Choice of the Deathless

In Choice of the Deathless, you follow the path of a newly minted law student, fresh from college with academic credentials (and student loans!) and ready to start work at the bottom of the corporate ladder, while working on your steady rise to the top.

In this setting, your employer is a demonic law firm, giving you all sorts of assignments to arrange infernal contracts and make deals with the demonic and undead world. It is actually very cleverly done, showing all sorts of amusing and insightful parallels between the corporate world and themes of the occult. It shows some of the usual real life challenges, such as renting an overpriced apartment in the big city to be close to the office and deciding how much of your student loans to pay with that surprisingly huge salary you're starting out with. Your goal is (hopefully) to ride from a lowly associate to partner, while making plenty of demonic deals to climb to that goal. Who knew the infernal universe was so similar to the corporate one?

On my latest playthrough, I dumped everything into Charm and Craft. I think I was able to beat most of the skill checks, but still ended the game being (Spoiler - click to show)turned into a skeleton. I think there is a way to avoid this ending, but I haven't found it yet, and I'm not sure if I want to do another replay for it.

The romance is ok, although I was only mildly interested in the character I finally picked to romance. I think the other non-romance aspects of the game were better done.

In short, this is a pretty solid and interesting game, and also feels pretty long for the number of words.

In this first entrant of the Choice of the Deathless series, you play as a young Craftsmen (i.e. magic user) in a law firm run by a lich and two sorcerers, and you have to work with demons, etc.

This game gives you quite a bit of freedom, letting you pick between a few romances, choose to be a fisticuffs type or magic-using type on a sliding scale, and letting you choose what factions you support.

Many people have enjoyed the simple touches like having to pay off your student loans, or the excellent descriptions of the non-humans.

Somehow this game didn't appeal to me as much as the sequel, The City's Thirst. The sequel is not strongly connected to the first, so you could play that one first.