Customization: Gender, sexuality, personality, clothing, hair, make-up, etc.
Choices that make for a varied playthough: Alot of games have choices that dont really change how the game plays. Choices that affect your characters path, friends, abilities, etc. are important to make each charater feel different.
An story interesting enough to make me play again: Some stories only warrent one or two playthroughs. Others, ive gone through almost a hunded times.
Games that fit these (in my eyes): Life of a Wizard, Lost Hier.
For example The Lost Heir trilogy does mechanics and choice brilliantly but isn’t the greatest in terms of narrative.
On the other side I love the narrative for Community College Hero but there isn’t as much choice (you basically always get the same ending for the first volume).
Quality of writing. Grammar, varied sentence structure, deep characterizations, well-planned rising and falling actions, etc. I’ll find almost any setting or theme interesting if it’s well-presented.
Many opportunities to personalize my experience. On the most basic level, this means having choices at the bottom of as many pages as possible, but also making sure that those choices have some meaning, even if it’s only a brief reference once or twice. I love little personal details that let me establish who my character is, what she looks like, what languages she speaks, etc. Stuff like eye color, hair color, native language, and such isn’t mandatory, but it definitely gives me more of a connection to my character, and that helps me feel more invested in the story. The choices at the bottom of the page serve the same purpose.
Romance. I know this isn’t too important to a lot of people, but I don’t get to see my orientation represented in the media too often. When I do, the characters usually die horrible deaths. As a result, I tend to read a lot of lesbian romances (I’ve written nearly 100 reviews on Goodreads for them) so I can see that part of myself reflected in the world. All the other parts of myself–age, gender, ethnicity, class–are available in some form (if only because I’m youngish, cis, white and hanging onto middle-class status by my fingernails), but my queerness still rarely sees screen time in anything with a budget bigger than a web series. Seeing a fictional version of myself as the star of her own story in which all aspects of her are seen and accepted…it’s big. The more attention that’s paid to that part, the more seen I feel, because the world desperately wants to pretend that part of me doesn’t exist. Plus, I just like love stories.
ETA: Oo, forgot to add games I thought did all of those things well. I think that romances generally tend to be thinner in CoG games than I’d like (personal preference), but I’d say:
Zombie Exodus: A for quality of writing, A for choices, A for romances
Tin Star: A for quality of writing, A+ for choices, A for the Miss Caraway romance
Creatures Such as We: A+ for quality of writing, A for choices, (?) for romance. The romances were…well, complicated, due to the very nature of the game. It was an exceptional intellectual and emotional experience for me.
Honorable mention for the Alison romance in Psy High. I really appreciated the way that developed.
Really, all of the official CoG games are well-written. Some are better at providing choices than others, but I think only Versus felt like it was a little heavy on the exposition side, and I still enjoyed it. There’s a little more variation with the writing in the Hosted games, but two of my favorites fall under that umbrella, as listed above.
hmm probably quality of writing, you know the writing is good if it’s a genre you don’t normally like(such as tinstar, don’t tend to like westerns much). But also if you have characters you both love, and love to hate, and villains that are understandable and believable(as the phrase goes, villains are the heros of their own plot )
Next I’d say relatable characters/characters that aren’t represented much/at all. I think most sexual orientations are in most games(although I always just pick the same ones, so probs don’t notice much) and for instance I really liked emma from zombie exodus, mental illness isn’t shown too much, plus I just really found her relatable and likable, probably one of my fav characters. And in the ZESH yp you can even play as someone with mental health issues, which is proving to be interesting.
Lastly I’d say replayability, but more specifically if the game gives you the chance to play as multiple archetypes, especially as I have a few set ones I always play as Games that come to mind are tinstar(again ). and life of a wizard.
guess three games that do all well are tinstar( )zombie exodus and life of a wizard. but there’s so many factors, hard to pick just 3 . Like in for rent haunted house, there’s no ROs and no characters I really relate to(but well written ones) but yeah, the characters are well written, it’s really funny and the story as a whole is well written, so I guess they’re just things I go for most of the time.
I may seem strange here, but… Coding. I really enjoy stories with good coding. I get to learn from them yes, but I also enjoy looking at the code and seeing the different ways people do things with CS.
Length. If a CoG or Hosted game is too short that sort of kills it for me. Even if it’s good story wise or it has a great many choices, I like for my characters to have somewhat of a long journey.
Characters. I like characters that feel real. That they respond in certain ways to situations because that’s who they are. Even if you put them somewhere else, they would react as if they were alive.
In depth characters. Like, I honestly don’t care about their gender or whatever (I mean, I’m a straight male and I can romance the hell out of Arthur and Lance in @jeantown’s Guenevre) as long as they seem realistic and have an in-depth personality.
Interesting features. This doesn’t necessarily mean a gripping plot, but at least some action or something. I mean, I love slow descriptions and settings but change the tempo up a bit, right?
Lastly, I think there has to be a feeling of choice-- I love reading books but I like visualizing myself in the characters situations (…I might have a small problem) hence why I’m attracted to CYOA games, especially COG’s ones, since you actually make choices that only only affect how the story develops but what options you can choose and how other characters interact with you, and COG’s games seem to incorporate all of them perfectly.
And I love long games. Like Guenevre is expected to be. And some other WiP’s and Hosted Games (either Life of a Wizard or Hero of Kendrickstone… I mean I think they’re long, from my memory of playing them.)