Hello all,

got even more Choice of Games news for you. Hosted games has just released two new titles.

The first of these is "Interstellar Air Gap" Which is a game where you are working to stop an evil empire with catasclysmically powerful super-weapons as you fly through space. Because of the general vibe and the list of possible love interests, This one seems to be heavily inspired by "Star Wars" for better or worse. You have a wide range of options, including joining up with the bad guys.

The Second is, "The horror behind the walls." In this one, you play as an investigator who is very familiar with the paranormal. Nightmares have been driving you towards a facility in Germany where you must use your wits to put an end to the eldritch horror that is trapped inside. This one seems to be in the lines of many an Eldritch horror story and it doesn't mention anything about love interests which is a welcome break as some games tack it on too much.

Just thought I'd share those tidbits with you.

Re: the accessibility issue, Choice of Games are usually receptive to screenreader issues, so you can probably email them about that or create a topic on the forum.

Hello all,

a little bit of news, though I will say right off the bat that I'm not overly excited about this.

After a long break, "Heart's Choice" games have some new content. "A Pirate's Pleasure" which I think I talked about above has a 99 cent upgrade where you get 3 short bonus stories of major characters that appear in the game and you get to see them before the game's action. These bonus stories are not interactive and are just a little something extra you can read if you like. It will be a very long time before I even touch "Heart's Choice" but thought if that was your thing, I'd let you know of the new content.

Also note that those are some of the longest games in the catelog, even taking into account both choice of games and hosted games. Night Road is 800000 words in total, and the other one is over a million.

Bookrage's review of "Choice of the Deathless"

Hello all.

I have another review for you guys as I have just completed "Choice of the Deathless."  which is based on the "Deathless" books by the same author.

genre: This game seems to be a sort of supernatural thriller with courtroom aspects as you play a sort of occult attourney in this story where mortals have largely taken the power from the gods and demons and have become a major force of power in their world after the god wars, which is apparently some sort of conflict. The genre is interesting, but as I will say below, I think some knowledge of the deathless novels is necessary to really enjoy this game.

biases: I love concepts like demonic contracts, occult bargains, and introducing magic into normal professions as a normal course of life. This game has a lot of that.

writing: This story is very unique and weird, but not in a good way for those who simply enjoy playing through a choice of games title but do not have interest or have not read the source material the title is based on. The game thrusts a lot of weird people at you such as bizarre demons and people, and the very odd partners at the firm you work at. Whether it is the jewel-eyed nebukineser or the skin-mask wearing skeleton varkath, you get a lot of unique characters.

Unfortunately, a lot of the uniqueness stops at appearance and many characters are non-entities in themselves with little personality and little depth. They were often set up as enigmatic and mysterious but that was done to the point that there is no real engagement with them that one can feel. All of them largely act the same and very few of them, including the villains really stand out and they tend to be really flat, delivering menacing or edgy lines or simple bits of information with no real bits other than one weird person looks different than some other weird person distinguishing them.

The story also seems to have some technical problems. Between major parts of the story you can change how your character lives. Midway through the story, I wanted to change how much my character slept but that option was no longer an option about 2/3 the way through the story which put a makjor monkey wrench in my plans, though on my first playthrough I did pretty well. Also, I failed to take a deposition from a goddess in the chapter I had to do that in, and yet in the next major part of the story, the story forgot that and said I had succeeded.

The metaphysical stuff they talk about surrounding the craft of your occult job was pretty cool, but again, a lot of it was weirdness for weirdness' sake and tended to muddle the story, making a lot of decisions hard to make informed decisions on (more on that in mechanics)

Even thhough I am an attentive reader, the plot was often hard to follow and has a lot of snowflake syndrome going on.

Mechanics: A definite plus to the mechanics of this game is that, like in "Reckless Space Pirates," the game explains exactly what each stat does and how it affects you. I have no objection to that and really like how a couple of games have done that. However, these stats are not applied well in the actual decision-making of the story. I specialized heavily in "craft" which was my sorcerous powers. Most craft choices, though not all, were fairly straightforward, but this is largely by comparison to other stats. Even with the concept of Craft being very simple, sometimes identifying what was the "craft" decision wasn't quite clear. This was far more true for other stats where it was very hard for me to map stats onto decisions. For having such a laid-out mechanics system, the game is very hard to play despite this.

Romance: Apparently, according to the achievements, there are 3 love interests in the game, I only had a very good relationship with two of them and what I saw wasn't all that great. Of the two I could've gotten romantic with, there wasn't really much difference between them. The game put out information about Wakefield and Chen, but in actual terms of how they behaved, like most characters in the story, they are largely non-entities with poorly-developed characters that are largely pretty cardboard cut-outs. Also, the conversations you could have with teither were rather stale and strained. There really wasn't much to love in either of my love interests and my choice largely came down to blond versus brunette.

Railroading: Depends on how you look at it: The game is largely a set of events in your career bookended by a struggle you are having with a foe in the first chapter and periodically throughout the game. You cannot really change what events you get, but you can choose how to react to them and also how you live between each event.  which provides a decent bit of freedom. An inspection of the achievements and what they mean for me as I have gotten several also tells me  that there are definite moments in the game where you have a lot of choices. There are lots of ways to beat the final bad guy and lots of different happy endings for you to pick from based on your moves throughout the game which are indicated by a number of achievements. I would say that like many choice of games titles, the events are set in stone but what matters is how you react to them, which is more wide-open.

Achievements: many: You aren't getting the massive number of achievements you get in some games,  but this title has several and it really shows that the game has some very significant replay value to get them all. It shows hints at multiple endings and ways to conquer various challenges in the game. I got over a third of them on one playthrough but I'll have to play many more times to get the others as I largely got the easy ones. The game has achievements for conquering various challenges in various ways, defeating the villain in various ways, and reltionship ones as well as doing some pretty hard stuff.

Closing remarks: Please if anyone has read the Deathless books, tell me what I am missing. As I see it right now, this is one of the worst Choice of games titles I've played and I don't know why it has such a very high rating with so many people reviewing it. For me, the writing is muddled, it is often strange just to be strange, one can play strategically but one must often fight the game rather than play with the game because of a lot of confusing applications of mechanics, the characters are flat. On the plus side, the game has some cool weirdness at times, and it has a lot of replay value with a lot of choices if you want to go for those achievements, provided you are willing to struggle with the above flaws.

I don't know if this title will go below my current worst "For Rent: Haunted House," but it very well might.

For those of you who are "Deathless" fans, either with the novels or the choice of games titles, as there are others, please explain where I am wrong.

Hello all,

"Hosted games" has a couple of new releases I thought I'd tell you about as I like to keep you guys aware of what is going on in that line-up.

The first title is "Raiders of the Icepeak Mountains." In this one, you play an adventurer setting up to battle orcish raiders who are coming down from the mountains.  and you go into a dungeon. This game is based on the old books from the 80s and 90s and even employs a dice system. You play as a fighter, cleric, wizard, or rogue

The game has a lot of randomization which means it advertises heavy replay value. Also, for those to whom it matters, it is one of the few titles with pictures.  Your character also levels up and such just like in a traditional rpg, as well as collecting magic items and the like.

The second title is "Temple of Eternal Night" which is an Egyptian mythology/fantasy game. You go out in the desert and start seeing weird things around a forgotten temple. It is then up to you to fight back your nightmares or bring them to life as you also use your talents and power to decide what to do about the society you live in.

Unlike "Icepeak Mountains," this one seems to be more like the traditional "Hosted Games" titles.  and has you dealing with a vaguely menacing Ancient Egyptian mythological setting with a little bit of eldritch thrown in there.

just thought I'd let you guys know of the titles.

Bookrage's "Choice of the Rock Star"

Hello all,

I've just completed "Choice of the Rock Star" and am here to tell you of my impression of it.

Biases: I know very little about Rock and Roll, but I like career management stuff and I like games that make you have to make strategic decisions, which this game does.

genre: This game markets itself as a career management, 80s nostalgia, rock star game, and it delivers exactly what it advertises. You will go from a wannabe rock star possibly to a major legend.

Writing: This game's writing is okay in terms of overall style but there are other things that it has going for it. Firstly, there are some great bits of Nostalgia that are worked in there such as the mention of you having a beeper, and a few other things that put you in the tech of the 80s. You also own a record player. Another thing that is pretty good is that most major sections of the game are opened with a set of quotes from a legendary song. I am so much of a Rock Neophyte, listening to Country music most of the time, that most of these songs were completely new to me, but the effect was still a good one.

On those lines, sometimes your choices were done in lyrics from rock songs too, which were harder for me to grassp, but this only happened a couple of times and was a nice challenge.

Most of the characters, other than Casper are pretty superficial, and there are a lot of them, but few leave an impression  so that is an area where this game largely fails.

Mechanics: The mechanics of this game are pretty straightforward with things like "Style" "musicianship" '"Buzz" "Band Cohesion" and other stuff being pretty easy to track. Where it gets tricky is not in the mechanics themselves, but in the plethora of them as the number of them is enormous. It makes this truly complex game work, though it is still easy to know what you are doing.

Romance: You can get with a groupie or flirt with a few people every now and then, but in terms of an actual love interest, this game doesn't have any of that. I flirted with a groupie at a bar but she had no name, character, or description. If you're looking for a relationship game, look elsewhere.

railroading: After a single playthrough, it is hard to tell. The achievements suggest that the game has a lot of branches and options, but I'm not sure whether those other branches of things I didn't do are brief encounters or major parts of the story that differentiate. As the game is only 74k words, I'm thinking the former but even if that is true, there is a lot of room to do stuff in this story. I also got to make a lot of real choices here such as my bandmates, several decisions about my career, record contracts, and stuff like that, and how I would approach my particular style. I would say that in this game, you are more free than most.

Achievements: Yes! and many! This game has a huge number of a chievements that represent a wide array of things you can do, including dying young, giving up on your dreams and going into insurance, going to rehab, rocking out with a gospel choir, being a master of several kinds of music, and the like. If you want these, you'll have to play this game a lot and I'd say based on my playthrough it is worth it. The achievements also advertise widely differing ways the story can go.

closing remarks: Though "Slammed" is much better than "Choice of the Rock Star" in one way they are very similar. They are both games that I love that are about things I don't normally like or care about. That is definitely to both their credits. "Choice of the Rock Star" has forgettable characters and is a little niche, but it is by no means a bad game and I highly recommend it.

well I love the omnibus app.  makes it super easy to just check what's new after being out for a while, plus the filtering is super useful.
I'm just about to try the first vampire the masquerade title which I've heard great things about.

Hello all,

There's a new Choice of Games title out. "Cliffhanger: Challenger of Tomorrow" has just been relased. In this game, you play as a super-agent-hero-sort who has been empowered by Zeta waves: a mysterious power source both for people and the world in the 1930s. Your Mentor has been replaced by an evil doppelganger who turns you into a fugitive and you must travel all over the world to stop the conspiracy.

The game is described as retro-futuristic and occurs in the 1930s. It seems to have several hallmarks of pulp fiction such as dinosaur-infested islands and super-gadgets along with a wide range of fantastic characters and events that are meant to be sensational, though you also can meet up with historical figures here and there. I'm hoping to enjoy the part of the game where they advertise that you can shoot Hitler in the face. Al Capone also makes an appearance.

This one looks like it'll be fun, and with a 300k word count, it's rather hefty, which should be refreshing.

Hello all!

More releases at this rate means I'll never catch up in my reviews the way things are going. For the thirds straight week in a row. Choice of Games has release a new title on their main line.

This time, it is witchcraft U. In this one, you are a student at a magical university that is opening up to mundanes for th efirst time. Three magical secret societies are clamoring for your support and between classes and relationships, you have a lot of the typical college story stuff.

There's also a wrinkle in it too as you are the heir apparent of a major crime family. You have to balance classes and reltaionships, learn and specialize in a type of magic, and figure out what the heck you are going to do with your criminal inheritance.

This one looks okay but I've seen the set-up before. It'll be a long time before I get to it but it looks like it might be fun.

if any of you try it, let me know how it is.

Bookrage's review of "Nola is Burning"

Hello all,

It has been a while since I have reviewed a game but I have just completed "Nola is burning" and have a bit to share on it.

Biases: I like dark stuff though my knowledge of gangster stuff is pretty limited so I was often confused temporarily by this one. I like dark stuff and the crime aspect was fun.

Genre: One of the best or worst aspects of this game is the genre that it breaks. Although quite a bit of it is solid gangland action though often delivered with a bit of snark, some parts of the story, such as the climax and the end of the story that I got were just plain goofy and the achievements that say things that can happen all over the story are very weird and have a very wide range of what sort of stories this game can apparently tell.

Writing: This game has a rather dark aspect, with a lot of violence, references to abuse, and general rather bitter views of the world around you. A lot of times, this is delivered with quite a bit of snark and you get a lot of that throughout the story. However, the game often breaks tone with parts of the story that come out of left field and either become silly through their lack of realism or just they break the tone with too much humor. If you want a story that is a bit chaotic without that necesarily being a bad thing, this is a story for you as some parts of the story, such as when I rescued El, and what happened after I escaped New Orleans were fun but very odd and rather out of keeping with the story, though the weirdness hadn't started there as I got something in the previous chapter that was weirder.

Characters in the story have a lot of life and quirkiness to them, from the batty old lady Dragon to several people you meet while trying to rescue the Bull's love as the story goes on. Most characters have something memorable about them, from the junkie priest to the no-nonsense Bull to the sneaky weasel of a detective.

Also, although there will be more on this below, decisions you make even early in the story are referenced frequently and consistently throughout the entirety of the story, and some things I did early in the story had a real butterfly effect later, so it reallyd oes feel like your adventure.

mechanics: Like several of the other titles released in this part of Choice of Games' history, mechanics are clearly explained and are defined directly on the stats page, making it easy to know what your stats mean. Mapping them onto the game can be a bit more difficult. I had a tough time realizing when my "respect" stat came into play and made quite a few mistakes because of that. Most of the other stats however were easy enough to grasp. They had good names for the genre as well such as "take it to the mattresses" for your fighting abilities.

Love Interest: Only one, either El or Alexander, depending on your choice, and they, despite being your goal for much of the story, don't appear much. Largely how they act is determined it seems by how you say they act at the start of the story. They are the McGuffin for the story but don't have much value, though your relationship with them is sort of orced on you. The only way you can really avoid it is by focussing on just trying to get out of your trade or focus on growing your career in either the Mafia or with the dragon.

Railroading: Heck No! I have only played through once but the achievements tell me, because even the shadow of many of them didn't come up at all in my playthrough that this story can goa lot of different ways. There is so little railroading that I'd say I'll probably have to review this title again after a few more playthroughs. I was fairly successful and only got 4 of the 26 achievements.

achievements: This game knows how to manage it. It has a wide variety of achievements and from what I can tell, few of them are simple token achievements as they, just by showing what they are, shows a wide variety of events and playstyles. One great thing about achievements in Choice of Games titles when they are there is that they often hint at what can be accomplished in the game, and from the looks of things, there are huge swaths of the game I didn't even touch.

closing remarks: I have oftten thought that Choice of Games makes several of their free titles free because they aren't up to par with their paid titles. I see "Choice of the Dragon" as a tutorial and "Choice of Broadsides" is a major acception to that rule. I have to add "Nola is burning" as another title that is free to play, and yet very much still worth playing. I've got other things I need to do, but I'm also very much eager to play this one again.

But right now, though there was a major delay since my last game review, I should be starting "Neighborhood Necromancer" tomorrow so a review should not be too far off.

thanks for the info, makes me more eager to get to that point now that I'vee got an endorcement from you guys.