I have not read SotS but I assumed it would have more going for it if it’s a Nebula finalist, though I guess I don’t know much about the award. What are they rating it on?
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In fairness to SotS- it is very well written from a prose / writing perspective. I personally would have rated it a bit higher than Kate, even if I didn’t have a great experience overall and agree with a lot of the points she makes.
That said, the Nebulas are voted on by members of the SFWA, the American writing advocacy group who run the award.
So whilst on paper they’re voting for the ‘best work’ in the category, as with all such awards there are some qualitative factors here such as - does a material proportion of the voter base know the piece of work exists at all? Are they willing to read it / opine on it? Etc etc.
So people and works known to the SFWA will inherently have a much higher chance of being recognized / nominated / progressed through the competition, especially for a niche genre like IF where they’re unlikely to have heard about it at all if it isn’t written by somebody they know or at least have heard of. Which isn’t to downplay the nominees’ achievements; if people vote for something, it’s because those people appreciate the author’s body of work.
(this also means that it isn’t COG / HG who are driving this, as far as I’m aware - so if we as readers and / or authors ever feel there’s a story that has been overlooked by the awards, it’s not the company’s fault, or down to malice - odds are that those who nominate and / or vote on the awards simply did not know the work existed!)
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I am still to this day mad/surprised, werewolf the apocalypse : BoHN hasn’t won any awards. That might be one of the best fiction I have read. Maybe I am slightly biased because I like WoD lore and gameplay. Still it was a phenomenal read.
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It definitely isn’t. They’ll proudly hype the nominations that come their way, but they have no control over which of their games the SFWA membership likes. Stewart Baker and the other CoG veteran authors who won last year’s Nebula for A Death In Hyperspace collectively have way more cred and clout in the Nebula process than CoG itself does as a company. 
They’re authors known and respected by other authors, who’ll thus take the time to read their work.
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Thanks for confirming! Absolutely what I envisioned and consistent with basically every big awards process ive ever seen run…
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Oh, 100%. I took a look at an Achievements guide posted on Steam, and the game seems incredibly wide. Lots of endings and combos I didn’t know were possible.
I’m sure there is but tbh… I’m not particularly inclined to replay the game ngl
I didn’t read it as Particularly Serious Commentary™️ either, just a joke that felt out of place in a world with writing so grim and melancholy. One thing (among many!) I like about your work, Harris, is how you play it “straight” (no pun intended?), as you say. Gender, dress, and sexuality (for the MC, at least) are just matter-of-fact options. It’s interesting seeing a world where being LGBT+ is normalized, though, of course, having the opposite setting is fun to play around in, too.
Theodoridou’s writing is always a pleasure. You might like it!
Real. This is me savescumming an event with three choices and failing ALL of them.
Yeah, after doing a quick (5-minute Google search), it seems to be geared toward more “serious” or “literary” works of prose. I’m quite surprised the company’s games even get nominated sometimes—it seems like such a niche!!! But if we’re looking at strictly prose, all of Theodoridou’s writing is consistently more professional and vivid than most, imo
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Well, the winners have most often been well-known hits: Elden Ring (in SotS’s year), Baldur’s Gate, Hades, Outer Worlds. If anything beats Hades 2 this year, it’ll probably be Silksong or Clair Obscur. But CoG has been more nominated than any other company.
This is I think not unrelated to CoG’s business model of operating as much like a book publishing company as possible, commissioning proven authors to write for them, many of whom come from the sci-fi and fantasy writers’ community.
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Sins of the Sires feels like the author dropped the game on the way to submit it, lost half the pages, and then decided to just submit the pages they managed to collect. What’s there is well written but the way it lurches from scene to scene just left me going “What? Did I miss something?” all too often. I tried to romance the vampire girl in every playthrough and I don’t think that I ever got an ending that included her in any way. Just entirely unsatisfying.
To me, the difference in these is that the AToM one makes sense in the setting. The vampire is pretending to be a cop who is pretending to care. On the police level, it’s the kind of meaningless pinkwashing policy you might see implemented as a show of performative inclusivity. On the vampire level, he just wants you to lower your guard for a couple of seconds so he can grab you and he doesn’t care if it happens because you believe the line or if you’re distracted by how weird it is for him to say that.
The one in SotS doesn’t have any of that. It feels awkward and out of place and the game lets you call out how awkward and out of place it is, and if you have to hang a lampshade on a thing like that you could just not do that thing and the game would be better for it.
This one is my favorite of the Vampire games. I’d be really, really surprised if you didn’t enjoy it more.