Reviews by Aletheia Knights (PistachioPug): "NEW! Doomsday on Demand 2"

General
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Dawnfall
originally posted on Reddit

Combine one part fantasy, one part science fiction, and one part romance (maybe). Toss in an interdimensional pirate ship. Stir in a sprinkle of rock and roll, a generous splash of found-family vibes, and a piquant pinch of danger, and bring to a frothy boil.

The result, in the words of author RoAnna Sylver, is “a giant ridiculous queer space magic pirate adventure.” I don’t think it’s possible to describe Dawnfall any more succinctly than that.

In Dawnfall, you play as a Navigator, one of the skilled specialists that work in small teams to open portals between the magical world of Zephyria and the dystopian world of Eclipse. (It should probably be mentioned that you’re not human; you belong to one of two sapient species described in the publisher’s blurb as “space elf” and “bird-person.”) In recent months, you’ve observed an increasing instability in the balance between worlds, but it still comes as a shock when one of your teammates is injured by a rush of energy from a malfunctioning portal - and the other, an unassuming fellow you never would have suspected, lets you in on a secret that will change everything you thought you understood about your universe.

I didn’t expect Dawnfall to be entirely to my taste. Sylver has stated they wrote the game with “queer/trans/polyam/aspec” players in mind, and I am none of those things except a heteroromantic demi who doesn’t use the term “aspec.” But I’ve enjoyed games before when I wasn’t in the target audience, so I took the plunge. Instead of trying to force the story into a narrower box than the author intended, I made up a character who belonged in the world of Dawnfall: a lusty pansexual with a taste for danger and plenty of love to go around. I threw caution to the wind and my lot in with outlaws; I embraced chaos and three of my fellow pirates. And I had a blast.

The story is pretty fun, and you have to love a world where humans are the aliens and interdimensional portals can be opened, with equal aplomb, by mystical runes, lines of precise code, rock-and-roll rhythm, or any combination thereof. That said, what’s going to bring me back to this game is the characters. The crew of the Dawnfall are a diverse bunch, in backgrounds and abilities and genders and species as well as personality, yet there’s a sense of love and respect among them that runs deep.

Dawnfall is among the few Heart’s Choice titles that can be played without entering a sexual or romantic relationship at any point. In fact, although I enjoyed the romance, Sylver devotes just as much attention to platonic soulmate connections, and nearly as much to friendships and familial bonds (both born and chosen). Although it’s rated “Intimate” (two out of five peppers), probably because it’s technically possible for the PC to have sex on the page, it’s not at all graphic. There are few physical sensations and almost no anatomical details (which, seeing as how most of the characters aren’t human, is probably just as well - or especially a pity, depending on how interested you are in xenobiology). The focus is overwhelmingly on the intensity of the emotional connection. That said, it does need to be pointed out that this game is very, very poly. Of the five ROs, only one isn’t already partnered with one or more of the others, so your options for a truly monogamous relationship are extremely limited. Romancing a character with a partner doesn’t require you to be in a relationship with the partner as well, but you do need to be willing to share.

There is a serious weakness in the chapters featuring intimate scenes, and that is repetition of text. Although the ROs in an interactive romance game should read as distinct individuals rather than interchangeable playthings with only superficial differences, I understand using some of the same text for multiple characters when there wouldn’t be any significant difference anyway. In a game written specifically to be poly-friendly, though, when it’s possible to have scenes with several characters in the course of one chapter, reusing text not only breaks immersion, it takes away from the individual specialness of each relationship - and there’s far too much of it in Dawnfall. Not only did I have some identical moments with two or three characters in the same chapter, at one point I had almost the same conversation, several paragraphs long, twice in a row with the same character. I wish more care had been taken to personalize these experiences.

If you decide to give Dawnfall a try, it’s definitely worth it to spend a dollar on the little collection of non-interactive bonus stories. Set several years before the events of the game, they can be read either after you play, to fill out the backstories of characters you’ve already come to know, or before, to introduce you to the setting in nice little chunks and the characters one (or two) at a time rather than jumping into the game with both feet. In any case, it’s both great fun and deeply moving to see how the crew of the Dawnfall began to find each other - and to get a better sense of the formative experiences that made them who they are.

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Alter Ego

Before Choice of Games existed - in fact, when its future founders were still in elementary school - there was a computer game called Alter Ego, in which Dr. Peter J. Favaro combined his lifelong interests in psychology and technology to tell the story of an ordinary human being progressing through life from birth to death. It was released in 1986 as two separate games, a male and a female version, each priced at the equivalent of $100 in today’s money. Decades later, Dan Fabulich ported this game to be playable for free online, and its surprising popularity was what inspired him to believe there might be a market for novel-length text-based games. He and Adam Strong-Morse created a little game called Choice of the Dragon, and the rest is history: fifteen years later, over 400 games have been published by Choice of Games and its subsidiaries.

Alter Ego begins with the birth of your character and proceeds, as Shakespeare would like it, through seven stages from infancy to old age. Life unfolds in a series of choices - will you be a curious baby who loves to explore, or a timid one who clings to the familiar? will you experiment with drugs as a teenager? is that big promotion worth making yourself sick with stress? will you be a dignified elder, or scandalize your younger relatives with your antics? You can choose a career path. You can fall in love. Along the way there are poignant moments, and funny ones, and hidden perils, all rendered with a verisimilitude grounded in Favaro’s study of human development.

It is, necessarily, limited in some significant ways. It’s set in an unchanging 1980s America. I was a toddler when Alter Ego came out, and the world of the PC’s infancy and childhood is one I used to live in, but as my character got older, the setting felt more and more dated. More significantly, Alter Ego doesn’t delve at all into minority experiences. Nothing ever happens to the PC that couldn’t happen to a middle-class white person, and they are clearly written as heterosexual, neurotypical, comfortable in the gender associated with their biological sex, and not disabled in any life-impacting way. Of course, Favaro’s intent was to explore the general course of human development across the lifespan in the average person, not the diverse nuances of human identity, and that’s fine - he had to set the guardrails somewhere - but it does mean some of us will find the game far less relatable than it was intended to be. Even when I played a character as much like myself as I possibly could, the experience was far more “alter” than “ego.” (Ironically, this game to which CoG owes its existence could not actually have been published by CoG, which has always required games that included romance to include same-sex options.)

And yet, although I couldn’t shape the character after my own image, somehow I became her. I played this game over the course of four days, one or two life stages at a time, and yesterday I sat down to enjoy my old age. Death came suddenly, when I’d played only a couple of the possible scenarios available to me. I guess I overexerted myself on a walk and died on the side of the road with people crowded around, and then the game was just over. It was too sudden, I wasn’t ready, and I hated that I couldn’t chalk it up to bad game design. For a few minutes I just sat there with my phone in my hand, stymied by weird grief.

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oh wow alter ego is old school.

It’s certainly not relatable as it could be; there’s some very distinct boxes it’s fitting you into, but damn if it isn’t immersive in other ways.

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I particularly liked this game a lot, I played it a few times and it was really good.

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I found this game on an old website, a good long while ago, called Home of the Underdogs (or maybe Abandonia) which hosted abandonware. I loved it and got a bit obsessed with it for a week or so. The very first section of Green, when you are a baby, was partly based upon vague memories of the descriptions here- of course not the same since my baby is an orc baby.

I actually forget the name of Alter Ego and searched for it a couple of years ago. That search brought me to another name, ‘The Parenting Simulator’ and HG and CoG. Then I played Choice of the Dragon and thought ‘oh, so these books are like that old game but you can do it about anything. Maybe I can get my orc game sorted this way? But properly this time, unlike that very rough card-swiper I based on Reigns.’

So I went into HG thinking all you folks are making and reading life simulators.

This little butterfly-effect gamer memory will always resonate with me now that I have actually put something together- all starting with Alter Ego.

Thanks for the informative review and analysis.

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Thanks so much for sharing! That’s a really cool story. I actually kind of wish there were more games out there inspired by Alter Ego, exploring all different kinds of experiences - fantasy Alter Egos like yours, historical Alter Egos, Alter Egos about people who aren’t the most super-normal ultra-relatable normal person who ever proceeded with aggressive normality through all the stages of normal human development.

I’m totally gonna refer to An Unexpectedly Green Journey as Orc-er Ego from now on, by the way. :wink:

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I wanted to do things like that for other fantastical beings though there is always the risk of things getting samey. Might still do. One day.

I love the idea of historical life simulators what with all the ‘what ifs?’ of alternative history. The WIP Shattered Eagle, though with fantastical elements, shows a great template for being a rising Roman senator- so many pivotal moments available in certain Roman lives. But we have infinite choices! Really great idea.

Aggressively normal, middle-of-the-road MCs could be okay, depending on what the delicious torments a game might drag them through. We’d all like to see what comes out at the end no matter what we put in the blender. With the way everyone loves their angst around Cog and HG stories, that would be some sight.

Haha! Orc-er Ego it is! And the sequel, Even Orc-er Ego.

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Doomsday on Demand

By the standards of some other place and time, it might be considered dystopian, that rigidly stratified society with armed guards at every gate, but as a ten-year-old boy, it was the only life you’d ever known. Things started to change when the war started - the sky grown dark with pollution, your parents holding intense conversations in low tones - but there was nothing that could have prepared you for the day the bomb fell. You were at school, and as the mushroom cloud rose outside the window, your teacher rushed you and your fellow students down to the bomb shelter.

Nearly two years have passed before you see the light of day again - and when the shelter door finally opens from the outside, it isn’t a familiar caretaker or a government rescue squad leading you and your friends to safety. Instead, you’re herded away to a fenced compound where the gleefully sadistic Ivan rules with an iron fist. Alongside a couple of older and more experienced members of Ivan’s labor force, you’re sent out to scavenge for supplies in a wasteland populated by mutant monsters. If you’re ever going to see your thirteenth birthday, you’ve got a few lessons in survival to learn: how to hide, how to fight, how to make a quick clean kill … and just how much of your humanity you’re willing to sacrifice along the way.

There’s a good story at the core of Norbert Mohos’s post-apocalyptic adventure Doomsday on Demand. The world Mohos creates, in which the brutality of the irradiated wasteland is equaled only by the cruelty of the humans who have outlasted civilization’s veneer, will feel familiar to fans of the Fallout franchise, without quite coming across as a shameless rip-off. Navigating a post-apocalyptic world as a twelve-year-old is an interesting change of pace, although perhaps not developed to its fullest potential. The story introduces some compelling dilemmas in the areas of loyalty and self-preservation, and with six different endings, there’s plenty to explore.

Unfortunately, Doomsday on Demand frequently pushes the limits of suspension of disbelief. No matter how little Ivan values the lives of his slave labor force, it doesn’t make sense that he would waste precious material resources equipping the PC as a wilderness scavenger without training him in the basics of survival. It’s implausible that Ivan would supply his scavengers with guns and let them out of the compound unsupervised and they’d never consider revolting or running away or seeking help elsewhere. (It’s possible the more experienced scavengers had to learn their helplessness the hard way, but it literally never crosses the PC’s mind.) The PC, who bangs himself in the face the first time he fires a gun because he wasn’t expecting the recoil, gets a couple of shooting lessons and almost immediately becomes a crack shot. And even before he starts taking down rabid monsters with a single bullet, he’s harder to kill than Rasputin: at one point he wakes up from a month-long coma with what seems to be a permanently infected abdominal wound, and he’s back out scavenging within a couple days. (To be fair, it does really, really hurt, like, a lot.)

But if I can’t recommend it as wholeheartedly as I might like, neither am I here to tell you Doomsday on Demand isn’t worth your time. It’s certainly entertaining. Ivan’s deliciously despicable machinations, along with the PC’s immense raw potential for heroism or villainy, make for a compelling narrative. If you’re in the mood for something post-apocalyptic, this game is worth a try.

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Doomsday on Demand 2

You knew where you stood at the end of Doomsday on Demand - if you were still standing at all, that is. It might have been a comfortable existence or one fraught with peril, a solitary life or one with friends by your side - but whatever it was had become your new normal.

That didn’t last long.

Nearly 16, you find yourself once again fighting for survival in the wasteland. This time, you’re taken in by the militant Sons of Tomorrow. From your base in the city of Novos, you’re sent out alongside other experienced fighters to bring the ruined district under control. As you make new friends (and enemies), discover new abilities, and maybe even start to fall in love, you keep hearing about the Oracle, a mysterious figure who can grant wishes.

Norbert Mohos’s Doomsday on Demand 2 doesn’t allow you to restore a save from the previous game. There’s no need, really: as long as you remember your character’s first name, the ending he got, and a couple of major choices he made along the way, you’ve got all you need to play the sequel.

I’m sorry to say this game just didn’t work for me. The new characters came across as either totally bland or implausibly caricatured, and sometimes somehow both at once. There were storylines with a lot of potential, but they tended to fizzle out quickly. The PC’s sporadic bizarre abilities and the enigmatic Oracle make it hard to take seriously what ought to be a gritty post-apocalyptic world.

Worst of all, the story is just plain hard to follow, as the actual progression of events is constantly broken up by flashbacks and flash-forwards and hallucinations and dreams. I love nonlinear storytelling, but Mohos simply doesn’t have the chops to make a narrative this needlessly complex actually work. If they got David Lynch to write the next season of Fallout but hired Uwe Boll to direct, the result would be worse than Doomsday on Demand 2, but not by much.

This game has eight possible endings, and I got a good one: my PC grown middle-aged in comfort and relative safety, still bearing the scars of the past but surrounded by loved ones. It should have been richly rewarding, after having seen this character through so much, but all I could feel at that point was glad it was over.

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Doomsday on Demand was funnily enough my intro to this type of choose your own adventure. It definitely had flaw, but it still hits me with nostalgia every time I see it pop up(which is rarely). So it’s pretty awesome to see a review!

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