Reviews by Aletheia Knights (PistachioPug): "NEW! Alter Ego"

General
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The Sea Eternal

The whales granted merfolk like you the Eternity Orb - which confers the gift of immortality - in exchange for protection from the giant squid. But when one mermaid, exhausted by the mental toll of endless battles, runs away with the Orb, she sets in motion a course of events that just might change your life - or end it.

Sure, there are a couple of giant squid battles, but if you’re looking for action and adventure, The Sea Eternal, Lynnea Glasser’s follow-up to the award-winning Creatures Such as We, might not be your cup of tea. This is a philosophical fantasy, an interactive novel of ideas - and within that context, it’s a darn good story.

The Sea Eternal, perhaps more so than any other ChoiceScript game I’ve played, is a story that had to be interactive to work as well as it does. Because not only does it ask the big questions - to what extent does mortality make life meaningful? who are we without our memories? what is worth sacrificing in order to belong? - it forces you to answer them. I wasn’t even playing a self-insert, but the choices I made on behalf of my character have haunted me since I finished playing. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so unsettled by a happy ending before.

Some reviews of this game have described it as preachy, focused on social justice issues to the detriment of the story, but that wasn’t my experience. Maybe some of that is in there and I missed it, but in what I could see, social justice issues were elegantly woven into the story and characters in ways that made sense and furthered the plot and themes. I never felt railroaded into making a particular decision or pressured to agree with whatever the author’s views may be on the big questions of the story.

There are so many good things I could praise about this game - thoughtful worldbuilding, nuanced characters, Glasser’s obviously thorough research as she wove fact as well as fantasy into her underwater world - but I think your time would be better spent playing The Sea Eternal. If you’re looking for a deeply thoughtful, yet pleasantly accessible, tale that will stay with you well after you’ve read it, you could hardly do better.

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It’s hard not to become interested in this game with such a glowing review. I know what I’ll be reading this weekend. Thank you for putting out these reviews, they’re very helpful.

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This was lovely to read. It’s been a long time since I last played The Sea Eternal but I should play again!

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You’re welcome, and thank you for your kind words! I hope you enjoy it!

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Thieves’ Gambit: The Curse of the Black Cat
originally posted on Reddit

Dana Duffield’s Thieves’ Gambit: The Curse of the Black Cat is easy to overlook in the CoG catalog: it came out almost ten years ago, it was fairly short even by 2014 standards, and although some early fans hoped that it was merely the first installment of a “Thieves’ Gambit” series centered on the same team of audacious jewel thieves, it remains one-and-done. If you’re looking for something different amidst the glut of superheroes and supernaturals, though, it’s worth checking out.

I’m not even a super fan of heist stories, but this is a fun little caper. Duffield embraces all the tropes you might expect - a treasure with a dark provenance! high-tech gadgetry! louche European aristocrats! suave criminal masterminds! a dogged investigator nemesis! - with a playful wink, but without ever descending into parody, resulting in a story that often feels larger than life without going over the top. What the characters lack in depth, they make up for in wit and flair.

The Curse of the Black Cat is a must for fans of the heist genre and a solid pick for anyone looking for a fast-paced, plot-driven adventure. Those who have expressed a wish for more realistic games set in the present day might appreciate it, if they can suspend their disbelief enough to accept some of the more innovative tech developed by the hacker/security expert of the team. And gamers who love to play as the “bad guy” should definitely check this out - not only is the PC, as the world’s second-greatest jewel thief, on the wrong side of the law by default, they can be extremely ruthless and even violent if you choose to play them that way.

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This was one of the CoG games that got my attention when I returned to it several years after playing Choice of Romance! (@FayI actually played it first and enjoyed it so much that she recommended that I give it a go.) It’s really underrated - I have a lot of fond feelings for it, and would have loved to see more instalments.

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Vampire’s Kiss

Your job, important though it was, was a simple one: transport the Cross of Aguirre from a museum in New York to one in London. Only a few people knew you had a priceless artifact in your carry-on bag, so you weren’t particularly expecting to be murdered for it. You definitely weren’t expecting to wake up in a London morgue with powerful new abilities of body and mind and an insatiable thirst for blood.

Fortunately, the first night of your new unlife, you cross paths with a more experienced vampire, Marky, who positions themself as your mentor as they introduce you to a side of London nightlife you never dreamed existed. But no sooner have you started to meet your fellow vampires than you find yourself pressured to take sides in a conflict among them that could have consequences for all of London … and beyond. And you still can’t help but wonder exactly what happened the night you died.

Dash Casey’s Vampire’s Kiss is a lot of fun. Like two of my favorite ChoiceScript games, Choice of the Vampire and The Vampire Regent, it sets up a vampire society that will feel familiar to fans of Vampire: The Masquerade while still leaving plenty of room for originality in its worldbuilding. There’s action, mystery, and (of course) romance. There are 4 ROs (one man, one woman, and two whose gender you get to choose), ranging from vampires to a vampire hunter, and optional sex scenes that, while rather brief, can get very spicy indeed (and more than a little kinky). There are also some delightful side characters, including a cat and a hedgehog the PC can pet, and Casey’s rich descriptions of the setting had me wishing I could hop on a plane to London myself. Replay value is high; as Casey has pointed out, Vampire’s Kiss has a word count roughly comparable to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, but it takes only a couple hours to play through. That leaves a lot of text to be uncovered the next time through by a different set of choices!

If Vampire’s Kiss has a flaw, it’s that it’s likely to leave you wanting more. It’s a quick read with a lot going on, and I would have liked it to unfold at a more leisurely pace, with more time in particular dedicated to character and relationship development. My PC and RO had some scorching sex, but I would have enjoyed it more if their relationship had had a little more time to grow, if I’d been given any reason to think these people truly cared about each other.

I do recommend Vampire’s Kiss. Just don’t go in expecting a big sprawling novel of epic romance. Expect a spicy little interactive novella with great replay value, and you’re likely to have an excellent time.

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Welcome to Moreytown

In the mid-'90s, S. Andrew Swann began his career writing three of the four novels that would become known as the Moreau Quartet; the fourth followed in 1999. In these novels, genetically engineered sapient animals known as “moreaus,” created to serve as soldiers, live uneasily among humans now that the war is over, many clustered together in slums known as “Moreytowns.” In 2017, Swann returned to the setting of his earliest works for his first work of interactive fiction, Welcome to Moreytown.

In Welcome to Moreytown, you play as a moreau of one of thirteen different species. You have a decent apartment and a tolerable job, but all that’s about to go up in flames - literally. When you lose your job the same day as a massive fire in your apartment complex, you quickly find yourself drawn into the underworld of cops and street gangs, peace activists and strange cults. It’ll take all your humanoid wits and animal instincts to make it through the next week - but if you play your cards right, you just might end up on top.

Welcome to Moreytown is a very short game - it probably took me about an hour to play through the whole thing. I wish Swann had devoted a little more time to worldbuilding and setting up the PC’s everyday life instead of jumping right from character creation into the action. That said, I really enjoyed the story, and just looking over the list of Achievements I can tell this game has decent replay value. It’s not one of the best CoG games I’ve played, even for its length, but it’s a fun little interactive novella that will probably leave you wanting to check out the Moreau Quartet.

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It was really interesting replaying Welcome to Moreytown recently after partaking of some more modern games and WIPs. I first played it not long after it came out and I recalled enjoying it then, and it was still fun the next go around. I think you’re right that it kind of launches you into things instantly, which is both a positive and a negative. You’re expected to set your PC’s values like immediately and it doesn’t always feel like you have the context to decide so soon.

One thing I did feel personally is that you get dragged around quite a lot and get hit up by a succession of the same characters in a row a few times that all seem to always know where you are. I’d have liked a bit more time for individual scenes with some characters, especially the ROs.

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Ah, in my comments on the Vampire’s Kiss release thread, I did remember saying that the bad was “A little on the short side” and my final IFComp style rating was 81.1%.

Oh, the joy of evaluating and reviewing stuff…

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All-World Pro Wrestling
originally posted on Reddit

David Monster’s All-World Pro Wrestling is perhaps the consummate example of a game that’s not for everyone. But even so, it’s “for” a lot more people than you might think.

Yes, it’s m/m erotica - not even erotic romance, really, although you can choose to have your PC pursue a monogamous relationship. If you’re not comfortable with homoeroticism, you won’t enjoy this game. But it is also very much a wrestling game. Throughout the story, you get to make decisions about the PC’s fight style and training regimen, as well as control his actions at major decision points in at least three wrestling matches; the choices you make will determine the future of his wrestling career.

It’s m/m, and it’s a wrestling game, but which (if either) of these elements takes the foreground is entirely the player’s choice. There’s no escaping the sexually charged atmosphere or the erotic potential of the sport itself, but all sex scenes are optional. Your PC can be a promiscuous horn dog whose only thought during a match is how to sex things up a notch, or he can be a serious technical wrestler who appreciates the eye candy in the locker room but always puts his career first.

And there’s a third level on which this game can be enjoyed: as a story. I’m a heteroromantic asexual woman who doesn’t know anything about wrestling, but I enjoyed getting to explore this totally foreign-to-me world through the eyes of the character I created. There are so many characters introduced so quickly I wasn’t sure I would be able to keep track of them all in my head, but I rarely had a problem, because the characters are so well-written; the limited space devoted to each one is used to the best possible effect to make them come alive. And the dialogue is often very funny!

I would have appreciated more actual romantic scenes (with or without sex) and character backstories, although the ones I did happen across were well-done, so I assume a lot of what seemed to be lacking is actually there in the game already and I just didn’t make the choices that would have led me to it.

This isn’t one of my all-time favorite ChoiceScript games by any means, but I had a good time with it. I recommend it enthusiastically to fans of wrestling and/or m/m stories. But even if those aren’t your particular cup of tea, All-World Pro Wrestling might be worth a try.

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Dragon Racer

Growing up on your family farm, there was only one thing that set you apart from any other farm kid: you had a dragon. He was just about your age, and you can’t remember a time before your bond. Perhaps it was only natural that you would dream of joining the elite ranks of dragon racers: riding atop your dragon to fly, run, and swim through an obstacle course before a packed stadium of fans.

When you and your dragon get a chance to participate in a racing tryout, you don’t hesitate. Before you know it, you’re offered a position with an elite racing team … as a stable hand. It’s not quite a dream come true, but at least you’re immersed in the racing world, living beside and sharing meals and going to class with professional racers. The next time an opportunity comes your way, you’re going to be ready.

It’s hard to imagine a more fun premise than that of Tierra Wright’s Dragon Racer. It’s got the competition and camaraderie you’d expect from a sports story, wrapped in a coming-of-age tale set in a fantasy world with a delightfully unique take on dragons. There’s a great cast of characters, human and dragon, with distinct personalities, backgrounds, and even secrets, and with plenty of opportunities for friendship, rivalry, and romance. There’s lore to uncover, racing technique to learn, and different strategies to employ based on your individual strengths.

Unfortunately, the execution of this fantastic premise falls somewhat flat. The story has a jerky, episodic quality, rather than events flowing smoothly together. It’s occasionally difficult to figure out what’s going on or who’s speaking. Wright’s prose style is generally lackluster, with periodic tryhard moments that distract from the narrative more than they enhance it.

Perhaps the most important thing for prospective players to know is that Dragon Racer ends on a cliffhanger. It was originally intended as the first book of the “Riders of Abauruth” trilogy, but two years after its release, Wright cancelled the project. As it is, Dragon Racer is divided into two parts. Part One, which constitutes the majority of the game, focuses on the PC’s entry into the dragon-racing world. Part Two, which is only the last three chapters, begins with a dark twist that sets up what would have been the plot of the second book. Fortunately, Part One does stand alone as a complete story if you don’t mind a couple moments of foreshadowing that never go anywhere.

Despite its downsides, I do recommend Dragon Racer as a fun fantasy romp, especially for readers who love dragons. Just feel free to stop when you get to the page for Part Two.

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The Dryad’s Riddle

It started as an ordinary, carefree day. You were with your best friend and your sister, playing hide-and-seek and racing down the hill. The discovery of a ring of mushrooms at the foot of a tree prompted a discussion about fairy lore, but you certainly never expected to follow a mysterious voice through a portal into the land of dreams. When you accidentally destroy the portal, it falls to you to collect six special mushrooms to rebuild the circle - and in a realm where wit and wisdom are more precious than any currency, it’s going to take all your cleverness to earn your way home.

Avery Moore’s sprightly little fantasy The Dryad’s Riddle isn’t your typical ChoiceScript game. Aside from choosing your character’s name and gender in the beginning, the interactivity is limited to solving riddles posed by the characters you meet in the land of dreams. There’s a map with six locations (including a carnival, a haunted house, and an art museum), which can be visited in any order. In each location, a cast of colorful characters will run you through a gantlet of varied puzzles.

The challenges range from simple riddles to logic problems best worked out with paper and pencil. Most readers who enjoy puzzles of this kind will have seen some of them before, but quite a few were new to me. There’s a hint system if things ever get too tricky; I had to use it only a couple times, but in my experience the hints were genuinely helpful without giving too much away. There’s also an option to eat magic beans which give you the answers outright - but be careful, the ending you ultimately get depends on how many hints you use.

As much fun as I had with the puzzles, there’s just as much delight to be had in the frame story, which is itself full of wit, wordplay, and unexpected twists of thought. Fans of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Louis Sachar’s Wayside School series will feel right at home with Moore’s splendidly twisted logic. Amidst the absurdity of a dream-land carnival, for instance, the PC is surprised to stumble upon a petting zoo full of perfectly ordinary animals - but the hobgoblins and pixies native to the realm stare in wonder at such beasts as one-headed dogs and hornless unicorns. The playful surprises and subversions that pepper the story help set the reader into the perfect frame of mind for solving puzzles that require thinking outside the box.

Replay value is low - once you’ve solved all the puzzles, there’s not much new to offer - although I can see myself replaying this every few years or so just to enjoy the story. Readers who go in expecting a traditional interactive novel are likely to be disappointed. But if you enjoy puzzle games - or wordplay and quirky worldbuilding - The Dryad’s Riddle is well worth picking up.

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Affairs of the Court: Choice of Romance

As the daughter or son of a poor-but-noble family of the kingdom of Iberia, you are privileged to spend the first Season after your coming of age at the royal court in the capital city of Orovilla. Your family hopes you’ll find a suitable spouse while you’re there, and immediately two candidates present themselves, the prosperous but dull merchant Torres and the dashing, rebellious noble de Mendosa. But you’ve caught a third pair of eyes as well: the Monarch already has a consort, but their history of extramarital dalliances is no secret - and if you play your cards right, you could be next in their bed. And with the Monarch and their spouse having so far failed to produce a suitable heir to the throne, perhaps there’s a way to turn a royal affair into something a little more permanent…

The first thing you need to know about Heather Albano and Adam Strong-Morse’s Affairs of the Court: Choice of Romance is that it’s not a romance game.

Affairs of the Court was written and published in three installments between 2010 and 2013, and the first was known simply as Choice of Romance. Although the main plot of Choice of Romance deals with the PC’s selection among three suitors, readers expecting a variety of attractive candidates to choose from are likely to be disappointed. This is a game about the inner politics of the royal court, where marital and sexual relations are viewed most often through the lens of money and power, and love and desire are all too often a polite fiction, an inconvenience, or a scandal. While it’s not impossible to find true love while navigating court politics, this is essentially a game about being a royal paramour. In fact, if you’re not involved with the Monarch at the end of the first part of the game, the story wraps up there.

It’s not hard to recognize the PC, whether male or female, as the Anne Boleyn to the Monarch’s Henry VIII. Albano and Strong-Morse have effectively captured the feel of the Tudor court, with all its masques and jousts and ever-so-polite tensions, with wealth and mage ability standing in for the limitations imposed by sex and sexual orientation in sixteenth-century England.

Choice of Romance was the third game ever released by CoG, and even filled out with the other two parts, Affairs of the Court feels a bit spare by the standard of recent CoG offerings. When I discovered CoG in 2011, only the first part was available, and with nothing to compare it to but the Choose Your Own Adventure books of my childhood, I found it wonderously rich and immersive. Playing it again this week for the first time in years, I couldn’t help noticing how short and episodic the chapters were, how shallow the characters, compared to so many of the interactive novels I’ve read since then. That said, Affairs of the Court remains among my favorite ChoiceScript games. It was an amazingly ambitious project for its time, and accomplishes everything it set out to do. It brings to life a world, and allows the reader to create a character who can be anything from sincerely sweet to coldheartedly conspiratorial. It poses tough choices - at the crossroads of ambition and morality, of desire and respectability, of more goals than you can possibly pursue. There are moments of genuine emotion. Replay value is tremendous, with possible outcomes ranging from being executed as a traitor to living happily ever after. I’m still discovering new ones.

Over a decade after it was written, Affairs of the Court still has a lot to offer. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s definitely worth a try.

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Thanks for (re)publishing these here, Aletheia. I constantly look for content I have missed in stories I have read, and you help me narrow what I originally missed down.

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Best of Us

In recent years, a new phenomenon has been emerging around the world: ordinary people developing extraordinary powers. You’re one of them - perhaps you can fly or teleport, scale walls with insectile agility or leap tall buildings in a single bound - although you haven’t told anyone yet. But when a major earthquake hits the San Andreas Fault during your visit to Los Angeles, you know the time has come to step up and show the world what you can do.

Teo Kuusela’s Best of Us starts out well enough. It’s fun to be able to choose your powers and see them come up in the story in relevant ways (although less often than I’d hoped), and the premise of helping to steer a worldwide paradigm shift is a compelling one. Unfortunately, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before - and better - elsewhere, and as the plot devolves predictably into big-business conspiracies and government regulations, it also loses coherence. Important plot threads were seemingly abandoned, characters popped haphazardly in and out of the story, and it was rarely clear to me what other characters stood for and why. Several times I was asked to join in a fight on one side or the other, with only the vaguest idea of what I was meant to be fighting for.

There was the potential here for something fun, if not particularly original. However, due to the shallow characters and poorly-managed plot, I can’t recommend it.

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Changeling Charade
originally posted on Reddit

Every now and then there’s a game that challenges me as a reviewer. Not because I don’t know my own mind or I can’t think of anything interesting to say, or because it’s so bad the review threatens to descend into pure mockery. I’m talking about the kind of game that makes me want to shout from the rooftops and squee like a fangirl about how good it is and how everyone should play it, aspirations of critical professionalism be damned.

I’m talking about games like Ruth Vincent’s Changeling Charade.

So, in the interests of balance, let me begin by saying that there are a few typos that slipped by copyedit, and the (otherwise perfect) ending I got felt a bit too rushed.

Now let me tell you what an unstinting joy this game is.

In Changeling Charade, you’re a young female fairy living in the city of New Victoria, a charming expy of Victorian London. (The river Thyme flows through the middle, there’s a deplorable prison called Old Gate, and the realm is presided over by a short, stout queen.) You promised your parents on their deathbed that you would take care of your younger sisters, but under the oppressive laws that forbid Supernaturals using magic or working in most legitimate professions, you’ve had to turn to a black-market changeling operation, hired to take the place of humans with somewhere else to be. When Lady Constance Weatherby runs off with a commoner a few days before she’s set to make her debut in New Victoria high society, she hires you to take her place to keep her mother from coming after her. It’s a comfortable gig that pays well, but it comes with a demanding mother to please, a pair of suitors to entertain, and a royal debutante ball to prepare for. As busy as you are, however, you can’t help wondering if there’s anything you can do to improve the lot of your fellow Supernaturals.

The otherworldly being forced to pass as human (and sometimes struggling with it) is a favorite trope of mine, and Vincent delves into it with enthusiasm and tells a story that is as suspenseful as it is delicious. There’s a lot going on, but never so much that it feels unwieldy. The prose is lucid and suffused with warmth, and there’s enough description to make for a vivid sense of setting without getting bogged down in details. Even the minor characters are vividly rendered. The PC’s little sisters in particular are utterly charming, and I quickly found myself almost as invested in their welfare as my character was.

There are four prospective love interests, one man and three whose gender you get to choose. They’re a diverse bunch, and although I’ve only romanced one so far, I found them all appealing and look forward to trying out the others when I play again. There were some genuinely sweet moments, a lot of spicy flirtation, and a sex scene that was every bit as heartfelt as it was scorching.

If I didn’t already know going in that this was Vincent’s first foray into interactive fiction, I would have assumed Changeling Charade was the work of a seasoned IF author. Every choice feels important, and many are pleasantly difficult. I went in with an idea of who my character was and how her story would unfold, but the events of the story led her to grow in ways I hadn’t anticipated. It was the synthesis of authorial intent and readerly purpose that distinguishes IF as an art form, and it was almost seamless.

I recommend Changeling Charade with particular enthusiasm to those who know the struggle of being different and having to work hard at fitting in: this story about a character who finds her happy ending, and perhaps makes her mark on the world along the way, will nurture your soul. And no matter who you are, it’s tremendous fun and full of characters worth getting to know.

Please don’t miss it.

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I loved this game! I played through 3 times and will probably go back to it again sometime. I enjoyed all the potential romances and loved the story, setting, and writing.

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I’m not surprised you like it - it’s one of my all-time favorites. I hope Ruth Vincent writes another game; she has an excellent grasp on what makes interactive fiction work. I’d especially love to see another story set in the same world, but I’d be happy to read anything she writes.

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This game also surprised me and doubly so that this was the authors first foray in IF, as this game felt like there were real options and paths that were very different. Really excited to see if they do something in the future.

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