Thank you for coming to my assistance, AletheiaKnights.
I have just come across your message. I stayed clear of this forum for a few days, after that other message.
“Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters” is out now! Topple the vampires from the streets below!
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So, there are two difficulty settings for this game: the easier one, if you accept Jangles’ “offer that you can’t refuse” and become a criminal under him in order to get room&board with the Fellowship of Zheng&co.
And the other, if you try to go at it alone. I appreciate the difficulty though, it is rare for stories to actually be challenging instead of the usual power fantasy trip, lol.
My char ended up in a spiral of failure, managing to get only some food, but very far from the dream of having a roof (don’t tell me how, I will play again and figure it out). Nearly murdered by Corinne(?) the Thinblood, Zheng dies. All investigations fail, because you don’t have a torch, and 1 Phys - 2 Soc - 2 Int are not decent stats, especially when paired with Willpower of 1 or 2.
The supermarket infiltration also fails, so the group gets all caught like dumbasses. At which point you get brought in front of Lydia, the Ventrue Vampire. Which is hilarious really, and endearing, it’s like the game twisting itself into a pretzel to be still playable, but why should she bother with any of these complete failures? Compare and contrast my first char, that investigated stuff successfully, found the remnants of ShreckNet with Fleur-de-Lys, managed to spy on the vampire meeting, and nearly got away in the escape. Later unknowingly did a no-sell of the tier 1 blood bond thanks to having 5 willpower (how do you get willpower btw? And how does despair work?), and ended up in the “The Unmaking, but with high-willpower” ending.
Time to re-roll and make different choices (too proud to turn on storyteller mode). Great story!
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So Cata has published his “post-mortem” of the game after the release, where he reflects on the reception, what it did right, wrong and lessons for the future, it’s pretty comprehensive, here it is so all you guys can give it a read:
January 2026: A Time of Monsters – the Post-Mortem | Paul Wang
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I always love his postmortems; I wish more authors would do one! Thanks for sharing. I would have missed it otherwise. I agree with all his points, too.
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@Cataphrak I feel compelled to offer unsolicited advice only because I think you are taking away some of the wrong lessons from Time Of Monsters. I’m a relatively casual fan of WoD. I like the video games for the most part but never played the tabletop. Similar to D&D which will be relevant as I make comparisons to your Kendrickstone series. I am a big fan of your writing I think you know.
I found myself skipping a ton of the writing on Time of Monsters in a way I never have with anything else you have written. I don’t think the problem is anything mechanical. I enjoyed solving the food money puzzle (even if it was quite a bit easier than your other titles). The problem for me was twofold.
One I think can summed up as “show don’t tell.” I felt like a lot of the dialogue in Time of Monsters was exposition dumping which is not something I have ever encountered in your writing before. In previous titles I found myself reading every word, but frankly the dialogue in Time of Monsters was boring. Even characters like Will that I thought I might be interested in I couldn’t read all the way through.
Second was I felt like the game was babying the hell out of me. Messing around with builds, falling into traps, and discovering I was one gold short of a build I wanted to try out was what kept me coming back to Kendrickstone over and over again.
All this is to say if you think the game balance was good and the branching was the problem with Time of Monsters I strongly disagree. Frankly the opposite things were what I bounced off of compared to your other titles.
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Yeah, IMO the branching itself wasn’t the problem. The issue was the way the branching was done.
The story plays with limited time to an extent that Cataphrak’s past games really haven’t. Hero of Kendrickstone (which remains my favourite ChoiceScript title) has great branching, as you say.
I think the main issue is that AToM’s branching is dependent on opportunity cost. Time spent buying food is time you don’t get to spend getting to know the characters. While obviously opportunity cost is important for what is at least partly a slice-of-life game, it does put stress on the player and put the game’s survival mechanics directly at odds with the narrative side of things.
There’s a lot of: “here’s an interlude. You can do whatever you want but if you don’t feed yourself you will suffer. And feeding yourself means you can’t talk to your fellow Hunters. Also you don’t know how many interactions you are going to have.” Followed by things like a trip to the grocery store or a chat with one of your friends taking a full day.
There was some of this in Hero of Kendrickstone too, but never anything like: “because you chose to buy a book you don’t get an important scene with your mentor.” Worst case scenario, you would wind up doing something like fucking up William of Hallowford’s heist mission because you had no way of knowing it was only beatable with either 5 Prowess or 1 Economics. The rest of it was fairly intuitive; one decision when deciding how you spent your free time, one decision on how you spent your professional time, and one decision on what you buy from the market before a mission. There were certainly things to quibble over like “well why can I only buy one thing every three months?” or the Lore Skills system (particularly as it pertains to magic) not being better-explained, but beyond that it was extremely easy to grasp and plan around.
And looking at Lords of Infinity, while the game did have branching issues with some paths being too hard to find or just too suboptimal to consider, I don’t have much to complain about regarding the Estate vs Aetoria path as a concept. There were just aspects of it which could have been executed better or differently.
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It’s not necessarily that I thought the game balance was “good” so much as it was that I was trying to address complaints that previous games were too difficult, too vaguely signposted, and too subtle, and I think by addressing that in particular, I made it too easy and too obvious for you.
Which I think is a fair critique! It is easier and more obvious than my other stuff, and that was a function of trying to reach out to new people and to correct for the fact that any playtester is going to, by definition, be better “trained” to handle difficult interactive fiction than your average player.
Yeah, this is one of the factors which I’d used before to success, and which just… didn’t play well with all the other systems I’d used before to success.
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Sounds like software bug-hunting. 
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Most damningly, I haven’t heard a word at all about the Romances (of which there are either four or five, depending on how you define them) because I suspect that most people haven’t been able to figure out the precise sequence of individual mutually exclusive decisions they need to unlock them.
I forgot to add this to my review (it was too freakin’ long already), but I thought you did a great job with Fleur’s romance! I don’t think of you as a Romance writer, though I did adore the ~yearning~ in the Infinity books. How could that translate to a modern setting, where there’s less coyness and no fallback on playing a role? Pretty damn well! I can’t quite remember any specifics, but I think there were some scenes where if the MC flirted, she would blush and stammer. I also vaguely recall comforting her and sleeping in the same bed together? Anyway, I think her dialogue was the best. It honestly felt less of a stereotype and more of two people getting to know each other. I didn’t realize she could be so sweet! And to me, it was written naturally. Just my 2¢
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I’ve just played the game again, romancing Fleur a second time. And yes, I liked her stammering and blushing (from when the MC agrees to return to the online research on vampires with her (‘It’s a date!’) to the moment the MC is holding and kissing her). Fleur is sweet when she calms down and isn’t swearing. My favourite character in the game.
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Note to the author: I don’t know if you’re already aware of this glitch or not. I managed to get the ‘Attend the funeral of a friend’-type achievement. In my latest playthrough, Mandy was sacrificed. After her death, my MC still met the Knights of Saint George, and I told Steve about Mandy’s death. But in some of the following scenes, before we chased Cora, Mandy was still present - talking about Steve!
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Oh, the gang side is actually the more difficult way about it, at least if you want the Apex Predator ending. It’s much easier to make friends with the locals as an independent.
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I actually found the independent path a little easier since I could get one additional money in the opening and food doesn’t actually matter.
I guess I should say I was able to buy the phone, crowbar, and flashlight in the independent opening and I had to forgo one of those until the next round in the gang opening.
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Congrats on the release. The setting and tone sound intense, and the Downtown Eastside focus feels refreshing and grounded. Looking forward to diving into the choices and seeing how deep the hunter paths go.
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Hey, I just wanted to thank you for this comment.
I’m going to be making a few changes to the structure of a game I’m working on because this makes a lot of sense and put into words a frustration of mine that just wasn’t clicking in my head. Thanks!
For what it’s worth, I really enjoyed A Time of Monsters, Paul. Nice to see more WoD stories set in the great white north!
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(Hi Jeffrey! Hi Paul!) It’s something I’ve also been turning over in my head.
On the one hand, I can see how frustrating it is. My second game, Cliffhanger, offers something ridiculous like 9 or 10 different mutually exclusive options on how to spend the first period of downtime. These days, even I’m a little bit puzzled by why I’d do that. Didn’t I want people to see all of the stuff I’d worked so hard on? Similarly, although it’s not quite as bad in that respect, my own Hunter game often gives players a choice between, say, spending time with the PC’s friends and potential love interests or doing boring but practical stuff like sourcing weapons or taking a nap. I knew that I wanted some payoff to be involved, but I don’t think I wanted it to be quite that stark.
On the other hand, I don’t think no opportunity cost at all is the way to go. Personally, if I’m in a situation in a game where I can take every option, I will. It’s more content that way. But I also feel a little bit, I dunno, disappointed? Because I don’t really feel like I’m making any kind of significant choice at all.
After all, even in the real world, we don’t have infinite time. We have to decide whether to hang out with friends or put in extra hours at work or engage with our hobbies or write our extremely long Choice of Games games. That limitation is frustrating but also gives our choices meaning.
The approach I’ve been working on at the moment, based on conversations with Allen “Tin Star” Gies and Kyle “Book of Hungry Names” Marquis, is multiple choices during those downtime periods, sandwiched by plot stuff. So you’ll get about 9 options but only have the option of taking 3. However, some of those options will still be available next chapter, so you’ll get a chance to explore them then. The ‘hang out with friends’ type ones will be perennially available, the more time-sensitive ones won’t be. All of this will be buttressed with much use of subroutines.
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In a somewhat similar way, I like how it works in Lies Under the Ice. You have several base improvement options each turn, and some of them special one offs. The rest will always be available to use your allotted actions for that turn on.
That’s what I did in the latter half of Werewolves 3 where the narrative opens up a bit to breathe, and it seems to have hit a decent balance that readers were happy with.
The new game I’m working on, however, has a LOT of ‘open world’ content between set pieces and I’m trying pretty hard to find a decent balance. On one hand, I’m not sure if I want to go Night Road levels of ‘do as much as you want before attending the next set piece’, but on the other hand, people really love that game, so maybe it’s the right way to go?
If that IS the right way to go, then maybe we can still address variance by having story elements of those choices be different depending on when the player chooses to do them. I flirted with this idea in Werewolves 3, where there is a side mission to save a trapped character. You can embark on the mission during your open time slots in any of the later chapters, but if you wait too long, he dies before you get there. So you get to go any time, but the results change.
This could easily work the other way around, as well. Like if you go to a place early on, you might have a different interaction than you would if you went later, depending on choices you make in a later chapter.
Like if you save a character during a main set piece, they could show up in a location available during free roam time where they weren’t during an earlier chapter. That way you can allow the player to roam about as much as they want early, but the content in those locations may change. That would largely solve the issue of a player blasting through all side content all at once from the beginning.
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@Cataphrak @GreekWinter @wbrown
I don’t know if any of you have played the Evertree Saga (by Thom Baylay), but if you want to study how to make the PC’s less-structured time very open-ended, but definitely limited, but not in a way that leaves the player feeling cheated, without losing sight or momentum of the basic plot, while also making room to pursue narrative goals and subplots of the player’s choice, occasionally surprising the player with unexpected outcomes, but never at the expense of agency, making for an amazingly replayable game even in a genre that doesn’t usually make for high replay value - it’s something of a masterclass.
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Eeeh from what I remember the Evertree saga was a bit of a fairy tale, and thus has a more optimistic bent and an easier time with choices, whereas the World of Darkness is more grim 'n gritty (which I love, we need both styles among stories IMO)
But we can all agree that the time crunch on Hunter:A Time of Monsters is definitely too harsh, and hampers an otherwise great game with alternatives like “do I spend my whole time allotment to get food, to buy a weapon, OR to talk with a character?” o.o
Idea: maybe having 3 time slots per day, instead of 2 that can be easily occupied by one long action, could solve most of the problem
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