Yep, allowing the player to toggle it off would help a lot
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Perhaps I’ll just have the choice “Something seems off about these stats…” with an explanation and an option to toggle inflation off?
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Sounds good to me.
Hard agree. The game as is does not allow for trans queer joy.
I really enjoyed this game at first, but the current trans experience in it is a disappointing slide into lifelong closeting. When the game asked how I felt about my beard if the shtetl erroneously knew me as a man, or if I wanted to experiment with presentation as a tumtum, or etc, I was excited for a possibility of actually transitioning. The game keeps hinting that the shtetl would never allow it and it could only happen in larger cities (oof), so I ran away to Lublin, where my character who knew she was woman and chose that she wanted to present as one happily enrolled in yeshiva and kept living as a man indefinitely. That just felt bad, and I spent a few runs trying to figure out what secret flag I needed to hit to convince the game I really did want to transition or even just be allowed to live openly as a tumtum. (I do like that you can be trans and say you don’t want to change how you present, but currently your only options are that or… never changing anything anyway, I guess.)
And having to live a secret tumtum with no possibility of changing that felt so much worse than being socially recognized as one, even if that would be more limiting. This doesn’t feel like a hopeful/progressive change at all.
It also stung that I couldn’t tell Basha or Moysheh regardless of why I wanted to or thought they might react. If they were genuinely interested, I as a trans person wanted to know that they weren’t only interested in a misconception of me and that they wouldn’t be upset or angry to find out later, or expect me to pretend for their sake. I also fully expected that “reveal something shocking about myself” would include at least some option to tell them that I wasn’t what the matchmaker was selling me as.
And having your mother try to steer the conversation away from you being a tumtum and having no way to say you don’t want it to be treated like a shameful secret… oof. I hated only being able to pick that I wasn’t going to tell them.
Ideally I’d like the option to be intersex and trans—you can’t say that you think your family picked the wrong option to raise you as—but I really, really hope some options to not keep your gender a secret forever are added.
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Hey everyone im playing Google play store version on android and i keep having my game restart. Its happened several times. I have reached chapter 2 and i close the app, come back to it later and the game has restarted. Anyone else having this issue?
The game jumping back to the beginning of the chapter usually happens when it receives an update, but a full restart, that’s new
I think a decent in-between could be an initial somewhat negative and/or confused response, but coming around to it in whatever manner that looks like for certain characters. Not all have to be immediately on board, no? And some may have negative reactions but out of fear for how you will be able to live authentically in the world you inhabit; not rejecting you exactly, but communicating they think you should try to live the lie for now/indefinitely anyhow. For instance, I’ve seen a historical fiction where the mother essentially had a breakdown when she found out the truth and told her child she must not dress in feminine clothing again for the time being, but only due to desperately trying to protect her from dire consequences (this was a political drama, so execution definitely could’ve been on the table). She also secretly had a painting of her daughter made, so that the daughter can hold onto it and know her mother loves her as she is when it gets hard. It doesn’t have to be either or.
Conflict with these sorts of matters takes many forms. Insisting on don’t ask don’t tell but otherwise not getting in the way. Not deadnaming/misgendering intentionally, but also dancing around or hesitating having to use pronouns/names in general. Anxiety, ignorant assumptions and not fully knowing what to say in their presence, but sticking up for them when push comes to shove. Some amount of discomfort is natural and realistic in general when confronted with what is not wholly understood and needing to reframe a person’s identity in the mind’s eye–especially if you’ve been using one name and set of pronouns for many years. Even just forgetting/misspeaking and awkwardly correcting oneself makes sense as a point of contention. There is a spectrum as it is with all things.
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Just wanted to pop in and say this game VERY quickly took up a special place in my heart and is absolutely one of my favourite IFs I’ve experienced so far! The writing is beautiful, the research is immaculate and super impressive, and it’s really lovely to see Jewish identity so thoughtfully represented in something for once (stock American Jewish comedy in recent TV media’s fun and all but this tugged my heartstrings). I’m definitely the target audience, with one side of my family coming from a shtetl in Poland in the 1910s lol, but I think the story itself (and the characters, and the narration) are just SO peak it’s the kind of thing everyone should play once. Or several times. I’d meant to join the beta testing but real life got in the way, so I’ve only gotten to the end of one playthrough thus far, but it’s absolutely going to be one of many. Thank you so much for this game.
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Are there any plans to implement the new checkpoint feature that came out a few months ago?
Nice and sad to see im not the only one with the reseting issue
@Sujan_Dhakal Honestly I hadn’t even heard of the checkpoint feature, since I’ve been so heads-down trying to get this thing done! How would you imagine using it here? I almost sort of wish it was just built into the basic UI of the game, so that you could just go back to the beginning of each chapter at the end of that chapter with a convenient button, say. If it’s in the text of the story (and thus in the consciousness of the narrator) it feels like it opens a whole can of worms, like when does the narrator think you should be offered the chance to go back and what, in the world of the story, does going back mean? It sort of makes sense for a game like “Restore, Reflect, Retry” being built around “going back” but I’m trying to imagine retrofitting it onto this kind of game without it being intrusive?
@sade98 @wolf666 I don’t know what’s going on with resetting…I don’t know that much about the implementation of the client. I hope the COG people have an answer for you.
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Jolly good uses the kind of system you’re thinking of, where it’s much more narrative based and you get the chance to replay the chapter multiple times, the checkpoint system I’m talking about has you just asked to save your game at certain points if you want to And then you can choose to jump back to previous points where you saved through the stat screen, implementation itself isn’t too hard
I am not sure if I am stupid or slightly blind, but damn 
now looking at the picture for the face of the game I just realized the human was looking at a golem or in my case a stone that looks like a face when looked closely
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If you’re having issues with the game resetting, please write into support@choiceofgames.com - that’s something we can help you out with better there. (And if you already did, I just got back in after the weekend, so I should follow up with you shortly.)
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I downloaded The Ghost and the Golem today on the Play Store, but every time I leave the app, the game restarts. How do I fix this?
Always best to email support at choiceofgames dot com with issues and give as much detail as possible so we can try to repro issues. On your own though, we usually recommend deleting/reinstalling first.
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What is a Khosid? From the context, it sounds like a future career the narrator is suggesting for my character, but according to my googling, it’s a kind of Hasidic line dance.
“Khosid” is Yiddish for “Hasid.”
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Apologies for going back a week, but I think you may have swung too far in the other direction? Inflated it too much? It was a bit of a surprise when the first choice of the game bumps a stat up to 50. But then in chapter four I fail a check with a skill that’s nearly 70…it ends up feeling like Whose Line, where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.
I don’t know what the “right” answer to this is, though I think a button to uninflate the numbers would be great.
But you know, other than that I love this, I love being able to argue with a narrator, I love the story, I love the painful reality of the setting and mundanity of the fears in a supernatural setting…like, it’s really just a lot of fun. I’m learning so much Yiddish. And it’s really fun to have an option to see your bibliography.
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