Mathbrush reviewing Hosted Games (Latest: Paradox Factor)

[Hamartia]

Thanks! For what it’s worth / to the extent it’s useful, here is my Golden Rose review draft (it’s a complete review, but a draft, so there’s some stuff not finished - I wanted to pull out specific scene examples, e.g.)

Initial Impressions (pre-and-post purchase)

• Analyzing Steam Page / Opening Page:

  • I’m immediately hooked by the opening - ‘shady mercenary on a 1m word fantasy adventure who’s in too deep’ is definitely my kind of premise. The description is short and to the point but has a lot of little points of detail that intrigue me.

  • Reading this, my feeling is that the key focus of the story is going to be exploring Tarragona - it’s easily the longest bullet point, and it does a lot of work to pitch the city as this big, diverse, sprawling place.

  • The other shorter bullet points help build the intrigue - what’s the alt-history hook here? What’s going on with my ‘mysterious’ MC? What’s up with the Church (OK, I can guess this last one to an extent going off history, if this is going to be set in alt-Europe, but you get the idea…)?

  • So it’s definitely a compelling pitch on the surface of it. Excited to revisit this later on.

• Opening Gambit:

  • So I’ve been hooked by the pitch. I run through the opening, which involves my protagonist navigating through a ruin, getting into some trouble, becoming a loot goblin and sharing a moment or two with their coworker Alessa. After that, we head towards the city, with a brief fight along the way.

  • I’m really enjoying things so far; I do feel like I’m running through a well-realized low-level DnD adventure or Dragon Age prologue with interesting companions. My Romanus’ options to express themself are really diverse, which does a great job from the outset making me feel a sense of ownership over them.

  • The cast introductions in particular stand out to me as pretty much the gold standard for IF, particularly Billy and whichever RO the game allocates to have an initial crush on you (in my case, Alessa, but I’ve read the Hadrian branch and know it’s as good). The speed at which the author establishes them as living, breathing people of whom I have a clear mental image is downright impressive.

• Opening Conclusions:

  • I’m feeling great about the Golden Rose as I head into Tarragona!

  • I like the cast, I like my MC, I like being a renegade adventurer, I’m excited to catch this thief and get back to adventuring!

  • From an author’s perspective - the main things that I’m taking from this opening are that Golden Rose is a masterclass in character intros (as per the above) and the MC’s variety of self-expression options does an amazing job at hooking me into their head fast.

Overall, I rate Golden Rose’s start basically as highly as I rate any IF’s start; I thought it was superb, and it certainly did enough to hook me into reading the rest. I’m not going to go section by section for the book itself like I did the opening, though, just summarize the key observations that informed my overall view of the book.

Overall Review

• The Story Itself:

  • I did feel as though the Rose felt more like a very elongated singular story hook, rather than a story itself. I didn’t expect when I went into the game for the first time that I really would be spending the entire story traipsing after Rafael over the course of a couple of days, soaking up the atmosphere and vibes of a town and getting to know my companions (and other folk in the city) better.

  • Even the individual locations I visited didn’t really feel like self-contained ‘widget’ story arcs with their own little resolutions (except the Lance stuff which I did feel worked quite nicely), which I think would have helped a lot. They were just elongated wanderings where I had the pleasure of meeting some very well-written characters.

  • That all sounds pretty critical. Surely that’s a bad thing, then? Can vibes, characters and prose be immaculate enough to still make an IF a good experience despite my fundamental issues with the bones of the story (even before we get to the conclusion)?

• Vibes, Characters and Prose:

  • Yes. Yes they can. I feel so weird that I loved the Golden Rose as much as I did, because it goes against every instinct I have as a reader.

  • I expect a self-contained story structure! I want a compelling conclusion that pays off my experiences throughout the book! When I go on a quest to get my maps back, or get invited to a big fancy party, or asked to book a follow-up rendezvous with a shady lieutenant lady, I sort of expect that at least most of these things will happen in the book that I’m reading, and not a sequel!

  • But damn if I didn’t adore reading TGR even so; the minute-by-minute writing was superb, the atmosphere as I walked through Tarragona was thick enough so as to be palpable, and the way the author deftly juggles the high-level atmospheric stuff (the feeling of a crowd, the state of the world, religious oppression, etc) whilst still having the ability to seamlessly deep dive into the feeling of sharing a bite to eat with a frustrated co-worker was nothing short of remarkable. As a sensory experience, I can’t think of anything in the space that came close to reading TGR for the first time.

• Themes: This isn’t a critical essay in that sense, so I’m not going into detail on this one, but it probably helped that I love a lot of the themes TGR plays with.

  • The complexities of different faiths overlapping with each other in a world that has accrued a ton of cultural and historic detritus, and the damage (and good - big up Hadrian) they can do to people? Meditations on the power of faith to affect the world that feel genuinely ambiguous in their potency? Allusions to something more deeply supernatural subtly at work?

  • I absolutely lap this stuff up, and TGR has it all in spades - and similarly to my point above, it’s executed superbly. It feels genuine and credible - religion has weight to the people who practise it,and to those who are victimised to it. The troubles and joys of Tarragona are believable and credible; the people in it take both seriously.

• Mechanics:

  • I won’t go into this one much for TGR. It’s a fairly mechanics-light game, nice and simple, and I think that suited it well; it didn’t get in its own way, and it served the story. No notes.

• Conclusion:

  • How did I feel about the story as it wrapped up? Honestly, very good. I didn’t get all of the experience I came in expecting after the Steam pitch and the opening. Whilst I certainly got to explore Tarragona, I felt more like a medieval tourist than an adventurer. TGR, to me, was not the mercenary adventure of the opening, but a fantasy romance where two weary travellers (in my first playthrough’s case, Romanus and Alessa) unwound after a gruelling journey and, in the process, dropped enough of their guards to end up in a relationship. But damn, it was a good fantasy romance, and it took place in a wonderful world with very well-realized characters.

  • I don’t mean to say that Alessa hard carried my enjoyment of the story either - I loved spending time with Hadrian in the cathedral, and I’m intrigued by Vallen and to some extent Lance and Neia.

  • One final point; something I grappled with a lot whilst mulling TGR over was this - was this well served being an IF? Would it not be an amazing standalone book? I’m still not certain I have a confident answer to this one, but if I do, the answer probably lies in Romanus. The story and mechanics absolutely didn’t need to be an IF, and the characters would have been superb in any medium, but Romanus was simply such an enjoyable vessel with which to explore the story, and I’m sure it would have been harder to be as fully immersed in them if I didn’t feel such a strong sense of ownership over them from minute 1.

  • That said, I still don’t know whether that fully does it - not when there’s so much left unknown about them and what they’re doing here. Ultimately, as with so many things about TGR, I feel only the sequel(s) will enable me to form a conclusive view.

• Branching:

  • I will say this for TGR - I think it is possibly the least replayable amazing IF I’ve ever played, at least for me.

  • The game’s dynamic changes clearly took a lot more work than I think they sometimes get credit for - the order in which you visit places does matter to an extent, and the chance to prod the cast in different ways as they react to very different Romanuses is seamlessly done and very, very satisfying.

  • But the bones of the story are so heavy and strong and consistent - the events you experience so similar with each read-through - that it does feel like hard going working through the same prose that was so beautiful on a first read, I think. At least at times.

  • In some ways the strength of Tarragona’s world and atmosphere might be a weakness on a re-read - it sticks with you so well that you never can recapture that sense of discovery. At least, I certainly couldn’t.

Reflections

• Reflection & Takeaways: In some ways, TGR was a frustrating first review for me. I came away feeling as confident as when I first read it that I adored the story and would recommend it, but I struggle to take many meaningful lessons away from the experience.

  • From a structural perspective, I don’t think TGR satisfies - my main learning point here is that I do prefer stories to have meaningful endings, to pay off at least two-thirds of the intriguing things they set up even if they leave the rest for sequels. As much as I found myself utterly immersed in the world, I did also find that the pacing and lush descriptions made for so much of the book’s content that I found it extremely hard to re-read despite loving my first playthrough deeply.

  • And yet - none of that did anything to take away from my enjoyment of TGR itself, which baffles me deeply - maybe the lesson here is that if you’re a good enough prose writer, worldbuilder and character author, nothing else matters?

  • Which I suppose is one thing to learn from at least, though it won’t surprise anyone reading this - I think a strong and well-realized core cast is the heart of what makes a successful IF. As writing skills go, I feel honing one’s character writing is the singular skill every IF author (myself included!) would benefit from accordingly.

• Ultimately, I said at the start of this whole affair that I’d only review stories I recommended people buy and read for themselves; and despite all my griping, that’s undoubtedly true of the Golden Rose. Tarragona is a profoundly immersive setting, and whilst I’m not sure the themes necessarily all paid off much in the story itself, they were woven into the world so masterfully that I still found myself engaging with them.

• Also, Alessa and Hadrian sort of are just absolutely top-tier ROs. I don’t normally read stuff for ROs, but as with many things about TGR, I’ve found that sheer quality of execution goes an awful long way.

[Brian_Rushton]

This is great. I’m going to copy a couple of paragraphs into the notes document I keep for my series for education. It looks like the start of the relationship/intro made a huge difference here and kept you interested for a long time. You mention Vallen; I liked Vallen as well, but that was a much shorter relationship, so that means the author’s skill goes beyond just ‘writing a long relationship’.

Overall I found this review very helpful.

[Kate27]

@Brian_Rushton

Is there anything you think someone can learn from this game that applies to all of interactive fiction? Like, are the features of this game unique to this game itself, or do are their parts of it that you think everyone could adopt? Because I’d hate to let my pride or opinions get in the way of good storytelling and writing.

This was such a good question that I had to have lunch before I came back to it. But, in general, is there anything universally applicable to IF? Probably not, besides making sure there are no grammatical errors or bugs. But yes and no. Some of the strengths of Golden Rose to me are writing, first off. Prose is prose; you either like it or you don’t. But I do think Anathema has a knack for detail and description. Some works I read (I read a lot of fanfiction, too) have interactions with characters that are just dialogue. (And I do this in my own writing). So it’ll look something like this (just off the top of my head):

Example of only dialogue

“Do you think we’ll ever find him?” you ask your companion, a hint of worry in your tone.

She shrugs. “We have no choice. We must.”

“But what if?”

“Well, then we’ll be in a lot of trouble with the boss.”

But Anathema adds setting, which helps the reader be grounded in the world. That’s the “immersion” people think of. Like, maybe the scene will be something like this:

Example with description

The sun scratches at the back of your neck, relentless and unforgiving. It has been hanging over you for hours now, turning the road ahead into a shimmering ribbon of dust and heat. Your fingers ache from gripping the leather reins for too long, the worn rope rubbing against your palms with every step of the horse beneath you. Even your horse seems tired of the journey, its pace slower than it was this morning, hooves dragging through the dirt.

Your body aches in places you didn’t know could ache. The saddle has long since stopped being comfortable, your shoulders are stiff from the weight of your pack, and every mile feels heavier than the last. Still, you ride on.

Beside you, your companion sits with the same expression she has worn since dawn: mildly annoyed, completely unimpressed, and somehow still more composed than you after days on the road.

“Do you think we’ll ever find him?” you ask, your voice quieter than you intended. The worry slips through despite your efforts to hide it.

She doesn’t look over. She simply adjusts her grip on the reins and watches the road ahead. “We have no choice. We must.”

You frown. “That’s not really an answer.”

“It is the only one that matters.” Her voice is as dulcet as ever, yet there remains a hint of steel. Somehow, it eases you.

In general, I would urge authors to add a bit more description. It reads as more vibrant, more professional, more thought-out.

The “hub” system of The Golden Rose is also excellent, where you choose which path to follow in the city and go on little adventures. It’s reminiscent of Tin Star, Gower’s books, and some of the WoD games. But again, it’s not easy to pull off!

And yes, I have to echo everyone’s thoughts. I am a reader who needs emotions and romance and characters. I don’t even know how to explain why I like these characters or how to write good characters. It’s almost like you either have “it” or you don’t. I think, in general, the best characters are complex and well-realized. What does that mean? I couldn’t tell ya, really.

But I do have some examples, though I haven’t read The Golden Rose in a while. Alessa comes off as cold or standoffish. But there’s a really great scene if you choose to pursue her where you can share a custard dessert with her and watch the city. The way Anathema describes the scene and her feelings is so tender and beautiful and romantic. That’s good character writing! Showing the reader a different side of the character.

I also liked Hadrian. I don’t romance male ROs, and I usually don’t care for them whatsoever, but I couldn’t help but like him! There’s an interesting friction in his self, being Christian (if I remember right) while also being a warrior yet being gentle-hearted.

Uhhhh, in summary, it all goes back to complexity. I think. Don’t take my word for it!

[Brian_Rushton]

Thanks, I can follow up on this advice. I’m helping finish someone else’s game, which already has a large chunk written, but one thing I can go back and do is add more to scenes. Seeing your example, you’ve given me something I can try out, have people play, and let me know if they like it better or not. I really appreciate you taking the time to put it into words and into something I can try!

[dorquemada]

@fsix

For what’s worth, going by various threads on reddit (even that best prose vote) there are some readers who hold similar opinion on wordiness of The Golden Rose, so it’s indeed a hit or miss thing. There’re just apparently a lot of people for whom it was a hit, whatever their reasons might be.

That be me in there too, resident Golden Rose hater. I don’t even understand people who think it’s good, though I see how it could be after you sicced a particularly tenacious editor at it. There’s nothing wrong with the prose, other than that it’s redundant, too much of it, superfluous, gratuitous, did I mention redundant, yes I did, that was a rhetorical question to humorously pad out this run-on sentence and slip in an adverb for comedic purposes. And if I had to summarize my impression of the game, it would be “Unhurried tourist lazily meanders around the town taking in the sights, gobbing with locals and sometimes stopping to read some history from his Lonely Planet tome”.

Loved the doodles! MC’s constant smirking irked me too until I ended up imagining him as walking this:

I won’t even start on that what passes for the story is nothing but glorified pilot episode. To possible defenders of it who might argue it is a standalone story because they set out to catch the thief and catch him they did – it’s the same as saying Lord of the Rings chapters up to where the hobbits reach Rivendell is self-contained story, because Aragorn told them to go there and that’s where they ended.

[malinryden]

Makes sense why I never could get into it even though I tried. Just not my cup of tea.

[LiliArch]

I liked The Golden Rose well enough—the prose is competent, the major NPCs are cool, and the box art is gorgeous (can’t ignore the effect of gorgeous box art!)—but plot-wise, yeah, it was a disappointment.

@Kate27

Probably not, besides making sure there are no grammatical errors or bugs.

1.2mil words for that lesson sounds a bit of an overkill. but personally, I would think it’s not a bad case study for when you want to slow down your pace (which I would imagine most writers do, at some point or other).

[Brian_Rushton]

Zebulon

This Hosted game is very short and quick, and wasn’t really designed for the same kind of things Hosted games usually are.

It was for one of the Jay is Games Casual Design competitions (I’d heard of these competitions before because they also ran one for one-room parser games, which ended up with fun games like Dual Transform, Fragile Shells and Hoosegow).

As a game made for a relatively quick competition where the rules are ‘web-playable game about friends’, I think it does a great job. You pilot a starcraft with friends Fred and Linda, and most of the game is dealing with their two opinions (I saw Fred as more of a goof-ball and Linda as more level-headed, but they’re nuanced).

You have been give less than a week to track down and reboot a computer on a mining asteroid. You’re lucky to get this job, because you just messed up something important on the asteroid Ceres.

For a small game the author has managed to throw in a lot of neat choices. You can pick what you and both of your friends train in; you have the choice of two extra crew mates or none, there are multiple new ships you can buy. There were so many options I was worried I’d pick a wrong one and die, but it all worked out; either it’s rigged to always work out or it’s a gauntlet and I lucked out.

When I say short, I mean Ch. 7 for me was two pages with no choice and Ch. 8 was one page with no choice. The characters have personality and there are funny jokes, but the plot it pretty thin.

[ChanceOfFire]

@Brian_Rushton

This Hosted game is very short and quick, and wasn’t really designed for the same kind of things Hosted games usually are.

It was written in 2010, during stone age CoG. I remember finishing it all those years ago and thinking, ‘a competent game at last,’ since whatever HG titles (and WIPs) we had at the time were few and weren’t good.

The experience hasn’t quite aged well, but I still think it’s good for a short read.

[Brian_Rushton]

Oh, that’s really interesting! Yeah, I felt like I didn’t waste my time and the game was fun. Just felt like it was striving for something completely different than usual; your history of it makes that make so much more sense.

[fsix]

@ChanceOfFire

It was written in 2010, during stone age CoG.

Considering it’s the year when e.g. Choices of Broadsides were published, and titles like Sabres of Infinity or Tin Star showed up mere 3-4 years later, that’s perhaps exaggerating a bit that supposed primitiveness of the era. I mean, it’s not exactly as if text-oriented CYA were a novel concept then by any metric.

[Brian_Rushton]

Tin Star

I had heard of this game long ago. It was famous for being the first million word game, I think, for Hosted Games.

It holds up great! Plays a bit differently than most Choice of Games, has a lot in common with Magincia series but with more story. Overall I’d say it’s great, up there with my highest tier of Hosted Games.

You play as someone set to be hang who is instead made a marshal and sent off (with a tin star) to Nevada. I grew up in Utah and my grandfather’s family was from Elko, so it was fun to see it mentioned here (they use to joke about going to prestigious Elko University). We used to drive from Utah to Nevada every couple of years as a kid and I remember them telling me it was the loneliest highway in the US, and that if you saw anyone whose car was broken down you should stop and help because there might not be anyone else for hours (this was before cellphones).

Gameplay has interludes where you train or buy things or build. Like other resource and upgrade-style games (Magincia, Adrao’s games, Night Road), there are a ton of options, from social to combat to self-aggrandizement. I liked how many small little details there were here, like going to the general store and finding books about you, or all the training dialogue having details.

In between interludes are the chapters, where something bad happens and you have to resolve it. I chose to interfere in pretty much everything. The game is 1.2 million words and it didn’t feel as long as, say, Golden Rose, so I assume there are significant branches I didn’t see.

I made Carraway my deputy and wife. I dealt with raiders attacking settlements, disputes between friends and family, a mining town, an army, and a lot of Uptons.

Some Choicescript games are ‘here is this very specific scenario with my OCs and you’ll experience the events exactly as I want you to and you can react’. This game, by contrast, lets you build your own story.

The beginning let you choose to be a doctor or lawyer among other things, or both. It was really funny to me when we had to leave something behind (I chose law firm) and one option was ‘a hospital for lawyers’.

I liked the representation of my ancestors, the pioneers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (here referred to as Mormons, as was common at the time). I’ve seen way worse depictions (the first Sherlock Holmes book was very anti-LDS). There’s a bit dodgy part hinting at some temple ceremony stuff but that wasn’t too bad (members are supposed to not talk about it as a sign of respect, but all the information is online). The LDS people in this game are just another group of folks, like the native american bands or the army. In fact, they were kind of worse in real life; before the railroad came, there was a big Reformation in Utah where they especially focused on how dirty and gross everyone was, with junk in their yard and people not taking baths. This game portrays them as clean and tidy, so I feel like they’re being generous. Also, there are parts here where white raiders use Native Americans as decoys to make people think they did the attacks; that’s historically accurate.

I appreciated the freedom to act as I wanted. There were many opportunities to take bribes or steal. This playthrough I was honorable but not very law-keeping, shooting a lot of people rather than talking things out. But even if I didn’t take the bribes having the choice made it feel more real.

Great game, I had fun playing it and feel like I can learn a lot from it.

[Brian_Rushton]

Pride and Prejudice and Murder

I instantly thought of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies when I saw this, so much so that when I started reading I was surprised that there were no zombies at all, until I remembered. Then I locked in.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t like this when I started, but I came out at the end liking it a bit better. Let me explain why.

Writing-wise, the game leans a little too heavily on familiarity with the book Pride and Prejudice. What I mean is, especially in early scenes, character interactions are often more like “Here’s Catherine de Bourgh! We all know what she’s like ha ha. Anyway here’s Darcy. Classic Darcy.” Someone with no knowledge of the books would be hard pressed to identify strong character traits of the different people involved or to develop a liking or detest for them. The original pride and prejudice used wordplay and dialogue to establish unique personalities, and this game just struggles to match the quality of one of the world’s greatest books.

This is compounded by the structure of the chapters, which have huge info dump pages with very few choices. These describe every character, which is what takes a while.

But, as the game goes on, things improved in my opinion. I’ve often seen it with authors that the later chapters get a lot better than the first due simply to practice. That’s why in my non-Choice script games, I usually write the beginning last, when I’m at my full strength. With Choicescript games go you generally either send things to an editor linearly or release them publicly linearly, so it’s hard to do that.

Anyway, as the authors begin the actual mystery, pretty much all the ‘original’, non-Pride and Prejudice content is pretty good. I liked the description of the mystery and the setup. The last chapter was a lot of fun for me. It’s like the opposite of that old saying. The old saying is “It was original and fun, but the original part wasn’t fun and the fun part wasn’t original.” This game is the opposite of that to me: “The original part is fun, but the unoriginal parts were boring.”

The choice structure came down to picking between several viewpoint characters and solving on occasional riddle or clue, as well as choosing the final mystery. I’ve done some classification of mystery games before (I’ll quote from upthread):
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This is mostly like number 1, you don’t do that much detecting, it’s more gathering clues and the game explains the mystery. I also believe there are multiple ‘real’ murderers, which, if true, is always a bit of a bummer to me, as it implies that reader had no chance of solving the mystery on their own (since the murderer is not determined to the end).

So overall this is a game that started out weak for my tastes but continually improved until the end.

[Brian_Rushton]

Magikiras

To adapt a copy pasta that’s been around for a while:

looking for a new hosted game
ask people if its plot, simulation or OCs smirking
they don’t understand
pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is plot and simulation and what is OC’s smirking
they laugh and say, “it’s a good game”
play game
it’s OCs smirking

All 3 categories have good and bad games; there are some games with great plot or complex simulations that aren’t fun to play, and some OCs smirking games that are fun.

Here’s what I mean by OCs smirking: the game seems centered on getting to know the personalities of several characters. Any events or plot develpoments not involving these characters requires extensive scenes debriefing with these characters. Most major choices revolve around which characters to spend time with. For some reason, a lot of these games use the word ‘smirk’ or similar words (like grin) in inappropriate situations where no one in their right mind would ever smirk. This has led me to wonder if the ‘OCs smirking’ games stem from a common source or culture (maybe AO3?).

This is how I imagine the characters in all the smirking games:

Games I would put in this category (including some of the bestselling of all time!) include Wayhaven, Soul Stone War, The Golden Rose, Creatures Such as We (one of my favorite games), and, now, Magikiras. I’m interested in upcoming games in my playlist that are OC smirking games, so if you have any favorites I should check out, I’ll add them to my queue.

This game has some cool stuff. You are a pilot of a magical suit in a new continent raised by magic users. You can choose to be a magic user or not; I don’t think there’s any downside. Using magic seemed to be the best option whenever I tried it.

Characters include your partner (who has a significant plot line), a psychic, your father The Major, a quirky scientist named Edgar, and several other characters (I believe you can choose between sets of side characters; I chose to work with a tough guy named Luis and a cute shy girl Karin who was coded to like someone else).

The mech suits have surprisingly little relevance. Fight scenes are common, but are written as if you weren’t wearing a suit (for instance, shadow fiends are pulling on you and you are screaming, but it just made me think of that part of Big Hero 6 where Fred is being stretched until he realizes he’s in a suit and nothing is hurting him).

I reached an ending that was open ended after a plot twist, and the author said that the story would just stop there and never be continued. Others have reported getting to the second to last chapter and being told that their choices made winning impossible and they needed to start the whole game over.

There are a ton of plot details. A psychic soldier sees a vision of you finding a magical artifact. So she’s transferred to your unit. But your boss doesn’t tell her about the magical artifact. What’s the reasoning here? Why transfer her at all if you’re keeping her in the dark?

Dialogue is often stilted as well. You boss talks to your group, which is mostly young people and one older person, and the boss says:

“That’s right, kids, except Balogh, who’s not a kid.”

Another example (this one’s not bad, it just shows what I’m talking about with games using smirk in weird ways):

“We just have to wait for Altug and the others to arrive before we get things done for the rest of the day. After that, you wanna get a drink with the rest of the team?” he asks, trying to make it sound light.

You open your mouth to answer, but you turn your head to the door at the same time; it swings open just before you can answer, and you smirk to yourself just as Altug enters the briefing room.

This is a lot of complaining (I have more I haven’t written, like stats being handed out pretty stingily and a reliance on code puzzles like Pride and Prejudice and Murder).

So what are the good points? Well, the game atmosphere is fun. I may be flippant towards “OCs smirking games” but they’re great social simulators and help you build friendships with and internal models of the characters. I did like several characters in the game, and there is more plot in the game than in many others. I felt like my decisions actually mattered and, because I happened to chose a good spread of stats at the beginning, I only had to restart chapters a few times and felt like I was really challenged.

I’ve played many games far worse than Magikiras. I might even play it again. But it just solidified in my minds some patterns I’ve seen in games. Now that I’ve seen more of this genre, I can approach it with a more open mind and not complain every time I run into it. (Official Choice of Games don’t really do this as much, as significant plot events are more important and are required as part of the outline submission process. The closest one I can think of is Escape from Death, and maybe Luminous Underground?)

(A final caveat: I could not create a game like Magikiras. I can’t write that fast! And my writing has several of the same flaws).

(Edit: I think some people might benefit from learning the phrase ‘wry smile’, which is similar to smirking but has more self-deprecating connotations instead of arrogance or condescension, and is appropriate in serious or sad situations.)

[LiliArch]

I’m really confused by the usage of “OC” in this context. I’d assume all characters in a book or a game like this to be the author’s own/original characters, so, what does this even mean?

[Brian_Rushton]

In my mind, normal characters are when a person has a story and the characters are used to further that plot. An adventure story might need a villain or an ally, and that person is written to supplement the story.

To me, OC culture is when the characters are developed first, separate from the story. I might imagine a tall pirate with a tattooed map on her back long before I have a story to put her in. Or a grumpy lumberjack man that likes to tell stories.

Most published books that I’ve read and enjoy have characters change and develop over time in response to the plot. OCs don’t change; you just get to know them better. Personal growth isn’t part of their story because that would change the personality you spent so long writing down.

One of my top 10 favorite games of all time is an OC’s game, with a fire demon boy that the author developed as a child and looked for a story to put him into (a game about dolphins that use singing to heal people psychically). Maybe it works for me in that game because all the non-OC characters (including the main character and her mom) have significant changes over the course of the game.

You’re right that all characters are OCs. Maybe I should just it to ‘UUUCs’ (unmoored, unstoried, unchanging characters).

Edit: It is ironic that I misused the word OC in a post about misusing the word smirk. Maybe I should avoid hypocrisy in the future! This would be an appropriate time for someone to smirk at me.

[LiliArch]

Ouch. I come up with 99% of my important characters before I have a story to put them in. (“Ex-supervillain turned police chief.” “Mob doctor who projects force fields.” “Grumpy mage who does blood magic with a clawed glove.”) And then I go to my back catalogue of unused characters when I need one.

I suddenly feel an urge to make someone smirk at an inappropriate moment.

(Thanks for the “wry smile”, though. I might need that one, and I can’t always count on my internal foreign-language vocabulary to provide a correct word.)

@Brian_Rushton

This would be an appropriate time for someone to smirk at me.

[Brian_Rushton]

I have you classified in my brain as ‘good author’ (based entirely on your insightful replies on this site^[1]) but I have that kind of character-centered story/writing classified as ‘bad’ in my mind, so I have some congnitive dissonance here. I think my faith in your talents as an author and commenter is greater than my annoyance with these characters, so I think I will change my views to be more open-minded to character-driven writing styles.

1. I also realized I haven’t looked up your games. I checked out The Box from the halloween competition and found it well-written, with the choices feeling meaningful for characterization.

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1. Footnotes ↩︎

[LiliArch]

I mean, it’s not like you could have read any long-form games I’ve written since I haven’t finished any, so you might just as well discover I’m actually a terrible writer.

The Box was mostly me getting the Beverage Choice Annoyance out of my system, but I do feel like I ended up with a significant event for my worldbuilding.

[Hamartia]

Interesting review. I do wonder if there’s an element of misdiagnosis in your critique of cast-focused stories (not here necessarily - I haven’t read Magikiras - but on a broader thematic level re: the characterization of the ‘smirking OC’ genre)

@Brian_Rushton

I have that kind of character-centered story/writing classified as ‘bad’ in my mind, so I have some congnitive dissonance here.

I definitely got this impression from this review! I feel there’s probably a line to draw between ineffective character-centred storytelling and effective character-centred storytelling.

A massive amount of classic Russian literature would fall under the definition of character-centred storytelling where relatively little happens that isn’t mundane in the extreme, particularly devoid of context (maybe one or two inciting events, and a resolution, but little more), and the author is overridingly concerned with the interactions and social dynamics of a cast (protagonist included). I’d argue a decent amount of Austen, too, most campus literature, plenty of Bildungsromans…In most cases, whilst a couple of characters will change ultimately, most will remain broadly as they were, to no detriment of the story.

In the world of ChoiceScript, I’d argue the excellent Créme de la Créme fits this archetype relatively well too, as does Wayhaven like you say, which is a really superb piece of work for the intended audience. Maybe Fallen Hero if you really squint, despite the broader superhero conceit.

I think the challenge here is that if an author is asking you to be carried through the story by a cast as much as the plot and premise, if not more, the cast needs to be capable of bearing that weight (which is of course a very subjective thing) and reliably evoking the feelings the author intended to evoke in the reader. If you want a cast to feel like a squad of best mates (particularly if the reader isn’t given a choice whether to buy in or not) your writing and atmosphere need to be able to convince them that they are more times than not. If you want a story about the decadence of '80s New York, you’d better hope that the reader can feel the opulence and the excesses of your socialites. Etc etc.

Else it all ends up ringing hollow; you get a feeling of dissonance, and one fellow’s complex tormented soul, smiling through the pain and a veneer of indifference, proves to be another fellow’s Smirky MC.

I think that would be very interesting to explore, and follows some of the earlier chatter around TGR where I think we were on opposite sides of the fence despite agreeing on a lot of the story’s flaws - what makes a cast work, both individually and as an ensemble, and work for whom? How does that differ in IF vs conventional prose fiction? It’s clearly a big deal for IFs in the current environment. So a super interesting question.