@Brian_Rushton I really appreciate this review. It seems like the writing, characters, and plot came off the way I intended which is always nice. I also like your analysis of the MC’s mindset, which definitely deals in black and white a lot.
4 Likes
War for the West
I was given a review copy of this game.
This is a long simulator Hosted Game, similar to Life of a Mercenary, which I played recently. In this game, you are a medieval lord who has recently ascended to the throne.
You have 3 main stats (combat, knowledge and social), a revenue stream, soldiers, and four advisors, one for each main area of interest in your life.
Most of the game consists of a free-form ruling sandbox where you can visit the temple, train or recruit soldiers, read books in the library, or, most often, just hold court.
Holding court causes random events to occur. Frequently you have the chance to pass judgment in trials or decide how to invest your money.
Occasionally there are big story moments. One includes a mysterious meteorite. Others allow opportunities for marriage (I went for a political alliance marriage with a neighboring lord’s daughter).
Near the end, the story becomes more prominent and sandbox options decrease. In the early game, it feels much more ‘game’ than story; in the end it switches and is almost all story.
This is labelled as a grimdark game but I would say it’s fairly mild for grimdark. The grimdarkness comes from the opportunity to do things like cheat on your spouse or be villainous by killing peasants, and story elements involve differing amounts of blood and gore. The content warnings include rape but I didn’t encounter that in my playthrough.
Overall, I generally understood what stats did and story elements seemed fairly clear. I did at first think it was going in a pretty boring direction with religion (the standard ‘haha we’re enlightened medieval people who realize that religion is fake even though our world has supernatural elements’), but near the end it took on a lot more creative role which I liked quite a bit.
I did feel like I was meandering a lot in the middle, having exhausted every single book in the library. There were numerous opportunities for big spending early on that I skipped and few in the middle. Overall, though, I liked the money balance in the game.
Compared to the most similar hosted game that I’ve played, Life of a Mercenary, I’d say that this game gives you more power, authority and agency, while Life of a Mercenary has a lot more character focus.
Glad I played this game; I spent around a week on it, and instead of binging it I just popped it open to play through a few days in-game, and I found it great as a time-spender when bored.
10 Likes
IIRC this can happen to female MC if you lose the war with neighbor lord. Can also lead to pregnancy. Combined with the rest of that subplot and also some of the potential endings, i’d say the game goes well into “grimdark” territory that’s not exactly mild. Or maybe i just don’t know what passes for “mild grimdark” nowadays.
6 Likes
That makes sense that if I didn’t see the grimdark content, I wouldn’t think the game is grimdark! It sounds like it’s contained within missable paths instead of being pervasive throughout the game. Thanks for letting me know about it.
5 Likes
Hero or Villain: Genesis
This game is a superhero Choicescript game whose main draw is that it lets you deeply customize your character’s superpowers through a point based system with different difficulty levels. You can be a super intelligent rich person with a robot suit, or a speedster with time powers, or a psychic with mind control, or combinations of the above. Or you could fly or have huge armor or all sorts of things.
More than that, you can choose to be good or evil! You can use violence to get what you want or peaceful ways. You can stop villains or join them, attack heroes or befriend them.
Customization-wise, this game is deeply impressive. However, I felt the story, while competent, was weaker. I remember thinking “this dialogue is stilted”, and when I searched other reviews they said the dialogue is stilted as well, so it’s not just me. And the story arc feels a bit flat. I beat the game after an event that just felt like another chapter, not a culmination of things.
But it wasn’t unpleasant or bad. The sandbox aspect was fantastic and I can heartily recommend this to people as a superhero wish fulfillment game with strong mechanics.
10 Likes
I am glad that you appreciated the sandbox nature of the game! 
Dialogue is indeed not my forte, although the next update of the game (hopefully coming out in the next month or two) adds a number of dialogue options, hopefully alleviating the problem a bit (it will not fully solve the problem). I also agree that not all the branches in the game are equal (I guess that is the nature of the game being a bit sandbox, and there is major branching in the game around half to 2/3rd into the game, depending on when you “branch off”). Some of the branches I am happier with, some…well, yes, they could do with a bit more work.
I guess your review captures well the feeling of my games, which tend to be more about mechanics than story. I hope that most readers feel that my games slowly get better (I tend not to think of my games as “finished”, but just as “good enough to be released, so I can then continue to tweak and expand”), and this and other reviews are what helps me continue to work and improve the game! (just to say, I always appreciate the constructive criticism )
8 Likes
I definitely think the writing quality was higher than my own games (often my harshest criticisms are reflections of how I feel about myself). But I am deeply impressed by the complex mechanics of the game and the way that each path feels natural. This was done in a superb way and is something I feel most authors could learn from.
6 Likes
A Sensei’s Story
This is a rare Hosted Game that is entirely comedy-focused.
You play as an English teacher (a ‘sensei’) who goes to Japan, lured by the promise of a lot of yen (you didn’t really understand the conversion rate, unfortunately) and a fun time living in a new place.
You meet your principal, teacher, and students, and get to it. Most of the game involves giving lessons or watching other people give lessons and interacting with your fellow teachers and students. The romances that I noticed were all with teachers and staff, many of whom are European (including a French woman that I romanced and a Scottish man who was somewhat of an enemy).
There are a lot of funny parts. The game is very self-referential, calling itself out for using fake_choice and having an extended sequence at a party where the principal urges you to reset the game while everyone else is deeply confused.
Some humor didn’t land with me due to my personal experiences. A long-running gag is that the principal has bad English, not conjugating his verbs or declining his pronouns, and his writing is in dialect (so like writing ‘za’ instead of ‘the’); in addition to this, he is long-winded. He sometimes has perfect English, but only when quoting what I presume are the author’s favorite movies (which come up as tests all the time, to see if you the player are familiar with them). The choppy English grated on me for four unrelated reasons: 1) it didn’t sound to me like the way people learning English talk, since they generally memorize several useful phrases perfectly and mess up on unfamiliar things instead of constantly getting the same mistake all the time; 2) I’ve had really great friendships with lots of East asian people who struggled with grammar and so it was weird to see our player be dismissive of what feels to me like an endearing trait; 3)every time the player talks to the principal, you have the chance to speak in complex sentences and vocabulary to purposely confuse him and feel superior; 4) I don’t really enjoy reading ‘dialect’ where the spelling of words is changed to match the pronunciation. Ironically, I found that the Japanese used in the game (untranslated, but written in roman characters) showed many more characteristics of a weak language learner. Only very basic phrases like one might find in an old travel book were used, and no conjugations or clauses like those found in most ordinary sentence (like this one) were used. It’s possible the author was completely fluent and just chose easy sentences so people could follow along well.
Now, this doesn’t mean “I say this game is wrong and people shouldn’t play it”, because it’s meant to be lighthearted and you can be friendly to the principal. I’ve looked up a lot of discussion and reviews of this game and haven’t found anyone that cared about it all, so I just happened to have a combination of traits where I found it grating.
Another experience I couldn’t relate to was being annoyed with the students. I’m a teacher and have tutored the elderly and taught English classes to Cantonese speakers, and I think it’s a ton of fun! But our hero, even with the flexibility choice games afford, is constantly bored of class or daydreaming while others talk.
The cast of other teachers was very memorable, with personalities that felt real to life and enjoyable.
Going to the areas around Japan was fun. In fact, most of the rest of the game was really enjoyable, the only other grating thing is that, playing as a straight man, there were a lot of options to be a kind of horn-dog loser. But fortunately, you can opt out of those.
I’d recommend people just try the first scenes. The humor and writing is very consistent, so if you like it you’ll get a lot of it. Despite my complaints, I recognize the technical proficiency in the game.
11 Likes
Evertree Inn
Most good Choicescript games at 250K words are either fairly linear with a long story or very branching with a short story, and this is the latter.
This is a mystery game, unusual for Choicescript since the format revolves around replayability and playing a mystery twice generally spoils the mystery. This is partially solved here by having many separate mysteries that intertwine and by having a customizable character.
You can choose between different races like elf, dwarf, brownie, etc. and you can focus on skills like magic, combat or perception. I went as a brownie with full magic. The game was very generous; I never ran out of magic despite using it at every opportunity.
The cast has several very distinct characters, many of which can be romanced. I went with Daisy, a gnome. The game has sexual encounters but provides few details, focusing more on conversation.
Each chapter is brief, playable in 20 minutes or less for me. You can choose where to go, what to do, who to talk to, etc. The last two chapters involve more direct conflict.
Overall, I was impressed by the real-feeling conversations, the ability to keep a central plot despite strong non-linearity, and the well-thought-out setting and real-feeling stakes.
11 Likes
The Great Tournament
This game has an impressive 22,000 (!) ratings on the Hosted Games app, more than any Choice of Games official title and only surpassed by Wayhaven.
It’s one of the older games, too.
It’s similar to Life of a Mercenary, which is set in the same world and comes afterwards.
Despite the smaller wordcount of this game, it is quite large due to re-use of text and terseness of description.
You play as a young boy who is in awe of a famous knight name Sir Robert who is known for travelling the land, fighting in tournaments and earning ‘boons’ from mayors and governors who run them. You, along with your rascally best friend, sneak out to watch him.
Together with a ragtag band of friends, you enter a tournament open to kids. Eventually, you become Sir Robert’s squire, and grow and train with him.
The game includes a war section, then a tense part involving Sir Robert. Finally, you become the main hero, able to wander around the map for 360 days, making money, buying items, and entering tournaments.
This builds up to the final Great Tournament, ran by the King Himself, who is willing to grant any boon to the winner.
There are a lot of romantic interests, including the royal princess and some scrappy fighter women.
Combat is generally taken care of for you, with occasional strategy choices. There are a lot of stats that you can boost. The time leading up to the actual great tournament has the most options.
Like the other game by this author, I found the characters interesting but the setting and locations rather dull. I can’t picture any town; the castles could be made of crystal or mud and I wouldn’t know. The only focus is the characters. And with that, it succeeds; this is a fun game and I would be happy to recommend it to others.
But, I feel like Choice of Games has some strong rivals for this kind of play. Vampire the Masquerade: Night Road comes to mind, which is just as strong as this in terms of stats and characters but more polished in terms of sensory writing.
Overall, I was glad I played!
6 Likes