Any good free interactive sites or apps other than Choice of Games?

Off-Topic Other Interactive Fiction
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It’s just a fact that we can’t please all of the people all of the time.
Don’t be trolled by those kinds of reviews.

  1. A Midsummer Night’s Choice: The customer does not seem to understand the concept of “try before you buy” or appreciate the chance to read through some free chapters. Also, the customer makes a contradictory commend by first not agreeing with the price, then claiming bait and switch tactics because they thought it was a free game. This is a troll review.

  2. Saga of the North Wind: The customer admits their experience was good, so the 3/5 star rating obviously reflects their own misunderstanding about the first few chapters. All games that are free to try clearly state, multiple times, before the story even starts, that only the first few chapters are free and if you want to continue, you should purchase the game. The customer is trying to punish Choice of Games for their own ignorance.

  3. The Eagle’s Heir: The customer is clearly abusing the ratings system to try and dictate Choice of Games’ marketing strategy. This is clearly a troll review.

  4. Choice of Alexandria: Again, the customer is clearly warned that they would only get to experience limited content for free without buying. Google (and all other distribution platforms, for that matter) should implement a “contest a review” feature for publishers who believe reviews to be bogus.

  5. The Eagle’s Heir: Of course, “way too short” is subjective. That’s why CoG has word counts per playthrough so that professional standards can be maintained. If the customer is warned of the average playthrough length then still cries “too short” they are trolling.

  6. Saga of the North Wind: Customers have been trying to haggle for lower prices since time immemorial. If the game is priced appropriately, then there is no need to concern yourself with this criticism. How many times would you have to play the game to unlock all the achievements? How many words per playthrough? The customer’s logic is flawed in that even if you read an epic story one time… you’ve just read a million words.

  7. The Eagle’s Heir: Gamers have been yelling at MMO devs to make their games free for years and years. Some do, to varying levels of success and failure. Many people still believe in the “you get what you pay for” philosophy, and with a free anything, there is no accountability for the level of quality one can expect to find in a given gameplay experience.

You’re doing a great job, @jasonstevanhill, and all the CoG staff.
Just keep up the good work and don’t let petty things get you down.
We’ve got your back!

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Agreed

It seems that people don’t understand the point of the free chapters, even though I thought it would be obvious. It’s silly to not buy something for two more dollars then your normal price.

The CoG staff is doing amazing, creating great products that many people like reading. I for one look forward to the future stories.

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Well, this was hillarious to read.

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Discovered interactive novels on Googleplay by stumbling unto Delight Games. Bought their premium library. Enjoyed it very much. Great customer service too.

Discovered CoG. And as with others… Now I have a hard time reading DG xD. I think above all, i love that i can play as a girl that likes girls (or whatever!) – woohoo!

Thanks CoG team (and writers!), hope to be able to continue to support your work for the years to come :).

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Oddly enough, I got two support emails this week about how people can’t access our IAP “diamonds,” …meaning the game currency for “Choices: Stories You Play.” Which makes me wonder how people are confused over support for Pixelberry vs COG. Maybe they google “choice game support?” Who knows.

But I went over to GPS and looked at their reviews. Same song:

“Great game, stories are well written and interesting. Just wish they didn’t lock story choices behind some stupid gimmicky pay wall. In a game called Choices I’d like the freedom to actually make a damn choice so I can experience the story how I want it to play out, not be told I have to buy it. You want money for your work and thats understandable, but you can do fine by blocking chapters or stories with a pay wall not the freaking choices. That or rename your damn game.”

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Not gonna drag on OP since they can do whatever they like, but as someone who downloaded a couple CoG titles for free waaaay back in the day on a jailbroken iDevice, but has been paying for every title(Sometimes on release day!) For almost five years, I do like the feeling I get, supporting authors who clearly like what they do.

Besides, I set aside a little pay every month for expenditures like this. $3-5 every so often is cheaper than my Spotify subscription!

I’m gonna check out every link on this thread since I’m always on the look out for more things to get into. Thanks to everyone who had something to link to and I wished I had something to share than my little ol’ opinion!

Oh, and to piggyback on Pixelberry since @Mary_Duffy mentioned them. They DO make decent stories, but as the review says, anything you’d REALLY want to do is locked behind a very annoying paywall. I stopped playing their games for that very reason… That FB casual style of play is not something I want in a CYOA game, thank you very much!

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When I get down about those reviews, like Jason, they do bring me down, I comfort myself with the knowledge that most of the people complaining about paying for content are literal children, so they have no income. At least, I hope that’s true.

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Just like older voters disproportionally affect election results in most countries (grey vote, more likely to vote etc), maybe children disproportionally affect things in internet world (more time and more likely to express an opinion?) Just a hypothesis, no way to check it though…

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Well, and one can sort of get away with it online. If people started asking the staff in a cafe, ‘Why do I have to pay for this cup of tea? It’s only tea! I mean, just have a look at it, it’s ninety percent hot water!’ they’d probably get odd looks at the very least.

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Indeed… the anonymity of the internet and being able to say whatever you want without fear of having to defend your opinions and look stupid (which in RL prevents many people from randomly criticising others). Also, it’s interesting to note that the younger the person, generally the less chance they think they have to pay for anything from internet. In many countries the thought of even buying anything from internet is considered stupid and socially unacceptable (why pay for something you can get for free?)

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I’m interested in the adult games you were talking about if you wouldn’t mind still sharing.
Thanks!

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Please inbox me those adult only sites.

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Delight Games, especially the Wizard’s Choice series, have really good characters, great writing, and great stories. The downside is that the choices are basically “try to guess which irrelevant choice this author thinks is the best one.”

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You should definitely try the `Huntsman`` - it is simply amazing. It’s a great story and extremely well written. Very few grammatical errors in the first book. Which is a breath of fresh air after most of the text games I’ve played. The games take on raising stats is neat, the story compelling, the characters are great. If you like horrors, of course :wink:

After the first demo version you can buy all other 10 chapters for just $3,99. Alternatively, buy each chapter separately. Very cheap and very interesting!

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If there has been anything I’ve learned over the may years of coding and designing is you can never satisfy everyone. There will be some who absolutely love your stuff and others who venomously hate it.

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So, pretty hostile post here AnneR as an introduction to the forum. I’m going give you the benefit of the doubt for now that you’re not trolling and reply.

I don’t understand the obsession with choosing the gender and orientation of the protagonist. At what point does it matter in most of the stories beyond the (usually) shallow romance options? If so much time is spent on the numerous permutations possible doesn’t that mean the story will likely suffer?

Shouldn’t a story in the romance genre and a story in the action genre play at least somewhat differently without attempting to shoehorn action into the romance game or romance into the action game?

This has been discussed elsewhere on the forums with regards to depth of romance and whether some stories are better off without it. Some stories definitely do require orientations etc as the characters may be locked to a particular orientation, gender flippable or simply to stop annoying readers with potential romance options that wouldn’t interest them. There are some games on the list that do not contain romance options. The short, short answer is, much of COG’s audience likes romantic options and games are can get bad reviews on the stores if they don’t contain any.

A story involving the heir to the throne (for example) SHOULD differ depending on the gender of the protagonist as well as the orientation. Otherwise why bother to create the scenario?

Why? If we’re talking about historically accurate Tudor England then sure. If we’re talking about a made up magical filled non-historically correct land with the rules set by the author, can’t they do as they like? The other reason to create the senario is for setting pronouns and RO’s as previously discussed.

Actually there are a few that are branching games on the site. And even some of the semi-linear ones can lead to significantly different endings. The more linear leaning ones often tend to be more popular than the highly branched ones so more of them are written and they get more attention.

This is an exaggeration for many, and more than you’ll get for many demo sections for books off amazon. If you do not wish to pay for the games, you can always stick to the free ones. If you don’t like them at all (which seems to be the case) why are you here to complain?

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I don’t know if this is the best topic to get involved in as a long time lurker (I’ve rarely been tempted to post as it seems like the more interesting topics always wind up getting locked/deleted anyhow and it seems like a waste of time to participate…) but just to put in my two cents I have to say that while I don’t necessarily agree with AnneR’s tone, the point about the…pointlessness of the gender and orientation stuff is something I’ve been feeling for awhile. Beyond the first couple I played back when it was still a novel concept I’ve never felt like it was anything but padding, to give the illusion of more choices when none of them mattered. Add the fact that it almost seems mandatory in every game now and I feel even less like I’m making interesting decisions about how I’ll play my character.

I realize I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I read a story, it’s because I want to read about a fun or dramatic or interesting plot. I’ve never in my life read a book or watched a movie and thought ‘well it was very well written, I’d have liked to enjoy that, but unfortunately the protagonist wassn’t exactly like me and I wasn’t personally interested in the person they got together with and so this is trash with zero appeal’. I know these stories are in second person but I’ve never taken the ‘you’ to be ME. Reading a choice-based story is more like role-playing, and I’d rather not even be offered roles that don’t matter and effect nothing about the plot.

But as long as I’m having a minor rant…for that matter it bugs me even more when love interest characters have their gender or orientation changed to match what the reader is interested in. The author isn’t even attempting to make them a character of their own or have consistency in the story’s world when that happens, it’s just a wish fulfillment fantasy for the player at that point.

…okay well it was nice to finally get that off my chest. Cheers everyone and happy Thanksgiving, if you celebrate that.

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That is point of the novel or a movie. It is a narrative about the protagonist and their struggle in the environment they were put into by the author or writer, which is some what different from what the CoG is aiming at.

One thing unique about CoGs is it aims for us to be integrated or to be part of the story or the world the author have created so they try to customize your orientation and background and take into account your choices if possible. I know that some stories are linear and others concentrate on world building but some authors have to gone some lengths in order to make our choices matter and reflected in the ending.

To be honest, I love some romance options integrated in my fav CoGs stories. It makes the story more interesting.

Well, that’s just my two cent.

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I think recent posters have been missing that the titled offered under Choice of Games and Hosted Games, are text-based choose your own adventure role-playing games. Choice of protagonist gender, orientation, appearance are vital parts of these things to allow people to be able to invest in the narratives.

Not interested in that sort of customisation? Go ahead and create a generic straight white male called John Smith an knock yourself out - your character will be no different from the vast majority of player characters to date.

Fancy a little variation? Go ahead and create that lesbian Asian woman and go have fun.

The point of choice is to let you choose how you want to have fun. That’s the point of these games. If that really doesn’t appeal to you, I think maybe you’re looking at the wrong game genre.

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The character might as well be a generic straight white male no matter what you choose, that was actually part of my point.

Since they’re essentially fake options that literally don’t matter in the slightest I just click my way through with whatever the first option is. The customization options I pay attention to are things like skills and stats and starting inventory. Things that effect the plot or the strategy I’ll be using.

I don’t want to sound like I care more than I do, because the only thing that actually bugs me about the whole thing (besides the inconsistency of NPCs I mentioned previously) is when purely aesthetic stuff that amounts to certain words being automatically swapped around gets praised as some kind of in depth customization and listed as a feature of a game, when it usually appears to be just a script tacked on after the story is already written, probably because it’s essentially mandatory at this point.

Can anyone suggest a game where anything meaningful happens as a result of these kind of choices? I’ll accept is entirely possible I’ve only played the less interesting ones and gotten a false impression. I’d love to encounter a Valkyrie-like faction you could only join as a woman, or as an orphaned female character getting sent to a different orphanage than when playing as the brother and unlocking an entirely new plot, anything like that.

NPCs as defined characters you could only get close to or access subplots around if you played someone they’d realistically be interested in romantically would also be great. Anything like this would add tons of replayability beyond just the usual ‘this is how you get the single optimal ending, congrats you figured it out’.

And I mean really no one else rolls their eyes at these scenarios like ‘Meet NPC. She’s a lesbian… unless you want her to be straight. Don’t worry it’s all good, this character only exists in the world as a doll to be tailored to your whims.’

Maybe I’m hoping for too much but I’m just big on exploring consistent settings and really like the feeling that a plot is really taking my choices into account even in ways I don’t expect.

And there are just simple things like…I wrote a story once about a girl wanting to be a paladin even though females in her culture and religion upon joining the church were expected to learn the healing arts and go around feeding the poor and such only. I’ve considered turning it into a CYOA and outlined and mapped out alternate plot lines extensively, including cities and factions and an economic system the player can become involved in…and yet if I ever really took the leap in converting it all to choicescript I get the feeling it would be unwelcome here because the character is just herself, and does not come equipped with interchangeable parts. And of course the very foundation of the entire plot would make no sense if she did. She is who she is BECAUSE she encountered resistance in this specific way. I honestly tend to think less of a character’s depth if who they are is generic enough that nothing about who they are or where they’re coming from matters to a story.

Okay not sure why I typed all that lol. This was supposed to be a short post and now I’m just wanting to go add more to my story. In an attempt to be on topic, maybe I will go check out a couple of those sites the OP mentioned again. I think I’ve seen all the active CYOA sites out there (surprised there’s not more) I’m just spoiled on the more consistent quality on this one.

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