The Sons of the Cherry

This choicescript game was entered in ifcomp 2010. It was one of the first choicescript games ever entered in ifcomp.

This game has the unusual setting if the American revolution. You play as a witch using one of any variety of kinds of witchcraft. You can tailor your character quite a bit.

The game isn't quite polished, with some heavy-handed choices (basically 'give up' or 'continue the story'). But I liked the overall result. It is shorter than most choicescript games.

If you've been running low on anti-American paganistic stories, Sons of the Cherry will recharge your battery. Of course, SOTC features the expected "people born more than 100 years ago are irrational and stupid" sub-theme as well as potshots at Christianity. At least the author knows his audience. I'm a bit mystified as to why he felt it necessary to disguise this in a generic CYOA RPG outfit, though. Those clothes are especially deceptive because they make it seem like you have choices, when in reality, your choices are all illusions.

The plot is on rails -- no matter what you choose, you end up at the same place. Maybe you can die, but I tried a few things and nothing resulted in my death. SOTC is much more of a story than a game, but you still have to select some meaningless choice, and click a button for the plot to proceed. I'm no fan of non-interactive fiction, and SOTC is non-interactive fiction.

The prose style is fairly atmospheric, competent (errors are few), and concise. The game is unscored, and I didn't notice anything that affected your statistics, though you'd think that it would. Maybe you have to finish the game or go much further than I did. I quit early on, after learning that my character was a warlock of some sort.

If you enjoy non-interactive fiction disguised, pro-witchcraft themes with a dose of anti-Americanism, you'll like SOTC.

This game uses ChoiceScript, a choice-based programming language (think Choose Your Own Adventure books with stat-tracking). I was not feeling very hopeful after the first decision I had to make was what color shirt I was wearing. It asks you a number of questions at the beginning to determine your various statistics. Not all of them are as bad as the shirt one, but it just wasn’t very motivational. But OK, I thought I’d give the story a chance. And it’s got some promise, but you’re very much railroaded along. You’re allowed to choose to refuse to go along with what the main NPC wants you to do, but then you’re told that you do it anyway, except that you’re not as powerful, so you end up dying early. (Spoiler - click to show)Of course, the reason I didn’t go along with what the main NPC wanted was that it was obvious to me that he was a bad guy, responsible for my troubles. I decided to replay the game, going along with what he wanted (and what the author obviously wanted) just to prove to myself that the main NPC was in fact a bad guy. And guess what? I was right.

Unless you’re a big fan of choice-based narrative and want to see an example of how not to structure the narrative, you should probably give this one a pass.