Reckless Space Pirates

This game has some very unusual features for a Choicescript game. But I'll get to those in a second.

Like Treasure Seekers of the Lady Luck, this is a Choice of Games title where you find yourself abducted by alien pirates, met with a few friendly faces and others out to get you, inducted into the party, and sent on a heist. Both are named after the ship you find yourself on.

This one is a bit shorter, with 6 chapters to play through that go by relatively quickly. There is one romance, as far as I can determine, and one major mission you go on.

As opposed to Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck, which had a crew of very diverse aliens, this game has humans (mostly), making it a bit harder to differentiate between the crew members.

As for the odd features, I had a feeling when I was playing at first that the game was intended as some kind of intelligent test. It had a lot of pass/fail logic and math puzzles at the beginning, and it included math conversations that (as a math professor) I felt were worded in intentionally confusing ways.

To my surprise, in a later chapter, you actually do take an intelligence test, quite a long one as well. It was pretty frustrating to work through and get every question right only to be stymied by a low relationship check later on with the person I'd spent the most time with.

There were a few stray coding oddities (I received an achievment twice, and the Choicescript code for your significant other was left as {so} instead of ${so} at one point, so it displayed incorrectly). But the intelligence puzzles were technically impressive, and I could see several people purposely seeking out this game as perhaps the most puzzle-heavy 'official' Choicescript game I've played. (The Race is a Hosted Game, meaning it wasn't vetted through the long Choicescript process, but it also contains numerous puzzles).

Like Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck, we find ourselves back on a pirate ship. In terms of plot, this is a little shorter, with only one major mission. After an… unorthodox recruitment process, you join up with a group of pirates who want something from a group of aliens. Of course, you could attempt to side with them or stick with the pirates.

There is a fairly straightforward stat based system over here. However, a good part of the game’s challenges comes from math questions and logic puzzles. At one point, I even got a couple of data analyst interview type questions, where I’m shown some patterned shapes, and need to pick the next one which belongs in the formation. Most of these questions are multiple choice and weren’t too difficult for me (save one which I just guessed at random because the question wasn’t very well written). However, something so logic-based just didn’t fit the vibe of the game. While there’s no excessive violence here, I started the game as a thuggish character doing rough stuff, and it feels more than weird that I’m now answering math and logic questions from some random aliens to please them. I don’t mind having these kind of questions in general, but the game uses them very heavily and it just feels inconsistent with the game’s tone.

The plot is pretty short and straightforward, with a fair bit of choices around a peaceful or violent approach. There is also a mildly interesting RO whom I romanced. However, there is little to explore in this setting as much of the plot is focused around a single mission with the aliens. There are also some choices around getting to know the crew, but it’s hard to make this meaningful with such a short plot. Writing is ok for the most part. I don’t think I saw any issues.

Honestly, I feel that this game could have benefitted from a longer plot, maybe with two or three connected missions to explore the world. There are some good parts here, such as the stat system and the relationships with the crew. However, it’s tough to make this work on a shorter plot. As for the puzzles, that’s one thing we could have less of. Multiple choice math questions get tedious after a while.