Formorian War
By Liam Parker
"Dagonet: Calm down everyone, Danna what’s the situation?
Danna: It’s bad
Dagonet: How bad?"
So, I’m going to talk a little bit about what I understand about one of the basic differences between Hosted Games and Choice of Games. Hosted Games offer more flexibility in what you can write, like a protagonist with set gender, while Choice of Games titles require that you meet certain standards and requirements, essentially a bit like approved sponsored content for the writers. I know this is a gross oversimplification, but the point is that there is a lot more oversight on Choice of Games titles. Hosted Games titles don’t always go through a strict editing process. Formorian War feels like a first draft of a game idea that could have worked with more time and effort.
General Story:
You are a King Arthur-alike thrust into a war upon Albion against the Formorian horde. You must balance relationships with other rulers, both human and non-human, and attempt to mount a defense against the invaders. After all is said and done, you choose how you reunite the realm.
I found much of the dialogue to be rapid-fire and jarring when considering we’re talking Arthurian Camelot. There are moments of slapstick comedy that feel like they’d be more at home in Guardians of the Galaxy and romance scenes jump between ‘wink-wink, nudge-nudge, fade to black’ to descriptive romance scenes where characters will suddenly remember they never told you they were bisexual, so a threesome is okay by them.
Format and Typos:
Barring talking about the numerous typos, because those ‘could’ be fixed… the format of the dialogue and story is written like a screenplay. Characters are called out, like in the quote above, before dialogue. You are actually informed mid-page (one page had over 1500 words on it) that your perspective is changing. A little further down the same page, sometimes, the perspective changes again. Characters with long names are often abbreviated, like a Sidhe Archer being referred to as SA. Personal readability of this is very low, and while the screenplay-esque dialogue made it easy to know who was talking, it read like a rapid fire dialogue taking place in a vacuum.
Game Mechanics and Stats:
Failstates seem few and far between. Stats felt like they were only checked sparingly, and the majority of pass-fail was related to previous actions you had taken as opposed to your stats. Options are often locked if you don’t meet the specific requirements to choose them. I didn’t find it difficult to discern, in most cases, if something was going to check what stat.
Replayability:
There are a couple of romance options, and different ways to build your army. There appear to be at least a few branches in the end, that will lead you to differing descriptions in your final epilogue screen.
Dislikes:
- No cohesive writing tone. Theme jumps wildly between Arthurian legacy to snappy banter comedy.
- Screenplay format does no favors for letting my imagination fill in the blanks. Reads like everything exists in a vacuum.
- For a shorter game (35,000 words), having multiple pages with over 1,000 words made for a difficult read
Likes:
- There are some flashes of comedy in the dialogue that could work in a different setting. Instead of Camelot, think Spamelot. The quote in the introduction is an example where the payoff after is genuinely funny and something I’d expect in a Mel Brooks feature.
- The lore in the game is a great skeleton to hang a story off of, some of the changes to the Arthurian style work well.
- You can play through the game once, for free.