Glad you liked it. The Fog Knows Your Name is one of my favorite choicescript games ever published, and it’s what inspired me to start working on my own CS game!
Yikes, I can see why the subreddit consistently rank this one so low.
2 Likes
The Gangs of Old Camp
You have a pretty good life, Officer Klaw. You’re well-respected by your colleagues at the Old Camp Police Department and something of a local hero after foiling the kidnapping of an heiress. You’re about to marry a woman you adore.
Too bad that’s all about to change.
You’ve been asked to go undercover among the five vicious criminal gangs that operate in Old Camp to bring down an ambitious crime lord who plans to bring the whole city under his control. It’s a top-secret mission. You can’t even hint to your fiancée that you’re involved in something major and ask her to wait for you. If you accept the job, the wedding is off. And if you decide to put your duty ahead of your heart, you’ll be plunged into a violent underworld that will challenge you physically, mentally, and socially. Completing this mission could be the greatest thing you ever do … if you survive.
Amith Shaju’s underworld crime drama The Gangs of Old Camp isn’t the worst ChoiceScript game out there, but that’s not to say it’s particularly good. The writing is perfectly coherent, but shabby. There are visible coding errors. A lot of outcomes have nothing to do with stats; if you pick the wrong choice, you’re dead - although at least if you die once the story really gets rolling, you’ll have the choice to return to an earlier checkpoint. There’s a combination of puzzle-solving and turn-based fighting and strategic thinking required to progress through the story, and it could actually have been a lot of fun if the story itself weren’t so silly.
Old Camp is a big enough city to support the territories of five organized crime gangs, but the only officer in the entire department who could possibly go undercover in its underworld is Klaw. Not because he has the necessary qualities to play a role that will get him accepted into the gangs with minimal suspicion; in fact, due to his recent exploits, he has one of the most famous faces in the OCPD. Not because he’s an expert on Old Camp’s criminal underworld; he doesn’t even know the name of the notorious gang leader who heads the department’s “most wanted” list. Not because he was essential to planning the operation, which he doesn’t even learn the details of until after he’s decided whether to accept the assignment. Only if he says yes does he learn that the plan is to frame him for corruption, having him arrested, tried, and sentenced so that he can approach the gangs of Old Camp under his true name and history, trusting that these criminals won’t bear a grudge against a hero cop now that he’s supposedly landed on their side of the law.
I managed to find the story fairly interesting, and I suppose I’ll give it another try someday to see if it gets better as it goes along, but when I died (fairly quickly) I really had no reason not to let go. It’s hard to get invested in a story that makes as little internal sense as this.
6 Likes
Elemental Saga: The Awakening
Oh, Elemental Saga, how I wanted to love you.
It’s no secret if you’ve read any of my reviews that school stories and elemental magic are two things I just can’t get enough of. Mandar Deshmukh’s Elemental Saga: The Awakening should have been my own personal brand of catnip.
As the story starts, you’re beginning your first year at the college of your dreams. Whether you excelled in athletics, academics, or the arts in high school, you managed to distinguish yourself and secure a place. Now you’re making friends with your suitemates and struggling with your calculus homework. Attending a presentation at which a physics professor demonstrated his revolutionary new research seems like an interesting change of pace - until the demonstration is attacked, and something strange comes over you. You manifest a superpower you’ve never so much as dreamed you had - and before you can process what’s just happened, you’re knocked out by a hooded figure and wake up in a compound full of people with abilities like yours. You’re an Elemental, one of the powered beings who exist to protect humanity from the machinations of the evil Wraiths - and you’re about to be drawn into a war as old as time.
It’s a great premise, but the execution fails on almost every level. Deshmukh doesn’t seem to understand how families work (the PC’s mother stops speaking to them and feeding them to try to convince them to apply to her alma mater instead, and this is treated as eyeroll-worthy rather than unhinged and abusive), how college works (almost no one applies to just one school; art and theater aren’t “extracurriculars” if you’re majoring in them; you can’t disappear for weeks at a time and still pass your classes), how skill development works (manifesting your powers for the second time ever when your life in danger, then kicking your trainer’s butt with magic for the first time ever after weeks of practice does not constitute the student becoming the master), how organizations work (ancient leagues fighting existential battles don’t let untried newcomers, even extremely talented ones, into leadership, at least not without a much better reason than “huh, guess we might as well”). The prose is distractingly awkward at best, with moments of near-incomprehensibility. The coding is clumsy - I played as a woman, but other characters kept referring to me in the masculine, sometimes going back and forth on a single page.
Perhaps worst of all, I never had any reason to care about any of the characters, including my PC. The game ends with a cliffhanger in which a group of characters important to the PC are in mortal peril, and I didn’t care - I was just glad the game was finished. And considering that it’s been nine years since this game’s release with no word on the planned continuation of the saga in nearly again as long, that’s probably for the best.
7 Likes
I’ve never played this game, but in some cultures (including my own) this isn’t uncommon. That’s not to say that makes it right, but if the author comes from one of those cultures, then to them that is absolutely how families work.
1 Like