The Book and Devil's Altar

I'm much more of a sci-fi fan than a fantasy fan, but this has to be one of my favorite pieces of IF, period.

There's a really interesting meta discussion about your own decisions within the game, e.g. "not every decision needs a hefty internal debate. Sometimes you just gotta pick the path and move on. Simple as that." While reading there was definitely some internal debate, because some of the choices seemed like a coin flip (and interestingly enough, this was also something mentioned in the story).

The style itself is also very good. The descriptions of fight scenes in particular stood out, because they felt primal, instinctual, and had very good flow with the rest of the writing. The rest of the writing maintains this flow, but has a different tone from the spontaneous fight scenes. The tone created by this is a dark one, matching the genre and the theme well. The morality, or lack thereof, of the characters adds to this tone.

The aspect of choice is definitely there, with multiple different epilogues and a number of ways to fail, but it isn't very hard, nor does it have any "gamey" aspects. The beginning of the story is somewhat linear, and your real choices arrive after exposition.

My one issue was that there was a lack of some lore or worldbuilding that I thought relevant to my ending. This story doesn't really set up the world for any sequels or continuations, and is just a stand-alone, which is fine.