Category: CYOA

Affairs of the Court

Affairs of the Court is a Kindle bundle from Choice of Games including both Choice of Romance (reviewed here) and its sequel, Choice of Intrigues. (As far as I can see, Choice of Intrigues is not available from the Choice of Games site, though that may be a temporary situation.) The sequel picks up directly with your character from Choice of Romance, so they really belong together as one continuous story. The intrigues portion is considerably darker and more political than the first half, however, and it’s possible to edge your character towards a genuinely villainous personality. The hints of magic, only loosely developed in the first part of the story, also become more central to the plot. Overall, the two pieces taken together are stronger than Choice of Romance on its own, though many of the points in that initial review still hold. Definitely worth a look if you liked the first half, however.

Introcomp 2011: ChoiceScript entries

Introcomp 2011 is now on, and it has a record 13 entries. Five of those are ChoiceScript games, best played online, but usually taking a bit less individual time commitment than a parsed game might. So I had a look at them together: Of Pots and Mushrooms, Exile, Gargoyle, Choice of the Petal Throne, and Choice of Zombies. Mildly spoilery remarks follow the jump.

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Mini-Ludum Dare 27

Last weekend there was a mini Ludum Dare — an online game jam — focusing on conversational games and encouraging people to try Inform, Undum, Ren’Py, and other text-heavy engines. There were thirty entries and I haven’t tried all of them, but some thoughts on the ones I sampled:

Leaks is an Undum piece that presents the backstory to a poem. Technically it’s doing something rather cool: new stanzas of the poem appear in the sidebar as the reader makes progress through the story. The story itself could use quite a bit of polish, as there are a bunch of non-native English errors, and it is initially somewhat confusing what is going on and how the different passages of text relate to one another. It’s also extremely linear. All the same, it’s an interesting example of what Undum can do with juxtaposing and reordering text. (See also The Matter of the Monster.)

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Choice of Romance

Choice of Romance is a piece from the Choice of… series: not exactly new, but I’ve been too busy to look at it until recently.

I wonder a bit about the marketing strategy of calling the stories “Choice of [blank].” It makes the stories sound more generic than they actually are, especially when the thing that goes in the blank is as sweeping as “Romance.”

In this case, the title is deceptive. “Choice of Romance” isn’t a generic romance story. On the contrary, it (like Choice of Broadsides) is set in a slightly alternate version of a historical setting, designed to allow the player to play as either gender, seeking a partner of either gender, and to give players with female characters the opportunity to exercise more agency than would otherwise have been available.

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