I don’t think I’ve played Interactive Bonbons, I’ll have to check that out!
Was this author’s insights into the game creation process something he wanted shared? It’d be cool to hear.
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It was inspired by the level of a video game he played some time ago. Grand Casino was his attempt to recreate it, if I remember correctly. You’d probably have to ask him for the full details.
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Lords of Infinity
This game is the third in the Infinity Saga.
One of the biggest differences between the Choice of Games games and the Hosted Games games I’ve played is that, due to CoG house style, most official games are pretty well-rounded, being roughly equal in the way they treat stats, narrative, romance, and plot. Sometimes they struggle in all 4, sometimes they are fantastic in all 4, but due to testing and editor help it’s generally a complete, relatively uniform package.
Hosted games that I’ve played tend to be very strong or completely focused on one area while ignoring or struggling with others. Wayhaven and Soul Stone War are hyper-focused on romance. Hero or Villain: Genesis is maximized with respect to stats. The Aegis Saga is all plot. This isn’t bad; if I want to play, say, a simulator game, War for the West or the Magincia series can really satisfy that.
To this point, the only games that seemed really well-rounded in the official CoG way were the Fallen Hero games. But now this game, Lords of Infinity, is another one in that category. The first two games in the Infinity Series were very war-focused with little romance and only a few characters.
This game expands that world. I saw that some were dismayed that it’s no longer purely a fighting/army game. And that’s true; but at 1,600,000 words and with 1/4 of the chapters dealing with fighting, it essentially contains an entire war game.
This game branches very heavily, so I can only offer an insight into what I played. After war ended in book 2, I had the choice to retire to my estate or spend time with political maneuvering in the capital.
I chose the estate option, and promptly found that I had huge debts and fairly bad stats (I’ve heard the pre-made characters are OP, so I might do that instead next time). But I buckled down, courted a neighboring noblewoman’s daughter who was my long-time betrothed, improved my village, dealt with bandits, and struggled against political unrest.
Later, combat and battle occur once more. As the game series progresses, we’ve moved from a frontline soldier with musket and sabre to a strategic commander. We now deal with some of the highest levels of military strategy.
There are multiple clubs you can join and sides you can take. After a while, I decided to use a guide. I had heard people say this series is stat intensive and hard, but I didn’t think the last two games were that bad. This game had me restarting many chapters and referring to guides a lot. I found it fun.
Giant games like this do feel overwhelming at times. While they sell very well and are obviously great, I don’t feel too bad about authors releasing multiple smaller games instead. But the market will do what it will do.
Very balanced overall, and now I understand many more memes from the Hosted Games subreddit. I’ve wondered what a ‘Wulframite’ was for a long time (I thought it was related to Book 1 Duke of Wulfram, and was so confused when he was written out of the book).
The depth, replayability, and difficulty of this game make it a good choice for people who want to rack up a lot of hours of playtime.
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While I agree with you that most HGs focuses on, or at least is really strong in one area, I am surprised that you didn’t also include Sordwin among the well-rounded HGs. Because I’d argue that it (and maybe also to a lesser extent Evertree Inn) is high quality both when it comes to plotting and characters and when it comes to the game aspects. It’s got a high quality plot and great character work, with the most important NPCs being well rounded and quite deep and the less important NPCs also being interesting. There’s also plenty of good dialogue, particularly in the scene near the end with your chosen(or sometimes not so chosen) companion for the trip. But gameplay is also fun and solidly implemented, with plenty of different builds for your MC to choose from and even character classes to choose from. There are also many different stat checks for your MC and plenty of interesting challenges in general for your MC. And I’d say that those game aspects are well integrated into the story and vice versa. I remember mentioning on the HG subreddit that Sordwin was one of the few exceptions to the rule that the IFs we were talking about usually either focused on the game elements or the plot/relationship elements and I got a lot of support from that.
So I’m wondering whether the reason that you didn’t also mention Sordwin is that you just forget about it or that you, unlike me, don’t actually consider it well-rounded. If so, I’m curious about which aspects you feel are underdeveloped, because I struggle to find any elements that you’d reasonably expect to find in a well-rounded IF, where it doesn’t do a good job as a whole(I’m not saying that it’s perfect, but when it comes to balancing out plot, relationship, game aspects and other such elements, I can’t see any such elements that suffer from lack of attention or from the writer not doing a good enough job with them).While I agree with you that most HGs focuses, or at least is really strong in one area, I am surprised that you didn’t also include Sordwin among the well-rounded HGs. Because I’d argue that it (and maybe also to a lesser extent Evertree Inn) is high quality both when it comes to plotting and characters and when it comes to the game aspects. It’s got a high quality plot and great character work, with the most important NPCs being well rounded and quite deep and the less important NPCs also being interesting. There’s also plenty of good dialogue, particularly in the scene near the end with your chosen(or sometimes not so chosen) companion for the trip. But gameplay is also fun and solidly implemented, with plenty of different builds for your MC to choose from and even character classes to choose from. There are also many different stat checks for your MC and plenty of interesting challenges in general for your MC. And I’d say that those game aspects are well integrated into the story and vice versa. I remember mentioning on the HG subreddit that Sordwin was one of the few exceptions to the rule that the IFs we were talking about usually either focused on the game elements or the plot/relationship elements and I got a lot of support from that.
So I’m wondering whether the reason that you didn’t also mention Sordwin is that you just forget about it or that you, unlike me, don’t actually consider it well-rounded. If so, I’m curious about which aspects you feel are underdeveloped, because I struggle to find any elements that you’d reasonably expect to find in a well-rounded IF, where it doesn’t do a good job as a whole(I’m not saying that it’s perfect, but when it comes to balancing out plot, relationship, game aspects and other such elements, I can’t see any such elements that suffer from lack of attention or from the writer not doing a good enough job with them).
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That’s actually a great question! In my mind, Fallen Hero, Sordwin, and Lords of Infinity are the ‘peak’ of the HG I’ve played in terms of well-roundedness (there are a lot of other amazing Hosted Games that focus on other areas; Unexpectedly Green Journey is my personal peak for a game that’s a little unrounded with no romance).
I didn’t include Sordwin because my original thought process was ‘games that are like the CoG model’ and Sordwin’s detective features are very unusual for a CoG game. So it is perfectly well-rounded and a 10/10 game, but doesn’t fit the CoG mold. I guess I was using ‘well-rounded’ and ‘like CoG’ as synonyms but Sordwin proves that you can be one and not the other.
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FWIW There’s also some Hitchcock connections? You might watch North by Northwest.
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Thanks for the tip! I saw the movie years ago but don’t have enough memories of it for a comparison. I’ll have to rewatch it; I remember it being very good
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Life as a Lich
This game is by Adrao, whom I know from Hero or Villain. I associate this author with complex mechanics-focused games that let you try out interesting systems.
This game was both more ambitious but less polished, even unfinished, then the last one I played.
For one, it is the sequel to two unrelated games, one a fantasy game, and one a game set in modern Tokyo. You can import a character from either one of these games. The differences between the two are slight; you end up in an underground cavern with a skeleton protecting you, and you explore your base while dealing with otherworldly creatures. In the Tokyo version, I made a surface cult and there was an alien/elemental attack on Japan, while in the fantasy I didn’t see a surface cult option.
There also is a way to make a new character for both, but the stories feel a bit incomplete. The Tokyo one is short but leads into the cave pretty well, while the Fantasy one just jumps from being a weak spellcaster to a very strong one.
The incompleteness isn’t just inferred; there are notes throughout the work saying that the game is incomplete, mostly saying that the author might expand one storyline later. The most notable part is the epilogue, which is blank, saying the author might add one at some point to link into another game.
Gameplay itself was hard to get into the rhythm of but improved over time. I played on easy mode, having learned from past games that this author likes to provide real challenge. At first, rats ate all my stuff, so I made ghouls to stop the rats. I had a big army mining and making weapons, when a dwarf came and overwhelmed me. It turns out I needed unassigned monsters to fight random visitors. There is an attack power level based on you, your spells, and your unassigned minions. If it’s higher than the enemy you win, otherwise game over.
So I started over and focused on making tons of guys. My health and will were continously depleted because my cult was making ghouls, but that gave me a big army and I found spells to replenish myself. I thought I had a strict time limit, so moved fast (the game kept saying I needed to make a portal whenever there was a lunar occurrence of some kind and I missed 3 or so before I finally made one). But it turned out I had enough time to research 2 mega-spells (Death Knight and Banish) before the end happened.
I made my army big. Too big. By the end I was riding my dracolich, summoning demon allies, fighting alongside 2000 rat zombies with my army of skeletons and zombies led by a fully armed and armored Death Knight against alien invaders. My attack power, due to my careful planning, was over 600. The alien overlord had 30.
So, I won! Using the ring of time and harvesting elementals for my ascension.
Near the end I had ran out of most story-based options and was just in a cycle of learning what I could until I ran out of useful options there, so I just cranked out studying for my big spells.
If someone wants a simulator for manipulating a necromantic army as a lich, this game works well. I just wonder why it was released with gaps in the story?
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There’s more material coming out soon for Life as a Lich, actually. I’m not sure whether it’s an update or DLC, but there is definitely an expansion on the way, (Fair point about ending up ridiculously powerful on easy mode, though.)
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Thanks for the review 
I think it is very balanced, and indeed highlights some of the shortcomings of “Life as a Lich”. Indeed, I consider all my games works-in-progress, which you happen to have been released. For the case of Life as a Lich, as @AletheiaKnights mentions, there is a DLC coming and massive patch that comes with it (even for those without the DLC), which I have already sent to CoG. This improves many aspects of the game (in some case by introducing more mechanics, such as being able to summon a demon cat 
, or one appearing spontaneously in the dungeon).
Story-wise… well, I always think of all my games as sandboxes. The player should be free to craft their own story and set their objectives, within the elements that are there (and the DLC should bring even more side stories and connected quests to expand the experience). But, yes, in this case the mechanics of the game are quite something, so I would expect that the first playthrough somebody does of this game is just to learn how to play, and then a second playthrough would be more rewarding.
As to why it was released with gaps in the story… I had indeed started to write that story some years ago, and got so far with it (it was supposed to be its own game). Even, I had commissioned sketches of how some of the characters would look like, but for some reason I stopped working on it. Part of the story was then incorporated as the background for character creation of Raiders of Icepeak Mountains, and then also in Lich. Who knows, I might end up finishing that story one day, but I take the view that it is better to release a game that is playable, rather than waiting years to finish something. I continue to expand on my games all the time, and Raiders of Icepeak Mountains already got some more content, as is Life as a Lich getting now.
So, to conclude, I really appreciate your review, and fully agree with it! 
I am glad you managed to get a good ending… the question is can you get a good ending in the higher difficulties? 
(I know also about the rat exploit, which is why when the DLC comes out there will be a demon cat hunting those zombie mice!)
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Okay, that makes a lot more sense! When I play all your other games, I’ll keep those things in mind.
Mentally I think of you as having the highest ‘complexity’ stat of any author. Like if each author had one of those manga stat charts (this is a random one I pulled from Haikyuu):
your complexity/sandbox stat would be 5 (I haven’t thought about what any other stats).
Looking forward to your other work! I’m glad the DLC for the lich game is coming out, and I look forward to the patch!
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The Golden Rose
This was a really interesting one.
There’s been a poll running on r/hostedgames about games with the best prose, best MC, etc. and Golden Rose won for best prose, so I was really hyped coming into this.
You play as a mercenary exploring an underground ruin whose existence is banned by the church. There are occasional flashbacks to a time long ago when Latin was the main language (this is like an AU medieval europe). Unfortunately, the treasure you seek has been stolen, and you have to set off to find the thief, spending a lot of time in a big city with a wide cast of characters.
The main NPCs are Alessa and Hadrian, fellow mercenaries, with Hadrian a former templar and Alessa an ice queen who wields two blades and knows more than the two of you about what’s really going on.
At 1.2 million words, I expected a long game, and having won best prose, I was looking forward to things. Then I started getting a little burnt out. Let me explain.
The author takes small events and amplifies them in a big way, letting you react however you choose to them. For instance, here’s how I feel the author would depict ordering eggs:
I look at the menu. (3 paragraphs of menu description).
Choice of reacting to menu (including grinning at the menu, saying nothing, frowning)
The menu reminds me of the hard times on the roads. (4 paragraphs of remembering journeying, when food wasn’t available.).
Reacting to those road times (including smirking to myself, saying nothing, frowning, praying thanks I’m not starving now)
Saying something to Alessa or Hardian about the road times (3 paragraphs of conversation)
reacting to comment (I can flirt, or my lips can quirk, or I can frown or be silent)
I ponder the menu. As I do, I look about the room. (description of people for a page)
Choice to react to people (I can flirt with them or smirk or grunt or pray)
Someone resembles those who are chasing us. I freeze. memories of being hunted come to mind (for 4 paragraphs)
reaction (I can weep in fear, wear a hard grin, say nothing or pray)
Thinking about those chasing us makes my hand hurt (4 paragraphs of hand hurting).
reaction (wince in pain, grin through the pain, grunt in pain, pray)
end of chapter.
Chapter 7: The Waitress Appears
Now obviously I didn’t receive this as well as many readers have (the game has more ratings on the Hosted Games app than almost every Choice of Games game, so it’s obviously extraordinarily popular). I thought it must just be a hit or miss thing, and went to Steam to see if any negative reviews agreed with me that it could get tedious, but the steam reviews are wildly over the top:
The new standard. Makes every other COYA game look amateurish. The writing was fantastic.
Amazing writing. It pulls you in and just doesn’t let go. The roleplaying opportunities are great, you can really develop your character’s personality, motivations, and skills. There’s so many choices and the game doesn’t make them for you or force you into a choice like some other text based games. It’s funny, emotional, charming, and has a lot of depth
Writing, writing, writing. The prose is lyrical and textured, but never indulgent. It doesn’t waste time describing every rock and tree, but it does make you feel things—from the weight of your sword on your hip to the quiet ache in your chest when someone you care about looks at you a second too long. It’s storytelling through implication. You feel like a real person, not a stats-driven machine.
So what makes good prose? That’s completely subjective. If someone likes the prose, it’s good prose to them. For my own tastes, I like to dabble more in the fantastical and metaphorical. I like a lot of dialogue. I like high-density information.
Let’s look at Golden Rose when it wants to have a dramatic moment. I think this is good:
Before your eyes, the Golden Coast stretches from east to west. The Mediterranean Sea, undulating gently on the surface, seems almost purple in the setting sun. The air smells like salt and fresh summer evenings.
You lower your eyes and see it.
Sitting on the rocky shores of the Iberian coast, its high walls and narrow streets jutting out, rests a sprawling city. From above, you see the soaring towers of the castle and the spiked balustrade of the enormous Cathedral.
A large dock juts out of the cliffs. The wood and black stone merging together to hold countless hulking ships with high sails and golden names on their hulls. Smaller, single-masted vessels fill the rest of the space, clogged together so tightly they seem to form an ocean of their own.
Standing proudly at the center, its masts soaring high above all, a Portuguese galleon sways gently near the pier, its white, triangular sails flapping in the wind. You see the imposing red cross and feel a weight settling on your stomach.
The Holy Cross.
So, they’re here
On the southern end of the city, facing the rolling hills and the endless flatlands beyond, is the main gate. The iron door that bars the outside world from the safety within.
*Tarragona*.
This is good writing! This is professional writing. 90% of the IF I’ve read is worse than this. Lots of sensory details (smells, colors, sights). We get a lot of info: There is a sea (the meditarranean, with a city with high walls, a big dock with a lot of little ships and one big ship, then a big gate.
We don’t get any real information on how we feel about this (nor do we choose our reaction here, as we do in other scenes). We don’t know what emotions are at play here. The imagery exists but is not, I’d say, vivid.
For my personal tastes, I like writing that more focuses on giving us information we couldn’t otherwise deduce, or that surprises you with it’s words. It’s hard to find comparisons to Golden Rose because these games don’t focus on long, ponderous descriptions, they use quick bites and often intersperse with dialogue. For instance, the game Bogeyman by Elizabeth Smyth gets down to the details quickly:
The window is a pitifully small square of thick, warped glass. You can’t see much through the frost crystals still thawing on its outer face: a foggy morning settling over a rocky incline.
This tells so much in two sentences: it gives a sense of claustrophobia and wrongness. It tells us the season and time of day, gives the general setting. We can imagine the world with so little.
Like I said, other of my favorite authors using a lot of dialogue. BP Hennessy’s games are just scripts:
Birdland
DAN CANOE: …It’s all about respect. You have to respect the paddle. Be one with the paddle. Treat the paddle like a lover. Or, if you prefer, a close friend. Most of all, you’ve got to stay calm and centred. The paddle can sense anxiety and if you bring a nervous energy into the canoe the paddle will betray you.
(The campers stare at him blankly.)
DAN CANOE: Now. (He picks up a paddle.) Today we’re going to be practicing some basic strokes. Remember to grip the handle firmly and make calm, deliberate motions. Any questions?
(You raise your hand.)
DAN CANOE: Bridget.
This conveys so much with just a few words. We immediately get a glimpse of this man’s personality, we get a sense of the social dynamics, how everyone is feeling, our role in the social pecking order. Without any other context you can guess a lot of the game’s structure and setting and feeling from context clues here.
I also like authors that use interesting and fun word choices that take time to read and process, like Chandler Groover in Cragne Manor:
Some instinct called them to the plant, compelled them to fall in this particular arrangement. Their limbs are like letters, their slaughter grammar. Whatever language they might embody, its blasphemy could never be written. Only erased.
Now, it’s really hard to come up with writing text like this, especially to fill out 1.2 millions words, so some kind of redundancy or filler is to be expected. But Paul Wang has similar wordcounts. I like how he describes approaching a major city (much like Terragonna):
From Guns of Infinity
The Antari write poetry about these plains. They have songs, folk tales, great epics, all about the vast expanse that now surrounds you. To read or listen to such things, you would imagine that the place would be a land of unbound wonder, a place to lift the hearts of all who would walk or ride it.
Yet you feel nothing. It is merely grass upon rolling hills, good ground for light cavalry perhaps, but you feel no different surrounded by it now than you did two days before, when you were surrounded by trees.
Your column makes good progress that day, forging forward until it is too dark to do anything except set up camp.
The next morning, you spot a grey haze above the horizon before you, the sort that only comes from smoke rising in vast quantities. By midday, that haze has become a cloud, and you begin to see the low, dark shapes from which the blackest and heaviest of the smoke rises.
By mid-afternoon, the sky grows dark from the smoke, which now begins to blot out the summer sun above you. Finally, you and your men crest the top of one last ridge, and you breathe a most involuntary sigh of relief when you finally have a clear view of what is before you.
Not three or four kilometers ahead of you lies an expanse of canvas tents, staked out and arranged neatly in rows around a large pavilion. Beyond that, there is a hellish expanse of trenches, earthworks, and fighting positions, boiling over with men in the burnt-orange coats of Tierran Line Infantry…
…and not a few hundred paces beyond them, scarred, battered, scorched, but still standing proud and unbreached, are the defiant walls of Kharangia.
Just like the Golden Rose text, there is vivid imagery, but see the difference! Action,movement, suspense, emotion, lore. We can tell right away what kind of genre this is.
Anyway, my goal isn’t to convince people that Golden Rose prose is bad since you can’t objectively prove subjective things and because it’s not, in fact bad; I just don’t think it’s revolutionary or the greatest prose of all time or even of CYOA prose or even just of Hosted Games.
I think a lot of that comes down to plot. I love plot, and this game has very little. Everything is stretched out as far as possible. Exploring the docks (which is 1/4 or 1/5 of Ch. 4 alone) is 120K words, the same as Creatures Such as We, one of my favorite games of all time. We start the game chasing down a thief, at the end we find him, the middle is all looking, but there’s no content besides the looking. 1.2 million words of looking for the thief.
The choices provide a lot of customisation. Basically, choices affect your states but never really test your stats (though some past decisions are tested). In on chapter with 96 choices, only 4 or 5 or so had stat checks.
But, 16 of them allowed me to ‘smirk’ and 25 allowed me to ‘grin’; plastering a smile on your face is one of the most common options (other variants of this personality are to laugh or to ‘quirk your lips’). After having two options in a row where I could smirk at inappropriate moments, I imagined an MC that picks these options all the time just terrorizing Terragonna with their smile. I called him ‘smirky’ and sketched him and then added some other common variants
(we have ‘Pious John’, who utters prayers to the saints. ‘Frownie’ who is unhappy or unpleasant. ‘Blusher’ who does the flirty or shy moves, the OG Smirky, and ‘Grunter’, who grunts and side-eyes or says nothing the whole time).
None of these choices really do anything; the big choices are in branching the story.
So, why is a game with solid but not enrapturing text, very little plot, and choices that don’t really do much of anything so popular? (By the way on IFDB I plan on giving this game a 5/5, and would rank 9/10 in competitions. I’m 100% only pushing back because of the extraordinary claims in the Steam reviews).
My hypothesis is that people like it less as a story and more as an experience to live in, like a Sims game. At every moment, you’re being that character, which can take on some of the tropes I listed above. With thousands of words per scene, you can take your time and spend days or weeks reading and imagining yourself there; this time makes you familiar with the characters like they are your friends. With little plot, you can pick up the book at any time, even after many days, and hop right back in since there aren’t a lot of plot points to forget. The lack of stat checks mean that you can just be yourself and not worry about anything.
So for people who want fiction that can be a reflection of themselves (which is one of the whole points of CYOA) or for people who want a ‘life experience simulator’ or for people that just want a lot of material, I think this is a good game. I’d love a 240K word version that just has the parts about the latin and sculptures and the conversations with friends.
Now that I’ve been grumpy (and I know people won’t like this, I saw how people reacted to my Swamp Castle review so I’m ready for the heat), I’ll say that Beka and Billy were awesome characters. I’ve never really seen a character like Billy (I can’t remember if I named them that, but that’s my horse); he’s genuinely funny. And every scene with Beka was a delight. I also liked the ‘corrupt older man’ depictions; a couple of people in the game (notably Aurelius) felt like Judge Claude Frollo from Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Anyway, that’s my take. As someone who like information-dense genre fiction with lots of choices and some pushback-crunchiness-chance to fail, this game didn’t enchant me, but if I were the author, I wouldn’t change a single thing I complained about here. Every single thing that rubbed me the wrong way is something that other people have liked and has spurred sales. You can’t really make fiction that appeals to everyone at once, and Golden Rose has levels of sales and popularity I will likely never achieve in my lifetime, and I think the author deserves it for finding out what the audience wants and deliver it. Never Change, Ana Ventura. But if I change my viewpoint I’ll come back one day and change my review.
18 Likes
Really great review! I’m one of the rabid fans, but your review makes complete sense.
Totally fair! This is where people will either like the game or not. Personally, I’m quite fond of the games where you get to embody a character. I don’t even mind not having the plot move forward if I get to enjoy the prose, like, say, GRRM’s books haha
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As a reader, I definitely have my preferences, but as an author, I think ignoring this viewpoint can really hurt me.
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.
1 Like
Golden Rose is amongst my favourites of Interactive Fiction (top three I’d say, with the infinity saga and Tin Star) but I don’t think any of your complaints regarding prose are unwarranted. The game is very hit or miss due to the way it’s written. You will either love the writing or it will bore you, and there’s nothing to change with that fact really, different strokes, different folks. In regards to plot, the movement is fairly slow I’d agree. I akin the game somewhat to a very long introduction that’s primary purpose is to introduce characters and get you familiar with the setting, including your own character in a way (the MC is fairly developed in comparison to other ifs imo). If you’re a person who wants to get straight into the action with no delay, then that’ll also probably be a problem for you, because the game likes to take its time.
What this game does I’ve noticed is that it provides a lot of “reactions” to things as you’ve mentioned, but where in some games you’d pick the choice and then it jumps into everyone else reacting to your reaction, the game takes the time to go through explaining your choice you just made. Again that’s a hit for some people, and for others it’s just not. I for one enjoyed it a lot. People praise the game for its prose (of which I am a fan) but where I think the game shines is characters. Characters, characters, characters. From the interactions you have with them, to the dialogue they have between each other. The characters feel real to me, and that’s why I enjoy it so much. Being a sarcastic asshole is forever funny to me. Also Alessa ftw.
Overall though, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what you’ve observed. It’s quite a fair opinion.
6 Likes
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.
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I have a 2,000 word review of The Golden Rose written up; the first entry in an essay series I will probably never continue or share. My conclusion is considerably more positive than yours, but even so it’s very interesting for me to find the similarities in some sections of my analysis.
I think Golden Rose is my favourite IF that I am unable to replay, for example, as the same prose I adored on my first read, which I found to create a wonderfully immersive and engaging world (I still feel that - I think the city feels alive in a way that I have felt whilst reading other books depicting cities, but never in another IF) feels harder to get through on a re-read with the benefit of knowing where it is all leading (or isn’t leading).
For me, the mysteries of the world and of my character mingled with a superb portrait of a world and extremely well-realized characters (I’d concur with the others who’ve cited the latter as a real strength) to carry me through the first read. They haven’t really been able to carry me through a second, despite Alessa being maybe my favourite RO in any IF game (and some other superbly fun NPCs like Vallen, Beka and Billy). And I’ve tried to do so, twice!
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I’d love to read your review. I honestly think sometimes I struggle with relations in both games in real life. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and experimenting in recent years with how to write relationships. And I think I just genuinely don’t know what players want from them. That part of my brain just never really ‘clicked’; so maybe that part of the game is like a flavor I can’t taste or a color I don’t see.
What part of it do you most enjoy? (I’m asking these questions because I want to incorporate it into my own writing). Is it the fact that there aren’t that many characters? That you get to pick your reaction? That Alessa has an independent personality and will react differently (but still positively) to whatever you do? Is it just the sheer amount of time you spend together that makes you feel like you know each other? There’s some secret sauce here that I’d love to figure out, both to be a better writer and also (hopefully) become a fan.
(Sometimes people can explain these things well enough that I can get them. When I first listened to My Bloody Valentine’s To Here Knows When I hated it, and went on the MBV subreddit to ask them why they liked it. A lot of people gave good answers and I went back and relistened and loved it. So I’m hoping for some revelatory experience like that here)
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I think the time spent together matters, but above all I think there’s an art, conscious or otherwise, to the way a good character author describes a character - not just the visual description, but the timing, the context, the presentation - the times they choose to go into detail, the times they choose not to go into detail. It’s my private theory that having this knack, the ability to effectively portray intimacy (not necessarily physical) in a relationship (romantic or otherwise) is possibly the single best indicator for an IF’s likelihood of success. It’s what stirs a reader’s emotions.
It’s interesting because I think the talent might almost be contradictory to some of a good IF writer’s other instincts - we want to give the reader control over their character, we want to let them shape their reactions - but in a very real sense these are things that don’t always work when you’re trying to convey attraction (not just physical); it’s very tricky to walk that line of keeping the characters’ reactions shaped by the reader whilst daring to take control away just enough to say no - you do feel a shiver at this person’s touch. You are lost in the intensity of their eyes. And, crucially, have the reader believe it!
Anathema has a knack for it, the same way the Wayhaven author does. FH also is good at this, and I think it’s an excellent counterexample to Golden Rose, because speaking objectively FH has a good bit less time spent with individual ROs than the other two series I mentioned (except maybe Ortega?). But people are still feral over Herald, Argent, Steel, etc.
I haven’t really tried to study it myself - I think I can recognize the art when I see it, when reading, but I don’t think I’d ever be able to tell if a character solo scene or romance scene I wrote was managing the same. I have a weird gut feeling I’ve managed it for a couple of characters I’ve written, but not all of them, which is a really strange thing to contemplate as an author. Though I’m still in early stages when it comes to romance interactions in my WIP.
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This is a great analysis, thanks! I feel like I can learn from it and appreciate the specific examples I can compare (I enjoyed Wayhaven and FH as well.)
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