I don’t really think it’s necessary to dredge up old drama, no.
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I think the issue in Paradox Factor is less philosophical vs power fantasy and more to do with just the pure frustration of it. The frustration is intentional, but in a time travel game where things go wrong, it’s kind of nuts to present the player with a range of choices that restricts any ideas they might have. The frustration is compounded by the simple fact that it’s a game and you end up trying a bunch of different combinations of things - not necessarily to get a good ending but just to “unlock” more options.
I thought at the time about how well the New Game+ aspect of A Kiss from Death worked. Not sure where A Kiss from Death lands in overall rankings but I thought it handled the “try again” mechanic really well.
I think a great example of time travel working extremely well while still exploring difficult decisions was Life is Strange. It’s a little unfair to compare a AAA title like that to a Hosted Games entry, but it illustrates just how difficult it can be to create a time travel experience that isn’t frustrating, conveys the weight of unintended consequences, and is emotionally satisfying.
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I’m going to disagree there. It’s one of those things where it depends on how you look at it. I don’t think I found it frustrating at all. It was more like a puzzle with lots of moving pieces, and in the end you have to come to terms with sometimes there are things you just can’t fix even if you had the power to go back in time. And perhaps there is even some peace in that. I mean how many times have we stopped and thought ,“if only I had have done this instead, would things have turned out better?”
Anyway, to me it had a very butterfly effect type storyline if you’ve ever seen that movie. Events don’t tend to move in isolation, fixing one thing sets different futures in motion for better or worse.
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Oh no, that part totally tracks insofar as playing around with unintended consequences. Butterfly Effect did it and had the luxury of being a non-interactive medium. Even so it still had an absolutely bonkers ending in the original cut where Ashton Kutcher unalives himself in utero - test audiences hated that.
Life is Strange came out a few years after Paradox Factor and it does the same thing but really really really well as a AAA title should be expected to do. The contrast between them helps to highlight the aspects of Paradox Factor that are not flaws but are just … frustrating.
I think the core issue is when your mechanic is “try again” that it’s going to be frustrating if the player is supposed to decide to stop trying. I honestly am not sure I ever actually finished Paradox Factor precisely because by the time I was ready to give up, I wasn’t ready to give up within the context of the story, I was giving up on the game. Alt-F4, uninstall. Mission accomplished, I was persuaded that there were no win conditions.
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I remember when The Gray Painter came out I was so excited. I was reading the wip thread when it was close to publishing and didn’t try the demo because I didn’t want to spoil the experience. The premise was unique and judging by the comments, it was something right up my alley. I didn’t stop until I got the true ending.
Donor is another title I enjoyed a lot. The gender locked protagonist enabled the story to go deeper in some regards. I also could tell the aither was also a programmer/ computer science enthusiast. Ain’t nobody crazy enough to make a blackjack game in choicrscript otherwise xD.
I vibed with Blood for Poppies even though it could use more polishing. The descriptions and plot were enough to aid my imagination to fill in the blanks. I enjoyed the unique plot and the surreal feeling to it.
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I agree with your criticisms. To me Paradox Factor felt like a choice-based IF trying to simulate being a parser-based one. Largely succeeding in that, which is in a way impressive, but also feels kind of pointless, since IF that are actually parser-based will be inherently more suited to puzzles and similar typically “parser-like” elements than choice-based IF, in the same way that some elements are much more inherently suited to choice-based IFs than parser-based ones. And for people like me, who actively dislike the normal parser-IF approach and enjoy choice-based IFs because they allow me to take part in an interactive story game without annoying(to me) elements like the story stopping until(and if) you puzzle out the decision to make to continue the story, it’s like being forcefed what I started reading/playing choice-based IFs in order to get away from.
And, like you I quickly got tired of constantly having to try to puzzle my way to the next step and since I quickly figured out what I assumed was supposed to be the moral of the story/IF, I just wanted the MC to be able to give up and resign himself to his fate(which would have made sense narratively, I think), instead of having to figure out the next step of the puzzle. I prefer that IF allows me to continue the story all the way, instead of stopping it, waiting for me to make a particular decision for my MC, to explore the consequences of the decisions being made all the way. That, to me, is an important part of what makes choice-script IFs fun, taking away that fun, is just frustrating.
You mentioned Life is Strange as an IF(I think) that you think does time travel better than Paradox Factor. I haven’t tried that, but a choice-based IF that I think does time travel much better than Paradox Factor is Stay? There’s a certain element of putting clues together in order to get the kind of outcome(s) you want from your MC there as well, but instead of stopping the narrative while waiting for you take make the “right” decision for your MC, it always allows the consequences of the choices you make for your MC to play out, so you get much more of a story on each attempt to set things aright. This means at least couple of tragic endings for your MC at the beginning, but in the process you learn a lot about the world and can also learn a lot about many of the other important characters and your MC can have some precious happy moments along the way, even when the attempt ends tragically. This meant both that there was enough story and deep enough characters to keep me invested, so that when I eventually found out how to set things aright it was extra fulfilling and that the narrative was fleshed out enough for me to more easily figure out the relevant clues than it was in Paradox Factor. I did also find its more hopeful tone more convincing than what to me often seemed to amount to basically Diabolus ex Machine or at least a systemised Murphy’s Law in Paradox Factor in order for your MC to accept their losses.
It’s interesting though, while I dislike Paradox Factor, its writer, is still my favorite HG/COG writer by far. He’s made the HG that is still my favorite HG/COG, Life of a Wizard and both The Lost Heir series and The Last Wizard are in my list of top 10 HG/COG series and standalones and I quite enjoyed Life of a Space Force Captain as well. But then again, Paradox Factor is quite untypical of him and I do, perhaps not unsurprisingly much prefer him when he leans into the rpg-y vibe of his other HGs.
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Life of a Space Force Captain plays around a little bit with the early decision being revisited later on when it’s contextualized, which is cool. I looked at the reviews of Stay, it seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it game, I wishlisted it.
Life is Strange is masterpiece, and it’s definitely got more in common with CoG titles than other Square Enix games, but it’s still a fully-3D, mocap, VO, all the bells and whistles of a AAA game. It, and the prequel Before the Storm and sort-of-sequel True Colors are really popular on sapphic tumblr for the queer relationships in the games but the storytelling is just fantastic. In the first one the time travel mechanic was carefully orchestrated to lead you towards learning that different decisions had unforeseen consequences and you couldn’t find a perfect path. It had me doubled over and sobbing uncontrollably during a sequence where the choices were clear, unambiguous, and heartbreaking.
There are a few HG/CoG titles that have managed to rip my heart out and stomp on it, like Mage Reborn, FHR, ITFO, and certain endings to Choice of Alexandria - but Life is Strange like, changed me.
Anyway Relics 2 is fun and I love shooting Nazis. More games should have more chances to shoot Nazis.
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Tudor in top 5, nice. I guess I’ll check some of them out to see if they interest me and buy whichever one stands out most. That and reinstall apex patrol.
Fatehaven.
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Doomsday on Demand~ is one of the best for me and same with Tudor Intrigue!
I love how the storyline if the Doomsday on Demand mixed a lot… Especially when we choose different choices, how intricate the details are!!
That’s how all stories are, simple, enigmatic and wonderful, I commend all the authors and who ever helped you!!
Interesting poll for sure
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I cannot recommend Donor or The Gray Painter enough. I played them both immediately after finishing the first playthrough. I needed a good horror/thriller romance-not-quite-romance itch scratched.
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I loved the Grey Painter!
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Oh okay, sorry i genuinely dont know. Ive just vaguely heard there was a bunch of drama but im not active enough to understand what happened. Thanks for the heads up
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Some of those are prolly underrated because of their word count. I usually don’t buy ones that are under 200k words. It sucks having a story end when you start getting invested in it. I imagine other potential customers feel the same.
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A regular novel has about 300 words per page. A 200,000 word novel would be more than 650 pages long. Even if you’re playing an IF where you only see half of that based on your choices, that’s a 300+ page novel! 200k is an arbitrarily high cut-off point, similar to saying “I don’t watch movies that are under 3 hours long”.
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My shortest game, Trial of the Demon Hunter, is 80k words which was considered short even in 2014. I’ve recognized over the years that anything under 200k words might be passed over entirely by readers as “way too short” and have upped my word counts to reflect that. Even though you may not see very much on one playthrough, which is why IF has such a high ceiling for satisfying lengths, 80k words in total is still about 240 pages.
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Yeah I’ve never quite understood this “I won’t read anything under x words”. It’s so variable. If something is designed as short form, you can get a complete story in less words that will just feel like it’s padded and dragged out if made longer to meet an arbitary minimum word count rather than the story ends as it’s just getting good. On the other hand just because something is long or short doesn’t mean it will automatically be a great game.
There’s also a lot more to it than straight word count. A more linear game will feel longer than a branching one of the same word count but have less replayability. Coding efficiency and underlying scripts in the background is huge. Complicated code can make the wordcount longer, but this will not be seen by the reader in terms of length (although it will have other benefits). One of my older games of the same wordcount is not the same as one of my newer games because I’ve gotten better at coding and using things like gosubs and variables where previously you would have had repeated sections of text. (I’ve got one at the moment that if I removed lot of my gosubs and variables in place of repeated text I could easily add many thousands of words that are not going to be noticeable to the reader.) If anything the obsession on wordcount encourages authors to pad the wordcount to make it seem longer than it is via poor coding, and discourages good editing to keep the pacing and story structure relevant and ticking along both of which are pretty cardinal problems in any other type of literature.
Anyway, I know I’m not going to change any minds here that are already made up, but I do wish the massive empysis placed on wordcount would go away in CSGs.
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You’d think these people had never heard of short stories! Some of the greatest works of literature ever written have been just a few pages long and pack as much of a punch as some novels.
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Arbitrarily? I’ve bought 60+ cog/hog titles and have read plenty of reviews on Steam/Android that have similar opinions.
Has there been a customer survey on prefered word counts? What are the word counts of the top 10 or 20 bestselling cog/hog titles?
To your 3 hour movie comparison… I think its more like choosing to watch a Netflix series has 8+ episodes or multiple seasons instead of one that only has 3-4 episodes.
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