The Golden Rose

This is a very long and ambitious Choicescript game, in fact one of the longest ever at 1.2 million words, and it's still only the first part of what promises to be at least a three-part saga. It takes place in an alternate-history version of medieval Iberia, where the Church has outlawed Latin (to the point where most of the characters have Germanic rather than Romance name forms) and the study of the Roman Empire. The protagonist is part of a company of mercenaries who seek to recover lost artifacts, which brings them into conflict with the Church and various other authorities.

The setting is probably my favorite part of the game. It is set in the city of Tarragona (in present-day Spain), and the medieval city comes alive in the very descriptive writing. There is a relatively free-form portion in the middle of the game where the player can visit different parts of the city; I love this kind of panoramic view of different social groups and people, who are all lovingly and distinctively portrayed. The alternate-history worldbuilding feels utterly believable, with details like names coming into play in fascinating ways.

On the other hand, the detail-oriented nature of the game can throw the pacing off. There is a constant sequence of tiny actions imbued with almost supernatural significance. Do you tilt your chin, touch your nose, or stoically gaze forward? Well, no matter what you do, there is going to be at least a paragraph of over-the-top description of your action and what it means for your personality, and it might not be what you expect. As someone who cannot read the author's mind (and is not the most socially aware IRL), the emotional salience of the various gestures was often lost on me (although I did learn the patterns). There's just so many of these tiny big choices, all throughout the story, and I got a bit tired of them. Also, the mass of details can unbalance the story; these tiny gestures are given more weight in the narrative than some of the moments where people actually die (it's funny how our mercenary can be adept at killing people while having anxiety attacks when someone looks at them a certain way).

The characters are a mixed bag. Some of them feel like dating sim archetypes (the nice boy, the bad boy, the defrosting ice queen), but they're written with a lot of detail and nuance. I like the ambiguity in a lot of the characters' motivations and even their feelings about the protagonist. The relationship descriptions in the stats page are all textual with no stat bars; even though there are multiple stat bars underneath the hood, it still felt more immersive to me.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game, but I wish I could like it more. I'm giving it 5 stars mostly because of its high ambitions and the huge amount of work that was put into the game, and I'm certainly looking forward to the next book.

The Golden Rose

This was a really interesting one.

There’s been a poll running on r/hostedgames about games with the best prose, best MC, etc. and Golden Rose won for best prose, so I was really hyped coming into this.

You play as a mercenary exploring an underground ruin whose existence is banned by the church. There are occasional flashbacks to a time long ago when Latin was the main language (this is like an AU medieval europe). Unfortunately, the treasure you seek has been stolen, and you have to set off to find the thief, spending a lot of time in a big city with a wide cast of characters.

The main NPCs are Alessa and Hadrian, fellow mercenaries, with Hadrian a former templar and Alessa an ice queen who wields two blades and knows more than the two of you about what’s really going on.

At 1.2 million words, I expected a long game, and having won best prose, I was looking forward to things. Then I started getting a little burnt out. Let me explain.

The author takes small events and amplifies them in a big way, letting you react however you choose to them. For instance, here’s how I feel the author would depict ordering eggs:

I look at the menu. (3 paragraphs of menu description).

Choice of reacting to menu (including grinning at the menu, saying nothing, frowning)

The menu reminds me of the hard times on the roads. (4 paragraphs of remembering journeying, when food wasn’t available.).

Reacting to those road times (including smirking to myself, saying nothing, frowning, praying thanks I’m not starving now)

Saying something to Alessa or Hardian about the road times (3 paragraphs of conversation)

reacting to comment (I can flirt, or my lips can quirk, or I can frown or be silent)

I ponder the menu. As I do, I look about the room. (description of people for a page)

Choice to react to people (I can flirt with them or smirk or grunt or pray)

Someone resembles those who are chasing us. I freeze. memories of being hunted come to mind (for 4 paragraphs)

reaction (I can weep in fear, wear a hard grin, say nothing or pray)

Thinking about those chasing us makes my hand hurt (4 paragraphs of hand hurting).

reaction (wince in pain, grin through the pain, grunt in pain, pray)

end of chapter.

Chapter 7: The Waitress Appears

Now obviously I didn’t receive this as well as many readers have (the game has more ratings on the Hosted Games app than almost every Choice of Games game, so it’s obviously extraordinarily popular). I thought it must just be a hit or miss thing, and went to Steam to see if any negative reviews agreed with me that it could get tedious, but the steam reviews are wildly over the top:

The new standard. Makes every other COYA game look amateurish. The writing was fantastic.

Amazing writing. It pulls you in and just doesn’t let go. The roleplaying opportunities are great, you can really develop your character’s personality, motivations, and skills. There’s so many choices and the game doesn’t make them for you or force you into a choice like some other text based games. It’s funny, emotional, charming, and has a lot of depth

Writing, writing, writing. The prose is lyrical and textured, but never indulgent. It doesn’t waste time describing every rock and tree, but it does make you feel things—from the weight of your sword on your hip to the quiet ache in your chest when someone you care about looks at you a second too long. It’s storytelling through implication. You feel like a real person, not a stats-driven machine.

So what makes good prose? That’s completely subjective. If someone likes the prose, it’s good prose to them. For my own tastes, I like to dabble more in the fantastical and metaphorical. I like a lot of dialogue. I like high-density information.

Let’s look at Golden Rose when it wants to have a dramatic moment. I think this is good:

Before your eyes, the Golden Coast stretches from east to west. The Mediterranean Sea, undulating gently on the surface, seems almost purple in the setting sun. The air smells like salt and fresh summer evenings.

You lower your eyes and see it.

Sitting on the rocky shores of the Iberian coast, its high walls and narrow streets jutting out, rests a sprawling city. From above, you see the soaring towers of the castle and the spiked balustrade of the enormous Cathedral.

A large dock juts out of the cliffs. The wood and black stone merging together to hold countless hulking ships with high sails and golden names on their hulls. Smaller, single-masted vessels fill the rest of the space, clogged together so tightly they seem to form an ocean of their own.

Standing proudly at the center, its masts soaring high above all, a Portuguese galleon sways gently near the pier, its white, triangular sails flapping in the wind. You see the imposing red cross and feel a weight settling on your stomach.

The Holy Cross.

So, they’re here

On the southern end of the city, facing the rolling hills and the endless flatlands beyond, is the main gate. The iron door that bars the outside world from the safety within.

Tarragona.

This is good writing! This is professional writing. 90% of the IF I’ve read is worse than this. Lots of sensory details (smells, colors, sights). We get a lot of info: There is a sea (the meditarranean, with a city with high walls, a big dock with a lot of little ships and one big ship, then a big gate.

We don’t get any real information on how we feel about this (nor do we choose our reaction here, as we do in other scenes). We don’t know what emotions are at play here. The imagery exists but is not, I’d say, vivid.

For my personal tastes, I like writing that more focuses on giving us information we couldn’t otherwise deduce, or that surprises you with it’s words. It’s hard to find comparisons to Golden Rose because these games don’t focus on long, ponderous descriptions, they use quick bites and often intersperse with dialogue. For instance, the game Bogeyman by Elizabeth Smyth gets down to the details quickly:

The window is a pitifully small square of thick, warped glass. You can’t see much through the frost crystals still thawing on its outer face: a foggy morning settling over a rocky incline.

This tells so much in two sentences: it gives a sense of claustrophobia and wrongness. It tells us the season and time of day, gives the general setting. We can imagine the world with so little.

Like I said, other of my favorite authors using a lot of dialogue. BP Hennessy’s games are just scripts:

Birdland
DAN CANOE: …It’s all about respect. You have to respect the paddle. Be one with the paddle. Treat the paddle like a lover. Or, if you prefer, a close friend. Most of all, you’ve got to stay calm and centred. The paddle can sense anxiety and if you bring a nervous energy into the canoe the paddle will betray you.

(The campers stare at him blankly.)

DAN CANOE: Now. (He picks up a paddle.) Today we’re going to be practicing some basic strokes. Remember to grip the handle firmly and make calm, deliberate motions. Any questions?

(You raise your hand.)

DAN CANOE: Bridget.

This conveys so much with just a few words. We immediately get a glimpse of this man’s personality, we get a sense of the social dynamics, how everyone is feeling, our role in the social pecking order. Without any other context you can guess a lot of the game’s structure and setting and feeling from context clues here.

I also like authors that use interesting and fun word choices that take time to read and process, like Chandler Groover in Cragne Manor:

Some instinct called them to the plant, compelled them to fall in this particular arrangement. Their limbs are like letters, their slaughter grammar. Whatever language they might embody, its blasphemy could never be written. Only erased.

Now, it’s really hard to come up with writing text like this, especially to fill out 1.2 millions words, so some kind of redundancy or filler is to be expected. But Paul Wang has similar wordcounts. I like how he describes approaching a major city (much like Terragonna):

From Guns of Infinity

The Antari write poetry about these plains. They have songs, folk tales, great epics, all about the vast expanse that now surrounds you. To read or listen to such things, you would imagine that the place would be a land of unbound wonder, a place to lift the hearts of all who would walk or ride it.

Yet you feel nothing. It is merely grass upon rolling hills, good ground for light cavalry perhaps, but you feel no different surrounded by it now than you did two days before, when you were surrounded by trees.

Your column makes good progress that day, forging forward until it is too dark to do anything except set up camp.

The next morning, you spot a grey haze above the horizon before you, the sort that only comes from smoke rising in vast quantities. By midday, that haze has become a cloud, and you begin to see the low, dark shapes from which the blackest and heaviest of the smoke rises.

By mid-afternoon, the sky grows dark from the smoke, which now begins to blot out the summer sun above you. Finally, you and your men crest the top of one last ridge, and you breathe a most involuntary sigh of relief when you finally have a clear view of what is before you.

Not three or four kilometers ahead of you lies an expanse of canvas tents, staked out and arranged neatly in rows around a large pavilion. Beyond that, there is a hellish expanse of trenches, earthworks, and fighting positions, boiling over with men in the burnt-orange coats of Tierran Line Infantry…

…and not a few hundred paces beyond them, scarred, battered, scorched, but still standing proud and unbreached, are the defiant walls of Kharangia.
Just like the Golden Rose text, there is vivid imagery, but see the difference! Action,movement, suspense, emotion, lore. We can tell right away what kind of genre this is.

Anyway, my goal isn’t to convince people that Golden Rose prose is bad since you can’t objectively prove subjective things and because it’s not, in fact bad; I just don’t think it’s revolutionary or the greatest prose of all time or even of CYOA prose or even just of Hosted Games.

I think a lot of that comes down to plot. I love plot, and this game has very little. Everything is stretched out as far as possible. Exploring the docks (which is 1/4 or 1/5 of Ch. 4 alone) is 120K words, the same as Creatures Such as We, one of my favorite games of all time. We start the game chasing down a thief, at the end we find him, the middle is all looking, but there’s no content besides the looking. 1.2 million words of looking for the thief.

The choices provide a lot of customisation. Basically, choices affect your states but never really test your stats (though some past decisions are tested). In on chapter with 96 choices, only 4 or 5 or so had stat checks.

But, 16 of them allowed me to ‘smirk’ and 25 allowed me to ‘grin’; plastering a smile on your face is one of the most common options (other variants of this personality are to laugh or to ‘quirk your lips’). After having two options in a row where I could smirk at inappropriate moments, I imagined an MC that picks these options all the time just terrorizing Terragonna with their smile. I called him ‘smirky’ and sketched him and then added some other common variants

(we have ‘Pious John’, who utters prayers to the saints. ‘Frownie’ who is unhappy or unpleasant. ‘Blusher’ who does the flirty or shy moves, the OG Smirky, and ‘Grunter’, who grunts and side-eyes or says nothing the whole time).

None of these choices really do anything; the big choices are in branching the story.

So, why is a game with solid but not enrapturing text, very little plot, and choices that don’t really do much of anything so popular? (By the way on IFDB I plan on giving this game a 5/5, and would rank 9/10 in competitions. I’m 100% only pushing back because of the extraordinary claims in the Steam reviews).

My hypothesis is that people like it less as a story and more as an experience to live in, like a Sims game. At every moment, you’re being that character, which can take on some of the tropes I listed above. With thousands of words per scene, you can take your time and spend days or weeks reading and imagining yourself there; this time makes you familiar with the characters like they are your friends. With little plot, you can pick up the book at any time, even after many days, and hop right back in since there aren’t a lot of plot points to forget. The lack of stat checks mean that you can just be yourself and not worry about anything.

So for people who want fiction that can be a reflection of themselves (which is one of the whole points of CYOA) or for people who want a ‘life experience simulator’ or for people that just want a lot of material, I think this is a good game. I’d love a 240K word version that just has the parts about the latin and sculptures and the conversations with friends.

Now that I’ve been grumpy (and I know people won’t like this, I saw how people reacted to my Swamp Castle review so I’m ready for the heat), I’ll say that Beka and Billy were awesome characters. I’ve never really seen a character like Billy (I can’t remember if I named them that, but that’s my horse); he’s genuinely funny. And every scene with Beka was a delight. I also liked the ‘corrupt older man’ depictions; a couple of people in the game (notably Aurelius) felt like Judge Claude Frollo from Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Anyway, that’s my take. As someone who like information-dense genre fiction with lots of choices and some pushback-crunchiness-chance to fail, this game didn’t enchant me, but if I were the author, I wouldn’t change a single thing I complained about here. Every single thing that rubbed me the wrong way is something that other people have liked and has spurred sales. You can’t really make fiction that appeals to everyone at once, and Golden Rose has levels of sales and popularity I will likely never achieve in my lifetime, and I think the author deserves it for finding out what the audience wants and deliver it. Never Change, Ana Ventura. But if I change my viewpoint I’ll come back one day and change my review.

Very good and engaging writing!