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.
8 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
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.
15 Likes
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.
13 Likes