You should be able to click on the button that says “Results.”
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I looked but I can’t see a button that says that. All I see is the voting poll where it says ‘vote now!’. I even used the ‘Find’ function but it’s not there for some reason.
Yeah there’s nothing there other than ‘vote now’. I tried to send a screenshot but it doesn’t work for some reason. Maybe because my account’s new?
Do you mind if ask why you’re interested in the results of the poll, if you’re new to the community and haven’t played any of the games?
I have played a few games like Path of Martial Arts and Triaina Academy (not any of the ones listed here), but I just recently made an account a couple of days ago, so I guess it’s wrong to say I’m completely new. I thought it’d be nice to check out some new games so I wanted to see the polls
Thanks for the help!
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I just tried it and it worked. Thanks! (I’m gonna undo my vote)
There are some great games on this list for sure, but do please note that this is a poll for underrated games, not best games. If you haven’t already played the really popular games, such as Wayhaven Chronicles, Fallen Hero, or Zombie Exodus, be sure to check those out as well.
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Ewwww, light mode.
Yeah, I’ll check them out. Thanks for the recommendations!
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I voted for The Twelve Trials, The Butler Did It and Interstellar Airgap. The Twelve Trials is one of the most underrated HGs in my opinion, with a great mythic Greek Heroes feel. The Butler Did It is among the HGs I consider best in terms of plot, even though I have some issues with how it handles stats. Interstellar Airgap is also quite solid, though not quite reaching the heights of the other two.
Although I think this was one of the best HGs in terms of writing, there are other aspects of it that I really didn’t like and I think it suffers from what feels like a poor compromise of writing a (sort of) regular HG where people can, to a large extent choose the kind of MC they want to play and a more “typical” IF comp entry, where the parameters of the story and the MC or MCs are often more strictly defined.
I’m particularly talking about the fact that a lot of the plot content, including at least half of the possible endings and the apparently most canon oneseem to be dependent on the MC choosing to romance or at least be attracted to a gender-locked RO. If you’re not into guys and generally don’t like playing MCs with a gender/sexual orientation combination different from your own, this means that you will lose out on a lot of potential content, including the apparently most canon ending If you start this HG with the expectation that you can play any kind of MC that you’re allowed to play within the parameters set by the HG without this locking you out of any content except possibly for romantic scenes with ROs who are unavailable to you and your preferences don’t fit with what you have to get those other endings, you’ll likely end up as disappointed as I was when I found what I had to do in order to get those endings.
I think this HG would have been better served by either a) making that particular RO gender selectable so that those of us not into guys would be more tempted to try the path that lead to those particular endings b) Making the MC more preset, not least including them being interested/ into emo vampire guys as much as the writer themselves seemed to be and/or setting narrower parameters for the story, so that this particular attraction/interest is signposted, since the writer clearly intended those issues to be important to the story. I’ll have to admit that I, at least these days, don’t generally enjoy playing MCs who feel to preset, so it could be that this would have lead me to noping out of it in the first place. But I would at least have had more respect for the writer being honest enough to be upfront about this in the first place instead of making it seem like more of a “regular” HG in that sense than it really is.
c) Making it a regular non-interactive book. Just to be clear, this is no slight to the story. The writing itself was top-notch and I could also appreciate the dark plot twist and reveal that came near the end of my so far only playthrough. But I think I would actually have enjoyed and appreciated the level of writing more and with issues that ruined at least part of my enjoyment, if I could just read what it seemed the writer most wanted to write instead of feeling the way that I do now, that I was basically being punished for not playing/reading the story the way the writer wanted it to be read/played.
So to me the execution of this story comes off as a poor compromise of the writer having a story to tell that they(at least for the most part) want to tell in a certain way and trying to make things look more open-ended and inclusive(in terms of player/reader preferences) than they really are. If the writer had either tweaked their ideas a little bit so that more people had been interested in what they were interested in or had been more clear and upfront about their vision in terms of the direction of the plot and the important characters apart from the MC…or even had used the seeds of what could have been a great regular novel or maybe short story and made that book or short story.
Any of those would have been preferable to the way it is now, where it felt like a poor compromise and, compared to its potential, very disappointing.
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This was my problem with the game, too. It’s a good game, but all the ‘good’ endings are locked behind a romance path with a male vampire and I have no interest in that. This really kills the replay value for me, and I’ve still never seen those endings.
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Just to defend this game’s choices a bit here. The layout seen in most COG/HGs is NOT typical of the majority of IF out there where preset protagonists are common and you’re asked to put yourselves in the shoes of someone else and play in that mindset. COG prioritises NOT doing that and playing as yourself if you want to. Both have their pros and cons. One allows for stronger story focus, the other allows for more customisation.
It doesn’t mean this was bad IF at all. COG’s typical format is not the only “correct” choice out there. It certainly doesn’t mean it should have been a book. It just means it was the wrong audience. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if this game was entered into IFComp, it would have won or at least placed very high.
(BTW this is coming from someone who doesn’t tend to play games for their RO’s. I can still appreciate why the choice to make this game the way it was done though.)
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I did actually address the points you just made in my original comment and specifically said that making the MC more explicitly preset was one of the ways that I think this HG would have been better and, I suspect, also more interesting to the IF comp. My point was that it didn’t go far enough in either direction. If it had been made with a explicitly preset or at least preset-ish MC, I could at least certainly respect that and see how it at least made a lot of sense, although I personally, as a general rule, prefer MCs who are not preset.
But the way it is now, you get the impression that you can play any kind of MC you want, within the parameters set by the story, without this locking you out of any significant story content, and certainly without locking you out of any endings. But that impression turns out to be wrong and it felt like this HG was misleading me as a player/reader. I think that it’s important for any IFs that it’s clear about its parameters and ensure that it doesn’t come off as if it’s pretending to be what it’s not, and I don’t really think this HG did that. And that’s why I’d have much preferred it, if it had actually gone all the way and had just made the MC preset(or something to the same effect) and had been explicit about this, instead of it on the surface seeming to be with a reasonably non-preset MC, but with the plot heavily favoring a certain kind of MC. Like I wrote before, the writer obviously had a particular story they wanted to tell and I could see how that particular story could have made a good showing at the IF awards. But why not then be upfront about it and go all the way and make the story with a preset MC or other otherwise more strict parameters that they are upfront about from the onset, instead of making it seem like its more open to any kind of MC than it actually is? Whatever else can be said about the IFs at the IF comp, they are usually quite upfront about what kind of IFs they are, but this IF just doesn’t seem to be like that.
And I said that it could have been a good book, not that it necessarily should have been one. This was one of the three alternative ways it could have been that I think would have been better than the way it is now, but certainly not the only one. It is also partly a compliment to the writing, actually, in the sense that I did enjoy both the level of plotting and writing, and that making it into a regular book instead of an IF would have taken away the frustration I felt with being forced to play/read it a certain way if I wanted it to have any real replay value, including if I wanted to get what was described as the most “canon” ending by the writer.
While I do suspect she underestimated the problems with that approach, hearing that this may have been an effect intended by the writer, was interesting to hear and an interesting perspective. Do you think you could expand on that a bit more, because it would be interesting to hear more about this?
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I do think the bait-and-switch with the PC’s role, preset-ness, and the unexpected restrictiveness about how to achieve “good” endings is intentional and is part of the themes the author was exploring around interactive narrative. I’m not sure that making a more clearly preset player character would have strengthened those themes, nor would it being a book instead of a game - for me it works because it’s exploring ideas about interactivity through an interactive medium.
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