Keeper of the Sun and Moon

Keeper of the Sun and Moon (or KotSaM) is a comforting game for me. This is in spite of the fact that it contains quite a deal of violence and dangerous situations; I think it's just because of a sense of familiarity, both from playing it a lot and from its use of familiar tropes. It is a very tropey game, taking place in a modern fantasy-kitchen-sink setting, with a hidden society of magical/supernatural beings. You play as a newcomer from a seemingly normal human background, who is discovered to have latent magical ability and is enrolled in a magical college. There, adventures start that involve life-threatening school exams, conspiracies involving the magical government, and potentially romance. The game follows the typical choicescript formula by offering a lot of character customization and numerical growth, a branch-and-bottleneck structure, and a lot of romance/relationship options.

From the description above, the premise resembles a number of quite popular YA literary franchises. But I feel like KotSaM implements the tropes well, and does enough to distinguish itself within its genre. As this is a college setting, the characters are all adults, and the courses and residential system are based on American universities. One of the fun parts of the game is deciding which species of supernatural creature you are; there are tons of possibilities from the gamut of mythological fantasy. Also, this is a setting that mixes modern technology with magic; mathematics and biology come into play a few times.

In general, KotSaM is one of the easier choicescript games, as it's hard to die and I don't think there are "bad endings" (or are there?). The stat checks are usually well telegraphed, but sometimes it's hard to tell how difficult a check would be. Failing stat checks might lead to lower grades or getting injured, but it's not that hard to stumble into a path to moderate success without really designing a specific route (kind of like college I guess). For min-maxers and guide-makers, there are secrets and achievements and hidden romance routes.

The writing is functional for the most part; some of the characters came off as a bit hard to distinguish from each other, and some of the scenes felt a bit vague. Still, the story was easy enough to read, and I generally enjoyed the character interactions. The resolution of the mystery and the reveal of the villain felt a bit anticlimactic. But it sets up for the sequel, which I'm rather looking forward to.

This is another game in the most-played top 20.

It's classic YA fare. You discover a magical world alongside the real one, discover you have powers, make friends with magical people who are impressed by your powers, and go to school to train yourself in magic while simultaneously foiling a dark plot.

It makes sense that it's popular; if someone enjoyed things like Percy Jackson and wanted a hosted game for it, this would be my first recommendation.

It has mostly good points with some rough.

One thing it does great is combining 'hanging out with friends' with progressing the plot. I complained about The Golden Rose that almost nothing happens in a million words and you just hang out with your friends all the time. This game makes the hangout sessions drive the plot, where talking to your friends gives you worldbuilding lore or info on your investigation.

The school stuff is class, even generic YA material. Classes on things like the basics of magic, potions, runes, etc., with students still complaining about the tediousness of it all.

I wonder how much branching their is; it felt like a very long game comparatively but only has 300K words. Is it because it branches less, or was it just due to circumstances in my own life?

The biggest negative to me was a certain lack of descriptiveness, and now I see where the fans of Golden Rose are coming from. I played a couple hundred official Choice of Games games first before switching to hosted, and there having literary prose is much more common (games like Martian Job, Rent-a-Vice, Fool!, or Night Road come to mind), since there's a resume/portfolio submission process and really bad writing usually get screened out (not bad plot, per se; that's harder to test for). But in Hosted Games, there are no barriers, so there is much more variety in the writing quality. This game's writing isn't bad, but it could be more. My biggest complaint was in the powerful artifacts; the whole game centers around them, and once we have them, the game just says 'use the artifacts!' and the NPCs 'use the artifacts'. How? Did lightning come out? A blast of flame? Did angelic messengers descend? It was really anti-climactic.

Some of the writing was great, though; I felt like some of the NPC dialogue felt very authentic.

I'm more of a plot person than a writing person myself, and I like this game's plot and reveals. I had a good time.

The other point I have about writing is that you get better with practice, so I'm definitely looking forward to playing the next game in the series in the future.