Ratings and Reviews by ChanceOfFire

Marine Raider is one of the earliest titles under the Hosted Games label. At 43k words, it was substantially longer than a good number of games at the time, although it is pretty short by today's standards. Playtime is quick, and you could probably get through this in ten minutes or so, depending on your choices and reading speed.

You play as a junior officer and platoon commander, leading a small force of marines. With the enemy having the advantage in numbers, skill and stealth will be key to balancing the odds.

The writing is a bit rough compared to later titles by the author. Still, this one is fun. There are no stats in this game, but you will need need to manage decisions carefully, reading the prose and trying to work out the benefits and potential costs of digging in to fight, charging in or beating a hasty retreat. There are plenty of ways it can work out, from pulling out once you have secured some intel to staying behind and trying to fight as much of the enemy as you can. As far as a single playthrough goes, the game is short, but does have a good bit of content if you are willing to come back and try other options.

It is perhaps outclassed today by really long and heavy titles in the HG library, but is still good for some fun.

School isn't going great. Your rival screws you up with his powerful connections and influence. Your professor gives you a failing grade. Getting expelled is right around the corner.

That said, you create a time machine and travel back to the age of the dinosaurs. With this earth-shattering discovery at your disposal, you might just be able to turn things around.

There isn't much in terms of plot as you navigate the dinoscape and work out your relationships with your friend and rival. Mostly, it's a collection of encounters with different types of dinosaurs, along with a couple of danger scenes to get the blood pumping. There is a stat system, along with different things to collect (samples, film, trophies, etc). Presumably, some of these collection options are connected to your stats, but the impact wasn't very apparent.

Not to mention, collecting these things didn't seem to be of much use, as the professor later threw all my findings out, pretty much declared me a fraud, and expelled me anyway. I mean, I brought a ton of souvenirs back from the prehistoric era, including a real living dinosaur. Are you seriously telling me you're not interested?

Frankly, if someone showed up today from a trip to the age of dinosaurs, complete with souvenirs, photographs and a living dinosaur, they would have been an international sensation on the spot. Yet, the entire ending just feels so ridiculously underwhelming. Granted, the rest of the world treated those discoveries with somewhat more interest than that very dense professor, but it still left me scratching my head.

Dinosaur fans may enjoy the romp through the land of the T-Rex. Still, the way it ended felt unsatisfying.

Daria: A Kingdom Simulator is an utterly strange beast. While there are some pretty successful choicescript games out there which include a good dose of management elements, this is a full-blown hardcore management game built in choicescript. Story, plot and character elements are minimal, and most major NPCs are pretty much just additional management assets. I do think having an overarching plot and characters with more story and dialogue could have made the overall product much better.

I was really struggling to decide how many stars I would give to this game. I'm aware four may be a controversial choice. Still, there is a certain therapeutic and enjoyable feeling (I'm serious) to setting up all the pieces together and watching the different numbers go up. This actually kept me entertained for quite a bit. As a choicescript writer myself, I'm also impressed with how durable and well-constructed the system is, even if over-complicated. (I'm aware that the initial release shipped with plenty of bugs, and a lot of people lost progress multiple times as HG tried to patch the game. Still, in the interest of reviewing the current product, I won't penalize the game for this here.)

That said, the game has its flaws. There is no save system in choicescript, and an unlucky early enemy encounter can wipe out painstakingly-earned progress instantly. Navigating the pages and reading the menus can feel excruciating on mobile platforms, but less so on a desktop screen. While it can be fun to unlock things and watch numbers go up, the later parts of the game can get very grindy, especially as you face enemy armies with absurdly high levels of strength (basically meaning even more grinding on your end to match them.)

Somehow, I feel this would have been more enjoyable in a game engine which is well... built for turn-based management. While there is a certain joy in watching numbers and structures going up, I really think choicescript isn't the best place for this. Make no mistake, there are certainly hardcore choicescript management nuts out there who will enjoy this, but I'm not one of them.

The game does a good job for its intended audience, and that's the basis of my star rating. Still, a game like this probably won't appeal to anyone outside that club.

I first played this game a long time ago (the complete version, not the Introcomp entry). I remember it being pretty mediocre back then. Now, I've decided to head back and give it another whirl.

The game adopts a humorous and snarky tone, but it really doesn't match the zombie apocalypse setting at all. There is some heavy fourth wall breaking, depending on your choices, but it didn't feel particularly witty or clever. The plot is straightforward in design as you move from one place to another, but filled with headscratchers, which I'll detail later on.

While there aren't any ROs, the game flips the gender of the companion NPCs depending on your own gender. The characters don't have much in the way of personality, and this just makes them feel even more shallow. Some of them will also do extremely obnoxious things in game, in case you needed more reasons to dislike them.

There are also a couple of things which didn't make sense, which I will talk about below.

(Spoiler - click to show) At one part, you can borrow/steal an abandoned car, but later, the game says that you have a shovel in the back because you were too lazy to take it out a while back. Huh? It's not my car.

At another point, a doctor with a stone-cold personality tells you to leave someone behind in an unsympathetic manner. This doesn't sound like something a medical professional would do so callously, even if the situation was dire.

At the shopping mall, you can spend a few hours on an electronic sim to build your shooting skills. I can buy that the mall runs on diesel generators, but it's a bit of a stretch that they'll let you waste precious power on playing videogames, even if you're trying to build your stats.

When you reach the island, you can't use your gun to break into the abandoned house. You can't retrieve anything from the boat to help you either. Does a ferry/yacht not at least have a length of rope?

Also, can't you simply remain on the boat? If you picked the yacht or ferry, it should be comfortable enough for you to survive in the water for some time, and the zombies wouldn't be able to reach you unless they can swim. You can also forage for food or water on land when the zombies aren't around in full force.

One of the endings says that the zombie plague got 'medically contained'. Huh?? What does that mean? The zombies multiply through physical contact. What does it mean to 'medically contain' them? Seeing that human civilization appears to be in shambles, who did this? A group of aliens watching from space? This part is so brief that I doubt much thought was put into it either.

Choice of Zombies came out at a time when decent choicescript games were few. But today, this just isn't it.

You face an unusual apocalypse. One which will put you to sleep forever as soon as you fall asleep. You can either give in to this mysterious condition, or fight it by staying awake for as long as you can.

It took me a bit of time to figure out how to 'survive' to the next day and after without falling asleep forever on the first day. Still, even once you figure out the steps, you get the dark sense that you are only keeping the inevitable at bay for a short time. The writing and conversations with the other characters also help to convey the hopelessness of the situation, and perhaps a certain sense of acceptance and tranquility they might find within. If you find yourself in the position where you are the sole survivor, the situation also takes its toll on you. If you can survive well over ten days, the choices all around you work to show that the inevitable is right around the corner.

I don't think there is a way to win this, and I think that's the point. That said, there is apparently a secret ending for the game, but I don't have the energy to try unlocking it at this point.

It starts off pretty entertainingly. You attend a series of interviews (not just the job interview kind) and get to pick from one of four responses ranging from professional to cringe. The writing was really entertaining, and I was seriously flirting with the idea of giving five stars at that time. The section on a romantic date left a silly grin on my face for some time.

Meanwhile, I was wondering about the lizard on the cover art. However, the answer came soon.

I'm not sure what I should say about the story's ending. I don't know if it's just so brilliant that my small brain can't comprehend it, or if it was just a dumb idea. (Spoiler - click to show)It turns out that the whole thing was just a reptile dreaming about human life, then a play about that reptile dreaming about human life, then a reptile dreaming about that play about the reptile which was... aaargh. Ok, I think that's all the layers. It was just multiple levels of the 'just a dream' trope, and I'm not sure if there's some brilliance somewhere I'm missing.

That said, the earlier parts were still very entertaining to read. I'm giving four stars for that. Now, I need some time to unscramble my brain.

Echoes is an anthology of three games in one. I didn’t do the Labyrinth one as it didn’t appeal to me that much. Treasure of the Deep is also a fairly short and very linear tale, such that it’s more of a story than a game. It was a fun read, but not really an interactive one.

Still, the one I did enjoy was Sticks and Stones, a humorous multi-part adventure where you travel around a dungeon, solving puzzles and collecting items, while trying to reach the next part of the game. Navigating the dungeon was tricky at first, but I managed to handle this by visualizing a grid in my mind. There are a good number of interesting puzzles there, and finding the different items to proceed also didn’t feel overly challenging, even though I went around in circles a few times. There is also a pretty basic but fun combat system, and the game allows you to retry whenever you lose a fight.

The writing is entertaining and there was good art to accompany the writing, such as the backgrounds for the linear Treasure of the Deep story. Overall, I’d say the full product is pretty solid, although I tried just two thirds of it.

Chronicles of the Moorwakker has plenty of content which will keep you occupied for some time.

Your task here is to investigate the death of your mother, on a journey that takes you through fantasy medieval Germany. As a twine game, it felt really well-designed with that open-ended adventure vibe, as you decide which way you will travel and the things you can do in each location. There are some sections which will require you to go through different rooms to hunt down the various items you need to unlock stuff and proceed, including the section right before the final boss. It added to the feel, but it can get tedious at times.

I failed the starting battle twice, with my opponent suviving with one health point on both occasions. (Something must really hate me.) Afterwards, I decided to do this true story mode, and skip all the battles. A lot of work must have went into scripting the battle system, and I liked all the little details, just that I felt that it required a lot of clicking. You are allowed to retry or skip battles (I can't remember which difficulty I picked) so the game is still pretty forgiving there.

Once you finish, you can restart the game entirely, or at a chapter of your choice.

The art and sound, along with the gray color scheme, also fit the game pretty well. That said, the art is at least partially AI generated, with some human modifications.

With solid writing and an interesting story which keeps the tension going, Canvas Keepsakes provided a pretty entertaining experience. As an artist, struggling to pay the rent, you have the strange power to travel in your own paintings and retrieve things from them. Of course, things quickly go awry as you meet a buyer who seems secretly out to mess you up, and your paintings come out to mess with you.

I liked the cat companion in particular. Pixel is pretty adorable, plays a strong role in the story and also provides some entertaining commentary.

One thing I didn't like was that the game didn't really introduce the story elements very well. For that, I recommend reading the blurb before you start, as the game does not explain quite a number of story elements otherwise.

As for one thing I really liked, the use of visuals and sound to convey scenes. Shaking and glowing letters, background color changes and sounds all work in tandem to add oomph to the different scenes. Special effects are one thing this game does very well.

It was a good bit of entertainment.

I first played Heroes Rise well over a decade ago, when Choice of Games was first inviting authors to write for their professional label. Heroes Rise received quite a lot of criticism for its railroaded design back when it was first released. A long time later, I’m taking another look at this bit of CoG history.

As has been said before, the story is quite railroaded. Speaking of which, this railroad does forcefully take you to a couple of sections where you get brutally defeated before crawling over to your next challenge. The plot also feels very convoluted, with twists and revelations thrown at you in a chaotic fashion.

There is also a RO whom I simply didn’t like. That said, the game gives you plenty of choices to say no, then disregards them all anyway. (why??) After making clear (multiple times) that I was (sincerely) not interested in her, she planted a kiss on me anyway and the game went on to suggest that we had a thing going on. Honestly, I love having romance in games, but this didn’t feel good at all.

The writing is fairly solid, with plenty of action-packed scenes in the middle of the madness and chaos. It’s fun, but could have benefitted from a more organized plot. Additionally, the game also touches on some hot issues like nuclear arms and real-life geopolitical matters, but these were handled so lightly and fleetingly that I think the game would have been better without them.

On my latest playthrough, my performance was about average. Despite the linearity, the game does build up a numerical score for you over your playthrough, and hands you your report card at the end. Still, this magic number still felt detached from the various experiences I had over the course of the story. I could have played again to try to obtain a better score, but simply didn’t feel like it.

Heroes Rise was probably solid at a time where there were few good choicescript games. Nevertheless, I feel that this hasn’t aged well.