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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Evertree Inn
I could name dozens of ChoiceScript games with richly realized settings that are a delight to explore, but few, if any, capture the expansive feel of an old-timey open-world adventure game as well as the three volumes (so far) of The Evertree Saga. It’s hard to believe Evertree Inn was Thom Baylay’s first published game; his 2017 debut serves up a tantalizing mystery with color and confidence that many more accomplished creators would do well to emulate.
As Evertree Inn begins, you’re a traveler on your way to the city of Lux, where you hope to start rebuilding something like the life you once believed you’d have. Since the night your childhood home burned down, you’ve struggled to make a living for yourself and your one remaining relative. Now the future seems brighter than it has in years - but after a long day on the road, you can’t resist the prospect of a warm meal, a proper bed, maybe even a bath. However, you begin to suspect not long after you receive your room key in the titular establishment that this might not be the restful evening you’d hoped for. One of your fellow guests has gotten into your pocket and made off with a few gold coins. One seems more interested in getting into your pants. And it was only by accident that the innkeeper handed you that letter about a mysterious death that happened here just last week, but now that you’ve seen it, it’s impossible not to be curious.
The Evertree Saga is set in a classic late medieval/early modern European-flavored high fantasy world, one that will feel immediately familiar if you’ve ever read Tolkien or played Dungeons and Dragons. There’s more worldbuilding at the series goes on, but in this first installment, what the setting lacks in originality, it more than makes up in vitality. Baylay’s world pulses with life (even before the … well … IYKYK): I could almost see the innkeeper’s flashy quill pen, feel the grime of a day on the road, smell the hearty stew bubbling in the kitchen. The characters are varied and memorable, with personalities ranging from sweet to comical to sinister, each with their own priorities, values, and agenda that have nothing to do with the PC, at least at first.
And the way everything comes together is nothing short of magical. The inn and its surroundings beg to be explored, the other characters leer and glare and conceal their secrets on their tongues and in their luggage, and as the story unfolds around them the PC can do almost whatever you want. There are limits imposed by the PC’s race (human, elf, dwarf, halfling, or brownie) and chosen backstory (an elf who always wanted to study magic and a brownie who trained to be a warrior will have very different skill sets) and the consequences of their own actions (people treat you differently when you’re tidy and polite than when you’re a brutish bully), but the way you move through this wonderfully responsive world is up to you. You can prioritize exploring the inn and questioning the other characters, or you can leave your curiosity to simmer while you nap, flirt, and order a third glass of ale at dinner. Nearly everything you can do and be has its own advantages and drawbacks, sometimes surprising ones.
True mystery games are rather rare in ChoiceScript, and for good reason; most CS games are meant to be played more than once, and therefore the format doesn’t lend itself well to a genre that’s all about the Big Reveal. Most CS mysteries are either short, shallow and game-y, with random culprits, or they’re genre hybrids, like romantic suspense. Evertree Inn centers the mystery, but there’s so much going on it’s impossible to learn and do everything in a single playthrough, and the replay value comes from the pleasure of revisiting Baylay’s world and delving into its secrets from new angles.
Evertree Inn is one of those rare games that set their ambitions sky-high and actually succeed on nearly every level. If you haven’t played it yet, you’re missing out on something genuinely special.
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Sordwin
You ckecked into Evertree Inn and lived to tell the tale. Now you’ve picked up a lucrative job from one of the most powerful men in the city of Lux: to travel to the island of Sordwin and collect a package that’s been held up in the shipping office there. On the way to the island, you learn there’s some kind of quarantine going on. When you venture into the town of Sordwin, you find the streets nearly deserted. No one seems to have the time or inclination to explain exactly what’s going on, but everyone repeats the same warning: don’t be caught out in the open when the darkness falls. You learn what they mean around noon, when the island is suddenly cast into obscurity. When the light returns, you witness firsthand the horror that has fallen upon Sordwin - and you know that if you can’t help the townfolk root out the cause and bring an end to it, this could be where your life ends.
Thom Baylay got his Hosted Games career off to a strong start with Evertree Inn, then took a brief break from the world of the Evertree Saga to write The Grim and I. His third game, Sordwin, returns to the Evertree realm for another adventure. Sordwin has all the features that made Evertree Inn so great, only (for the most part) bigger and better. Evertree Inn was set mostly in a single building; Sordwin serves up a whole island to explore, with a town full of homes, shops, and public buildings to visit and dozens of residents to interrogate or investigate. The new characters are just as vivid and intriguing, and the close relationships among the townsfolk add a poignant dimension of dramatic complexity that Evertree Inn, in which most of the characters were strangers to each other, largely lacked. If the PC was in a romantic relationship at the end of Evertree Inn, their love interest can join them on the voyage to Sordwin, and they’re worked so seamlessly into the narrative that you could almost forget they weren’t meant inevitably as a part of the story all along. I found Sordwin’s mystery fairer to the reader, more poignant, and more satisfying than that of its predecessor - and once again, there’s far more going on than can be uncovered in a single playthrough.
Sordwin isn’t quite perfect - there are moments where Baylay seems a little less in control of his narrative than he generally was in Evertree Inn, where the PC suddenly knows something about the case the player wasn’t privy to them actually learning. It happens only a couple times, and stands out because otherwise the game is so elegantly constructed.
Sordwin is one of the highest-rated ChoiceScript games ever, and for good reason. It’s the strongest entry so far in a series that deserves every bit of the praise it gets.
24 Likes
The Magician’s Workshop
The year is 1512; the place, Florence. You are the prototypical Renaissance person: one of three assistants to a master artist, inventor, and magician. You can paint a fresco that shimmers with actual life, turn water into wine, and glean the very thoughts from the minds of the people around you. A party to celebrate the elite Medici family’s return from exile to power should have been a moment of triumph for you, as one of the Master’s closest associates - especially when the man himself fails to show, but you and your fellow assistants pull off your act without a hitch. But when a messenger arrives with the news that the Master’s body has been discovered in the river under mysterious circumstances, there’s no time to rest on your laurels. As the Master’s secrets, great and small, come to light, your future hangs in the balance. Are you worthy to step into the Master’s shoes as head of the workshop? Is that really even what you want?
I knew when I sat down to read a game by Kate Heartfield that I was in for a treat, and the worst thing I could possibly say about The Magician’s Workshop is that it merely met my very high expectations, without exceeding them.
To my surprise, there was very little in the game about trying to solve the mystery of the Master’s death, but I quickly found I didn’t mind all that much, since I was so absorbed by the details of carrying on his work. Almost immediately, the question arose which of my fellow assistants or me would be chosen by the city’s powerful guild as the new Master - or whether it might be possible to work together. There were other people around the worshop - models, apprentices - to take into account. There were major commissions the Master had accepted - many from actual historical figures - without telling any of us, and not enough time to complete them all. And just when we were starting to feel we were getting back on top of things after the chaos of losing our master, evidence began to accumulate of one final secret commission, the most sinister one of all.
This is a well-researched, well-written, well-constructed game. There are extremely few anachronisms (that aren’t intentional to the alt-history worldbuilding) or typos. There were no obvious continuity issues, although there were one or two occasions when I failed a check I assumed I would pass and don’t know what I could have possibly done differently. I enjoyed getting to develop a variety of magical and practical skills, and to develop my PC’s character, with a special emphasis on social skills and the life of the mind. (Huge bonus points to Heartfield for making Faith/Humanism work as an opposed stat reflective of the trends in Renaissance-era thought, without ever treating religious belief as inherently inimical to reason or progress.) If I had one quibble, it’s that the prose was a little too gamey at times: I was very conscious of the way Heartfield phrased each option to make it clear which stat(s) it would test, which often made it a little easier to get a positive outcome, but at the expense of my immersion in the story.
Okay, maybe two quibbles. Romance isn’t a major component of this game, which is fine, but it was a little annoying how often the game asked if I might be attracted to someone or other, compared to the actual amount of interaction I had with the person I chose. This is one of those games that try to be as inclusive as possible, not by allowing you to define your sexuality however you like but by refusing to define it at all, which often has the unfortunate effect of feeling as if the game won’t let me be who I am (or who I want my character to be). I played this time as a man, Ottaviano, who was, in my mind, romantically interested in women (only). There was one choice that asked about my character’s possible romantic interest in his longtime best friend, Konrad. Ottaviano’s mother, I was told, had often hinted that she could envision his friendship with Konrad becoming something more - but how did Ottaviano himself feel? There were four options, two variants of “Yes, I am interested” and two that basically boiled down to “Not interested, because I want something more exciting than a romance with an old friend.” I decided to have Ottaviano pursue a romance with one of his colleagues, Fiametta, and I think I had to confirm on no fewer than three occasions that it wasn’t actually his other colleague, Piero, that he wanted (or maybe even both). There was no option to play Ottaviano as a person who didn’t have to ask himself if he might be interested in Konrad or Piero, because Konrad and Piero are simply not elements of the set of romance-shaped objects in his mind. For me, it was merely an obstacle to immersion while roleplaying a character - and the thought of a guy getting pestered by his mother to ask out his best friend because he can’t come out to her as straight is a little funny. But imagine a lesbian reader playing a self-insert, being constantly questioned not just by other characters but by the game itself if she might actually rather be with a man, and suddenly it feels pretty icky.
To be fair, that last paragraph was more a criticism of a certain trend in game design than anything specific to The Magician’s Workshop, which I want to say again is a delightful game that is well worth your time. Heartfield seems more focused on novels than interactive fiction these days, though her participation in Stewart Baker’s Nebula-winning 2024 project A Death in Hyperspace gives me hope CoG hasn’t seen the last of her. I want many, many more games that are this smart and elegant and fun.
18 Likes
This was something I enjoyed a lot about the game - on looking at the stat page at the start, it immediately made it clear to me that it would feel grounded in the era.
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Yay, another review! It’s been a while since you posted one; I missed reading them! 
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Thank you for your kind words!
In addition to posting reviews here, I write for an IF zine called ChoiceBeat, where I review at least one ChoiceScript game in every issue. These reviews are more comprehensive and based on multiple playthroughs, unlike the reviews I post here which are often based on a single playthrough. When you don’t see a new review here for a while, it’s probably because I’ve been immersing myself in a game for ChoiceBeat. In this case it was a whole series, and I played through it nine times! I also did some beta testing for the new material for Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven. Hence the long absence. 
13 Likes
Choice of the Dragon
originally posted on Reddit in 2021, and reproduced here without modification
It was ten years ago this December that I discovered Choice of Games. Back then there were only four official titles and about a dozen Hosted Games. Most of the latter were short and puzzle-based, rather than story-based; I played them and enjoyed them, but it was the four official titles I kept coming back to over and over. The first-ever CoG game, Dan Fabulich and Adam Strong-Morse’s Choice of the Dragon, wasn’t my favorite of the four, but I still lost count of how many times I played it.
Recently, I played Choice of the Dragon for the first time in years, curious to see how this small early effort would hold up in an era of longer and more complex ChoiceScript games. Compared to the delectable buffet of possibilities served up by the likes of The Play’s the Thing, A Kiss from Death, or The Vampire Regent, Dragon is merely a snack - but I’m pleased to report that it’s as tasty a snack as ever.
This is just such a fun game to play. The narrative voice has a dry self-awareness, in a way I don’t believe I’ve seen attempted in any other game of this kind, and the writing’s strong enough to pull it off without descending into bathos or mockery. It takes place in a standard medieval-Europeanish fantasy setting and hits on all the tropes you’d expect, but with an affectionate wink that keeps them from feeling stale. I’m not a big fan of the Honor/Cunning continuum stat - why should my dragon get dumber just because they kept their word? - but the utterly delightful Disdain/Vigilance stat (which measures whether the dragon is fiercely sensitive to insults or rises above such trifles) makes up for it.
After all these years, Choice of the Dragon holds its own as a great little game. More than a mere historical curiosity, it deserves to be played and enjoyed for a long time to come.
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This was one of the first titles I played! Man, those were good times. I need to go back and replay it, but I remember having a blast.
Yep, this is it, exactly!
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It was my first too. Short but sweet!
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I love that threatening the narrator is kinda meta. I’m a bit of a minmaxer in these games and you can get so much free brutality just by being mean to the poor narrator.
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Werewolves: Haven Rising
Occasionally, I see someone on this forum claim that a certain non-interactive work of art would make a great interactive novel - and usually, I disagree. Although there have certainly been cases of adaptation between interactive and non-interactive narratives - including some very good ones, like Elena Hearty’s Donor and a still-unpublished novel by a Heart’s Choice author that essentially takes a particular route through the game as a starting point to continue developing the world and characters. But every artistic medium has its own strengths and weaknesses, and some stories just work better than others with the reader driving the action. With great non-interactive stories, there’s often a feeling of inevitability that settles over the ending: even if it didn’t feel that way as we watched it all unfold, it’s clear that this destination was the whole point of the journey. With the best interactive fiction, it’s the journey that’s the point. Non-interactive fiction (there really should be a term for that - passive fiction? static fiction? disengaged fiction? fiction accomplie?) is about the consequences of our choices. Interactive fiction is about the act of choosing.
Jeffrey Dean knows this. I don’t know if he knows that he knows this. I just know that he is one of those IF writers who seem to understand exactly what this medium is good for.
Werewolves: Haven Rising wasn’t Dean’s first venture into interactive storytelling, but it was more ambitious than his “Road Less Traveled” gamebook series - and yet he created a richly complex narrative that flows so smoothly and logically it feels effortless. The story is set several decades after an internecine conflict between humans and werewolves ended with the relatively few remaining werewolves granted limited freedom in a ruined, abandoned city under military supervision. The PC, one of a small number of young wolves born after the relocation, has heard stories of how things used to be, but this is the only life they’ve known, and it’s not such a bad one - until they sneak onto the military base with some friends and discover a secret so horrible that they know immediately that nothing can ever be the same again.
Although it’s usually referred to casually as “Werewolves,” the series that begins with Haven Rising is more properly known as “Claw, Shadow, and Sage,” a name that indicates the three broad possibilities that lie before the PC: to fight an oppressive system openly and with as much violence as necessary; to surveil from the shadows and infiltrate and undermine; or to prioritize reasoned discourse, civility, and peaceful resolutions whenever possible. Of course, there’s plenty of scope for nuance within these three broad categories, and it’s possible to develop skills and alliances in more than one area. There are some thrilling action sequences, but there’s also a lot of discussion and debate. What makes this game so compelling is that Dean makes no character an obvious mouthpiece for his own views. Everyone has a good point to make - the brutish warmonger, the peaceable elder, the conflicted young intellectual, the coward, heck, even the oppressors - and everyone’s worldview is tested to the limits, to the point where the cracks are clearly visible in everyone’s logic. It’s the kind of game that lends itself well to real character development: I’ve played before as a character who was all claw and one who was all sage, but this time I played as a character who was forthright, clever, and a believer in the rule of law, who found himself thinking there might be a time and a place for deceit and violence after all, and I enjoyed navigating him through the development of a more complex worldview.
Dean’s prose is excellent, and his setting is thoughtfully constructed and full of excellent characters - some you will love and others you will hate, but either way you’ll want to know what they’re going to do next. There are several possibilities for romance, and the love scenes, spicy or otherwise, are written with tenderness, desperation, and individuality.
There’s a reason this series is one of the most popular and highest rated of ChoiceScript games, and that reason is that it succeeds in everything it sets out to do. It challenges us, it makes us care, it makes us think deeply about the politics of a fictional world in a way that illuminates real-world issues without getting preachy. If you haven’t played Haven Rising yet, please do give it a try - I promise you’re in for something amazing.
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Firstly, thank you for the reviews, I love them!
That’s a good point that we don’t really have a phrase beyond “non-interactive fiction.” Of the suggested, static fiction might work, but “fiction accomplie” made me laugh because I mis-read it as “fiction accomplice.” Ah, yes, I’m this fiction’s accomplice… It’s just me and this book against the world, and together we’re going to save the Rose Bride or boop Cthulhu on the nose or what have you. 
A variety of perspectives and pursued paths to a better life is great! Your review makes me more interested in playing the game. Does it get very depressing in the game though? Like, sometimes when authors/devs present multiple methods to tackle oppression and the flaws in those methods, there’s also a nihilistic throwing up of hands, like because no method works perfectly, it’s better to do nothing. Like a smug sense of superiority for not being vulnerable and trying. Such storytelling leaves me depressed, so I like to avoid it.
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Thank you for reading!
“Static fiction” is what I’ve been calling it in my head for a long time now, and that would be my preference as long as everyone understands that it refers exclusively to the fact that the narrative is entirely author-directed and meant to be experienced a particular way, and has nothing to do with the energy of the plot or quality of the character arcs. (Static fiction characters are necessarily often more dynamic than IF characters!)
I do think you should give the Claw, Shadow, and Sage series a try. It’s bleak at times in a genre sense - a story about an oppressed class in a dystopian world isn’t going to be super cheerful - but I wouldn’t say it’s bleak in its choices. If I had to put into words what I think Dean is trying to say about resisting oppression, it’s partly that there’s no perfect method that’s guaranteed to work in every case, but also that there are multiple methods that can be used to accomplish these goals and that it takes a variety of methods and variety of perspectives to make progress, even if that involves a lot of butting heads on the way to some kind of consensus. The series isn’t finished yet, so I can’t say how happy an ending will actually be possible, but the three games we have so far are full of hope, moments of triumph, and lighter moments that remind the character that life and freedom are worth fighting for, even when there are serious setbacks along the way as well.
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Hey, if it’s not bleak, I’ll take it! Added to my Steam wishlist. Thanks again for the great review! 
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The Sons of the Cherry
originally posted on Reddit
I know I must have played The Sons of the Cherry back in 2012, when it was first released under the Hosted Games label, but when I went to play it again this morning, I realized I couldn’t remember anything about it. I realize now that I probably just lost interest when I kept getting endings that went nowhere.
If you make the choices author Alex Livingston obviously wants you to make, you’ll eventually get to read a couple of interesting scenes. I’d call it railroading, but you don’t actually have to ride the train to the end of the line. You can get off any time you like - it’s just that the train goes on without you and takes the story with it. “Choose a side or go it alone in the secret war for the soul of the new nation,” the publisher’s description reads, and technically this is true - but if you choose to go it alone, the game ends abruptly, in one case spitting you right out onto the “rate this game” page without even a paragraph to wrap things up. There are also choices that allow the story to advance, but in a way so shabbily thrown-together it’s hardly an improvement. I’m not talking about the minor continuity errors that often slip into a game, especially when the player makes an unusual series of choices. I’m talking about my PC staring down at George Washington’s corpse, when there was no reason in the text up to that point for Washington to be dead.
It’s especially frustrating, because the parts of the game that actually work are done rather well. The character-establishing questions are pretty silly (fortunately, there are only four), and the stats seem to be labeled backwards, but once the plot really gets going, the choices you’ve made really shape, in more or less subtle ways, how the character sees the world. Even if you make all the “right” choices, however, it still ends abruptly, just as it seems that things are about to get really exciting. If I didn’t know better, I’d assume that what I’d just played was the unfinished opening chapter of a game, and I’d be excited to play that game someday.
As a finished, published game, unfortunately, The Sons of the Cherry is just embarrassing. (It was created as part of a larger project, “Waking Cassandra,” involving works across a variety of media, but that project seems to have been abandoned years ago.) You can play the whole thing for free and I don’t think it could possibly take more than half an hour, so if you’re at all intrigued, go for it I guess. Otherwise, there’s no reason to play this game unless you’re an obsessive CoG completist.
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So, You’re Possessed!
You’re not the kind of person anyone would have pegged as a crucial participant in a conflict spanning multiple realms of reality. You’re a rather unprepossessing young adult, sharing an apartment with your best friend, delivering pizza to pay the bills, wondering if you’ll ever be able to afford to finish college. After your final delivery of the day, you’re looking forward to a relaxing evening with friends, eating junk food and watching movies, but while you’re in the store grabbing snacks on the way to your friend’s place, there’s some kind of explosion - and two otherworldly beings arguing in the rubble. One of them flies straight at you - and before you know it, it’s inside your body and mind. It merges with you, or maybe takes you over, and you’re just along for the ride - unless you can find a way to fight back? Anyway, you’re possessed by a demon now. Welcome to your new life. Remember when your biggest problem in life was cheapskates who gave lousy tips? Don’t you kinda miss it? And why do the various supernatural beings you can’t stop running into keep hinting that there’s something special about you?
So, You’re Possessed!, by Tony R. Smith and Beth Townsend, is a feisty little gem of a game that continually surprises. It’s consistently hilarious, occasionally heartwarming, and sometimes just a little gross. Although the story’s cosmology is more alluded to than spelled out, it’s clear that there’s some real thought and originality put into this wacky escapade. The PC’s relationship with their best friend is central to the story, and their bond (which can turn romantic, but doesn’t have to) is entirely believable as a comfortable, close friendship of long standing. There are some fun action scenes, but witty dialogue is where the game really shines - the banter among the PC, their best friend, their resident demon, and the various allies and enemies they encounter along the way is easily worth the purchase price of the game.
So, You’re Possessed! was intended to be the first game in a series, and although Smith and Townsend did start work on a sequel (Have Human, Will Travel!), Townsend hasn’t been to the forum to post an update since 2023, so although it doesn’t seem to have been officially discontinued, the chances of it actually coming out one day don’t look great at this point - but even if it never comes out, I’m not sorry I played this. I just had so much fun with it - and although it does end on a cliffhanger, I think it also works pretty well as an ambiguous, “and so we live to fight another day” sort of ending, if you don’t mind that kind of thing.
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