Good review @AletheiaKnights. I think I’ll check out A Squire’s Tale as I enjoy shorter, branchy, more whimsical stories a lot of the time. I’ll keep in mind it may have a few wrinkles here and there
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Faerie’s Bargain: The Price of Business
originally posted on Reddit
[This review was originally posted shortly after the game was released, and the text reflects that fact. I have posted it unmodified.]
In Faerie’s Bargain: The Price of Business, Trip Galey has embarked on a magnificent undertaking, a glorious feast of language and imagery, a twisting of history and folklore in a way that testifies to boundless creativity, lucid erudition, and deep love. And for the most part, he succeeds.
For the most part.
There’s a good plot and some intriguing characters, but this game’s strengths lie in the worldbuilding and the sheer ecstasy of Galey’s enchanting prose. If you think of fairy tales as charming little stories about people who live happily ever after, you’re in for a rude awakening here: Galey’s Victorian London - both the mundane city Above and the magical one Below - is driven by some harsh realities, foremost among them greed. Above, factory owners exploit prepubescent laborers; Below, the ruthless goblins and fey of European folklore - the kind of folk who go around tricking desperate mortals out of their firstborns - barter and haggle over such commodities as second chances, true love’s kisses, and strokes of genius. It’s a world by turns comedic, disturbing, and delightful; and it’s always, always surprising.
And Galey has the literary gifts to do it justice. Heaven and earth, that man can write. To say his prose is lush and sensuous, poetic, doesn’t begin to do it justice. He occasionally writes a sentence so beautiful it’ll take your breath away, if you’re the kind of person whose breath gets taken away by a beautiful sentence, and yet somehow, when I look back, it’s not the words that come to me but a flutter of sensations: the whisper of silk, the ticking of a clock, the moist odor of roses and pollution, the glimmer of mirrors and the glitter of gold. And it’s not simply the setting that’s brought to life by the vivid imagery; the PC is, too, as descriptions and metaphors often vary somewhat depending on the background you’ve chosen for your character: where the hunter stalks, the tailor threads their way through.
There’s wordplay, too. Just consider these two sentences: “All around you, other merchants are doing likewise, and you join a growing stream of your fellow fey-folk, flowing without knowing precisely where you are headed. Each holds in their hand a coin, and the subtle tug of it guides you as like calls to like, a gathering hoard.” It could almost lull you to sleep, all that alliteration and growing, flowing, knowing, and then suddenly there’s “headed” where it could have been “going,” and it washes over you like the breaking of a spell. Then, there’s that “hoard” - an error, surely? since of course a mass of people on the move is a “horde.” But wait, they’re being guided to their destination by enchanted coins, and it’s really the coins that are being drawn away together, which would make them, in fact, a hoard of sorts, and ye gods this is brilliant, brilliant!
Ironically, when it comes to the PC’s actions, Galey often seems inclined to tell rather than show. I would choose to have my PC respond to a slight with a devastating witticism, say, and the next page would tell me how my verbal sparring partner responded to his quip, without actually telling me what the quip was. Or I would choose to have him advance his case in an argument by producing evidence, after which I would be informed, without ever being told what the evidence was, whether the listeners found it persuasive. Perhaps it would have bothered me less in a game that didn’t so often sparkle with intelligence and wit, or if it had happened only once or twice, but here I always felt just a tiny bit cheated, especially when it happened several times.
Also, I would be remiss at this time not to point out that this game has a lot of continuity issues. For starters, the game is often a bit sloppy about keeping up with what the PC knows or doesn’t know at any given time. It’s subtle enough that I wasn’t even always sure when it was happening, whether the fault was in my attention or comprehension or whether a thing sounded unfamiliar because I really hadn’t ever seen it mentioned before, but the cumulative effect often had me feeling as if I were trying to follow a movie I’d missed the first twenty minutes of. This kind of error is the hardest to document and report, especially when there’s so much of it. Other continuity errors were far more obtrusive (making a choice that brought me right back to the beginning of the conversation I’d just finished), even game-breaking (as in someone being dead who wasn’t supposed to be, then turning up alive in the next chapter), but I expect those to be corrected quickly. They may well be working on them this very minute. (Okay, probably not literally this very minute, but only because I’m a weirdsmobile who writes reviews in the middle of the night.)
On the strength of my conviction that the most grievous errors will be mended quickly, I’m going to recommend that you buy this game. Personally, I wouldn’t regret buying it even if that update never came - that’s how much I love this game for what it does right. The world of Faerie’s Bargain is a place I just want to be able to visit again and again.
P.S. Whatever goblin is out there supplying Trip Galey with bottles of creative inspiration should feel free to send me a PM. I’m sure there’s a little corner of my soul I could spare in trade.
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Fatehaven
Devon Connell is best known as the author of the popular, albeit controversial, Samurai of Hyuga series - but before there was Hyuga, there was Fatehaven.
As a young man or woman coming of age in the medieval-Europeanesque land of Delmacia, you’ve led a pretty ordinary life: helping out at home, attending religious services every Sunday, flirting with other young people and dreaming about what the future has in store. Helping out a wounded stranger - and a rather attractive one, at that - was an exciting change of pace. You had no idea that stranger was a powerful mage. You never would have guessed that they would awaken your own elemental affinity and start secretly training you in the ways of magic. And not in your wildest nightmares would you have imagined that you would soon be drawn into a violent conflict with the Church’s zealous crusaders determined to stamp out magic in the name of the Fates.
I didn’t know much about Fatehaven when I started to play; like many older games, it has a short blurb without much detail. I like elemental magic, though, so I figured I would enjoy it - and for the most part, I did. It’s not particularly polished, but it’s entertaining, and there are some understated scenes involving the consequences of violence that are almost devastating. Connell’s narrative voice is distinguished by a quirky, edgy sense of humor; there are meta asides and anachronistic quips and a lot of sexual innuendo. A little of that kind of thing goes a long way, and I can’t help wishing he’d dialed it back a notch, but for the most part it worked for me. No, it’s generally not the most mature or sophisticated humor, but it feels about right for a seventeen-year-old protagonist.
Unfortunately, however, my playthrough was unsatisfactory. It’s not just that my character died halfway through; I’ve thoroughly enjoyed games before despite getting a “bad” ending. But I had just played through a somewhat confusing action scene and was looking forward to an explanation for some of what had happened, only to die before one was offered, without knowing even in a general sense how the ending I got was the consequence of my choices or what I could have done differently. It also annoyed me that the game opened in medias res with my character and her presumed love interest being chased by a dragon, before flashing back to simpler times - but my character was able to die before the story caught up to that opening point. That’s some pretty sloppy game design.
I’m sure I’ll give Fatehaven another try someday and see if I can get a better ending. It’s not a bad game by any means. But if you’re looking for elemental magic or a high fantasy quest, you can very easily do better.
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Whoa whoa whoa.
If you died before the big twist, I’d urge you to go back and give it another try sooner rather than later. 
It ends up doing something much more distinctive than anything you’ve included in your review. A second readthrough would probably showcase how railroady the game actually is, but it would be worth it to get to the proper ending.
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That actually doesn’t surprise me, somehow.
I always worry when I post my reviews here, most of which are based on a single playthrough, that I’m necessarily selling some of the games short. (This is much, much less of a concern when I write for ChoiceBeat, since those reviews are based on multiple playthroughs.) I don’t know when I’ll get back to Fatehaven, but thank you for putting me (and my, uh, legions of readers) on notice that there’s more going on than my experience may have indicated.
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The Fernweh Saga: Book One
EXT. HIGHWAY - EVENING - AERIAL VIEW. Ominous music plays as a lone car follows the curves of the road through a vast dark forest.
Okay, The Fernweh Saga isn’t a film, so it actually opens inside the car, with a love ballad playing over the radio between fits of static. But when the car breaks down just outside of the tiny municipality of Fernweh, the stage couldn’t be more perfectly set for a tale of small-town spookiness. The setup is so perfect it might be almost cozy … if it weren’t so eerie.
You were born in Fernweh and spent your childhood there, but you haven’t been back since your early teens, when your parents died and your grandfather sent you away. Now that your grandfather is dead, it falls to you to settle his affairs. You and your friend B (Beckett or Becca; as with all of the potential love interests, their gender is determined by the player), who comes along for moral support, intended to stay only a day or two, but the mechanic says it will be nearly a week before your car is ready. At first, it’s not so bad. The bed and breakfast where you’re staying is now under the management of your onetime neighbor and playmate S (Silas or Sofia) and their mother. When your agenda requires you to drop by the police station, you discover your childhood best friend J (James or Jane) works there as a detective. Even your old rival R (Reese or Ruby), the scion of Fernweh’s most prominent family, is still there, and they’ve grown up rather charming, especially if you like style and swagger. But there’s more to Fernweh than happy reunions: J wants to meet with you away from the station to discuss the circumstances of your grandfather’s death, not all of which made it into the official report. A distraught father shows up at a memorial event for your grandfather to report his teenage son missing. Soon you and your friends, both old and new, are joining midnight search parties, meeting in the diner for strategy sessions, and putting the key ring your grandfather left you to good use as you delve into the secrets of the man you once believed you knew.
It was inevitable that the first (and so far only) volume of Aelsa Trevelyan’s Fernweh Saga would remind me of nothing so much as Jim Dattilo’s Out for Blood, but although the similarities are undeniable (from a protagonist whose car breaks down just outside the small town to which they’re returning after the death of an estranged grandfather, to an organized search for a missing teenage boy), Fernweh is much more tauntingly enigmatic. Likewise, the wooded setting, eccentric townsfolk, and hints of layered secrets will feel familiarly uncanny to fans of Twin Peaks (and there’s a certain extended dream sequence halfway through that’s so Lynchian I could almost hear some unwritten Badalamenti composition droning in the background), but ultimately Fernweh is sui generis. Every time I thought I was starting to understand what was really going on, I was mostly wrong. Since this is intended as a series opener, Trevelyan doesn’t clear up the mystery in the end - there are answers, but they raise more questions than they resolve - but whatever is going on in Fernweh is legitimately spooky and downright weird.
Relationships with other characters are a major aspect of Fernweh, although I found them less satisfying than the mystery elements. All four of the PC’s frequent companions can be romanced, and J and R can be romanced as a throuple, but it’s all slow-burn so far, at least on the route I played. That’s not a problem in itself - the PC has known most of these characters as adults for all of a week, and I prefer romance that takes time to develop. Unfortunately, much of the space that could be devoted to developing the ROs as complex and interesting characters goes instead to awkward exchanges and either endlessly looking at each other or studiously avoiding eye contact, often in monumentally inappropriate situations. (There’s a reason the way the body responds to threats isn’t called the fight-or-flirt response.) But although the characters were less developed than I would have preferred, they were pleasant enough, with moments of genuinely winsome banter, and I hope they’ll become more compelling as the series continues.
What disappointed me most about Fernweh was the quality of the writing. It’s not awful - Trevelyan even manages a nifty turn of phrase here and there - but it’s very amateurish. Although it’s written in second person, the narration frequently touches upon what other people are thinking or feeling that the PC couldn’t directly know, breaking the immersion of the limited perspective. Trevelyan has a tendency to overexplain, not only in the sense of telling rather than showing, but also in ways that rather insult the reader’s intelligence. She delves into such mysteries as why people drink coffee in the morning; why a medical office that handles corpses might have a utilitarian interior even if the reception area decor is a little more creative; and why a person might ask a friend they saw suffer a severe injury the previous evening, who is now walking around with a heavily bandaged arm, how they’re feeling today. As for the copyediting … it seems, based on a note at the end of the game, to have been done by a personal friend of the author’s, and I don’t want to be unkind, so I’ll just say that I hope Hosted Games insists on hiring a professional when Book Two comes out.
But for all the room there is here for improvement, when Book Two is finished I’ll be buying it not merely as a HG completionist or even as a self-appointed ChoiceScript game reviewer, but as a fan. I want more Fernweh. I want to uncover the town’s secrets, to explore corners I haven’t yet, to find what exactly is going on in the woods, why there’s a server at the diner who’s creepily fascinated with my character, to understand why the [redacted] [redacted] in the end when I tried to [redacted], which actually didn’t surprise me that much because [redacted].
If you’re looking for a spooky story that will leave you haunted, shaking your fist at that cliffhanger but hungry for more, The Fernweh Saga: Book One delivers.
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Love your reviews @AletheiaKnights ! And your own writing is great, I hope you have a WIP?
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Thank you so much!
No, sorry. 
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Starship Adventures
“Absurdist romp aboard a spaceship full of quirky characters, written by a team of ChoiceScript superstars” might be my new favorite bizarrely specific IF genre. Last year, Stewart Baker got together with a bunch of pals, most of them Nebula nominees, to write A Death in Hyperspace, which won this year’s Nebula Award for Game Writing. But nearly a decade before that, Felicity Banks got together with a bunch of pals, most of them up-and-coming Hosted Games authors, to create Starship Adventures. Banks organized the project and wrote three chapters; Adrao and Eric Moser contributed two chapters each; Doctor and Jacic each wrote a chapter; and they all worked together to contrive a coherent plot and unified tone and to make decisions about game design. I’ve worked on betas with Banks and Adrao. I’m a huge fan of Moser’s games, and I’ve enjoyed some of Jacic’s short pieces - but somehow I’d never got around to giving Starship Adventures a try. This week, I rectified that.
Starship Adventures is a brilliant satire of old-timey science fiction tropes. You’re the captain, a daring leader with perfectly styled hair. Your crew consists of a gruff mostly-alien engineer, a surprisingly effectual damsel in distress science officer, an android with a penchant for saving the day in deus ex machina fashion, and some guy named Joe. You travel among worlds populated with brightly colored alien races, dangerous plants, and sentient machines, getting into episodic scrapes that are always neatly resolved by the end of the chapter - but could there be a more sinister plan afoot?
It’s a short and silly game, but it’s worth playing a few times even if you don’t die in the last chapter (which I did), just to explore the outcomes of all the different options, which range from relatively reasonable (attack your enemy with a flamethrower!) to downright ridiculous (attack your enemy with a mop!). If you like Spaceballs or Galaxy Quest or Monty Python, you’ll definitely find a few chuckles here.
Worthy of note is the Special Features section. Casual players may wish to take advantage of the opportunity to modify their stats, while those who are interested in game design will enjoy the commentary, editorial notes, and excerpts from discussions on development issues.
Starship Adventures is sadly underrated, and deserves far more attention than it gets. If you’re in the mood for something funny, or you’re a fan of any of the authors involved, it’s definitely worth a try.
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You’ve just named some of my favourite “silly” shows 
. Thank you for the nice review 
(I think you might actually be the first to review it!)
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If I can convince even one person to play this game, my tragic death - and what happened afterwards - will not have been in vain.
Shoes. They made me into shoes!
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Oh my goodness thank you for this amazing and highly complimentary review! Writing that thing was quite an adventure.
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You did a great job coordinating the project!
Thanks for stopping by - I’m always glad to hear from you. I hope your writing is going well.
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@Felicity_Banks Thank you again for leading us in writing us. That was my first ever published game actually, and I have very fond memories of the entire process. But, I know how much work you put into it!
@AletheiaKnights glad you enjoyed it! It is certainly not a game for everybody, but I am glad that you appreciated the humour!
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