Punch out Fascists and unravel conspiracies in this explosive pulp adventure set in a wild 1930s world of airships, fast cars and two-fisted action!
Cliffhanger! is a 320,000-word interactive novel by William Brown, author of The Mysteries of Baroque. It is set in a fantastic Art Deco version of the 1930s in which an amazing scientific discovery has changed history and unleashed humanity’s wildest dreams and most dreadful nightmares! Airships criss-cross the skies, masked daredevils clash with sinister masterminds, and every day brings something new and extraordinary. You are Challenger of the Tomorrow Institute and you stand among the foremost adventurers of this era, whether your reputation is based on your amazing gadgets and inventions, your mystic powers, or your sheer grit and daring.
• Earn a fortune for yourself by building up a trading empire across the world, by taking priceless artefacts from ancient ruins, or by pulling off daring high-stakes heists at glittering casinos and high-security banks!
• Fight for freedom by smuggling guns to anti-colonial revolutionaries, riding with partisans, crushing fascists in Europe, and uncovering Nazi fifth columnists in the United States!
• Test your skills and your nerve by hunting the biggest game of all: gigantic monsters ranging from kaiju off the coast of Japan to the dreaded T-Rex itself!
• Find friendship, love, rivalry, and enmity among a colourful cast of stalwart heroes, brooding warrior princes, shy scholars, charming rogues, ruthless gangsters, enigmatic spies, inscrutable mystics, fast-talking reporters, and brilliant scientists!
• Protect the Earth from interstellar and extradimensional invaders!
• Advance the cause of science and usher in tomorrow or dig deep into the strange occult history of the Earth and its lost civilizations!
• Form a society of science heroes and masked adventurers to defend the world – or to conquer it!
Directions for beta testing:
Email us, beta AT choiceofgames for access. (This changed several months ago, so take note if you haven’t beta tested in a while.)
Do not send DMs/PMs through the forum mail system, Discord, text message, carrier pigeon, or any other method than email.
When you send your EMAIL, include:
- the game you want to test in the Subject line of the email.
- your forum-name
- your real name (first and last)
- if your family/surname comes first, please indicate that. I will assume that your given name is listed first unless you tell me otherwise.
Do not email us multiple times about joining a beta. If you don’t email us as soon as we post a beta, you go into a queue. As we post new drafts, we admit more people from the queue. Eventually, we will get to you. When you have been admitted to the beta, we will send you a link, a username, and a password as a reply to your email.
When you have feedback to submit:
- Return feedback to beta@choiceofgames, preferably part of the same email thread/chain, rather than a new one.
- Please send screenshots or copy/pasted quotes as often as you can; it helps us track down whatever observation you’re making. In particular, the author may see things that you don’t, and/or the screenshot may contain more information than you realize.
- If you’re submitting feedback using the Bug/Submit button in the game, make sure you include your handle/name in the body of the email. The Submit button obscures your email address, and I can’t give you credit for feedback if I don’t know who you are.
DO NOT POST ASKING WHAT THE BETA EMAIL ADDRESS IS. The first test to becoming a beta tester is inferring what it is based on the above paragraph.
Lastly, you cannot be testing two games at once. Send feedback on one and you can apply to another.
Tips on How to Give Feedback
I’m looking for “high level” and “low level” feedback. Not mid-level feedback.
Low-level = typos and continuity errors. A continuity error is when a character’s gender flips, or someone comes back from the dead, or you run into a plotline that just doesn’t make sense (because it’s probably a coding error).
For these low-level issues, screenshots are very helpful. If you see a problem, take a screenshot, or copy and paste the text that is in error, and email that.
“High level” feedback has to do with things like plot, pacing, and characters. “Scene A didn’t work for me because x, y, and z,” is useful feedback. “B character was entirely unsympathetic, because u, w, and v,” is also useful feedback.
“Mid-level” feedback describes things like grammar, style, word choice, or the use of commas. As I said above, I do not want mid-level feedback. In particular, DO NOT WRITE TO ME ABOUT COMMAS.
“I had a great time and saw only a few spelling errors,” is not useful feedback. In fact, it’s the sort of thing that results in you not being given access to future betas.
Some examples of useful feedback :
In Choice of the Dragon, you get to choose what type of wings you have: leather or scaled. Someone wrote in and asked about having feathered wings. Great suggestion! Done!
In “The Eagle’s Heir,” someone asked about Eugenie. They said that the romance moved too quickly–because she only appeared in the last third of the game–and wished they could have had an opportunity to meet her earlier. So the authors added an opportunity to meet her and start the romance earlier in the game (in a scene that already existed).
In “Demon Mark: A Russian Saga” several people commented on how the PC’s parents were unsympathetic, so the authors added a choice or two to deepen the relationship with the parents in the first chapter, to help better establish their characters.
Similarly, pointing out a specific choice and saying, “this is who I imagined my character was at this particular moment, and none of these options seemed right for me. I would have liked an option to do X instead,” is also really helpful feedback.
Another useful piece of feedback: if you choose an #option and then the results of that #option don’t make sense. Like, if you thought an #option might test one stat, but it seems to have tested a different one.