing style which this game shares with Fallen London (is it considered to be "weird fiction"?) and found myself just glancing over the writing. But a lot of people like the writing of Fallen London so whatever.

There is a *lot* of repetition in this game. The ultimate goal is to build up resources for the Divine's visit in order to give as gifts, and the optimal paths involve basically grinding certain cards in a cycle. Actually some level of grinding is inevitable, as there are only so many cards, and they will repeat a lot through draws. Combined with the 20-action limit and 20-minute recharge time (which is totally pointless in 2020 as the game is no longer even monetized), it often feels like this game has a higher grind-to-new-story ratio than the Dragon Age RPGs themselves.

There is narrative payoff though. The most interesting parts of the story are when more of the mysteries surrounding Serault are revealed. There are also some interesting character moments, but not much in the way of development even when one of the characters is taken as a companion or lover (yes, this is a Bioware game). (Spoiler - click to show)I took the Wayward Bard as a lover but I think there was only one change with his card, and little change in the text. The Horned Knight was my favorite character overall, while the Well-Read Pig Farmer was my favorite companion. Many of the mysteries do not have a final resolution, which perhaps leaves room for future Dragon Age games. However, much of the interesting parts of the narrative, the individual mysteries and such, seem to be front-loaded and can be done in a few days, leaving the last few days for total grinding. And the ending feast itself is one of the weaker parts of the game.

The Wayhaven Chronicles games are two of the most popular games in the Hosted Games catalog, based on review and download counts. I was kind of surprised to see that this game didn't have an entry here. Overall, I think the game deserves its popularity: it is a very well-written and constructed game with an engaging plot and character development, but I personally had some issues with the choice structure.

The author of this game comes from a visual novel/otome game background, and it shows. The structure of this game mixes Choice of Games and otome game conventions. Like the latter, the primary source of branching in the game is which love interest to pursue (or to pursue a love triangle option), which is an explicit choice in the middle of the story. Like the former, the protagonist has numerous options to change their personality stats or use their skills. A large number of choices are personality-setting choices, which provide a choice of what you do, and why you're doing it. I wasn't a fan of these choices because I could never figure out which choice was supposed to correspond to which personality stat, and often none of the personality choices were appealing. Perhaps fortunately, these choices and their associated stats appear to have little impact on the broader story progression (but I haven't re-played the game enough to really find out).

One of the main reasons behind the popularity is the characters. The four main romance interests (who are a team of gender-flippable immortal mostly-benevolent vampires assigned by a secretive Agency to help the protagonist) are very well realized, with their own distinct personalities and detailed descriptions of their appearances. The protagonist's relationship with their mother is also portrayed well, but I could never get past the fact that the protagonist always calls their mother by her first name.

Beyond the romance, the main plot of the game is a supernatural mystery: there is a supernatural serial killer in town and you have to bring him to justice with the help of your companions. However, the killer is revealed through perspective shifts early on; the only question is how they catch him.

This game feels like the culmination of the genre of twines that started with howling dogs. It might be overstating to call it the apex of twine, but that's how I personally feel.

SPY INTRIGUE is a story with many layers to it, and somehow it works on each of these layers as well as all together. At the beginning it seems to be a wacky, vaguely sexually charged spy adventure. Then you die and see a story about mental illness, gender, relationships, living in A Society, and all that, all excellently written. But deeper into the spy missions, the themes wrap back around into full earnestness in a way that's difficult for me to describe. I usually bounce off video game comedy, but the humor in this game is genuinely funny. (Spoiler - click to show)For example, the best updog joke in video games. Hearing the word "mumps" still makes me want to laugh in a socially inappropriate manner; I wish I could talk about "SPY MUMPS" irl without being ostracized.

I love the interface too, especially the story map, which shows the current node and all the nodes leading out of the current node, annotated with colors for whether they lead to death, an aside, or story progress.

(Spoiler - click to show)One of the segments, the death scene where the protagonist tries on their parent's clothing, really got to me in a deeply personal way; I still go back just to read this one passage.

The Lost Heir series eschews the Choice of Games design philosophy in which all paths should be valid and failures should be interesting. This is a difficult game. There are many paths through this story, and it is difficult to die in the first game of the series, but some paths are objectively better than others.

Like many visual novels and gamebooks, the difficulty is in designing a path through the game in which the player character survives and achieves their goals. This involves raising certain stats to the necessary level by key points in the story, and not letting health decrease too low. Unlike in many other stat-heavy choicescript games, the player cannot simply focus on one or two stats; a pure magic user can't expect to get by on magic alone, for example. There are a large number of stats, divided into abilities, skills, knowledge, and relationships. Usually, the stat being checked is well cued, but not always. Only passing stat checks will raise the stat while failing checks will lose health, leading to potential death spirals where the player fails one check after another. I think it is expected that a player will play through multiple times to learn the checks and stat gains and to find a route that leads to a desired ending. Overall, it felt somewhat like Long Live the Queen in terms of the stat-check gameplay, but with fewer deaths.

The story itself takes place in a seemingly generic fantasy setting, where the player character is the titular "lost heir" seeking to reclaim the throne from evil usurpers. Despite the typical setting and plot, it was easy for me to become engrossed in this game. The writing is decent, and I really felt like I needed to find a way to save my favorite characters. There are a number of romance options as is usual in choicescript, who are described in broad strokes in this volume. The romance options themselves are also pretty heavily stat-gated.