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.