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I know nothing about the genre but I was curious about Fallen Hero and Wayhaven series. Those seem to be the cream of the crop right?
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Jul 13, 2023 19:53
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Jack Trades posted:I know nothing about the genre but I was curious about Fallen Hero and Wayhaven series. Those seem to be the cream of the crop right? I haven't played them myself, but if you rank the Choicescript games on IFDB by ratings, they do seem to be quite popular, yes.
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Jul 13, 2023 21:00
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Jack Trades posted:I know nothing about the genre but I was curious about Fallen Hero and Wayhaven series. Those seem to be the cream of the crop right? FYI, Wayhaven is very romance oriented. And I haven't played the third one but apparently there is some backlash. Fallen Hero is great, the second one being even more interesting than the first. I don't know your tastes but in the same "system": The two games by Kevin Gold, Choice of Robots and Choice of Magics are standalone and extremely replayable. Tin star if you like western. The infinity saga if your life is lacking a Napoleonic saga. SLAMMED if you always dreamt of being a wrestler. And many others... If the genre you're speaking of is interactive fiction, and you want a bit more graphic/sound in your games: Scarlet Hollow, Citizen Sleeper and Roadwarden are wonderful games.
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Jul 13, 2023 22:31
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I started with Fallen Hero. I'm 4 chapters in and I'm having to force myself to stop reading for now because otherwise I won't get any sleep.
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Jul 13, 2023 22:46
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I finished reading the first game. I'd be somewhat annoyed at it ending there if there wasn't more available but otherwise it's been really good. I just wish their engine had rewinds because I had to replay several times after having fat fingered my choice.
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Jul 14, 2023 11:07
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I feel their tech definitely needs an upgrade and perhaps integration into Unity or Godot or, I dunno, Flutter or something to allow for some UI customization if the author feels like it.
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Jul 14, 2023 11:17
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Jack Trades posted:I finished reading the first game. I'd be somewhat annoyed at it ending there if there wasn't more available but otherwise it's been really good. If you play on Steam, I can recommend this to manage saves on the choice of games engine: https://github.com/yasirkula/UnityChoiceOfGamesSaveManager Loddfafnir fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Jul 14, 2023 |
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Jul 14, 2023 13:03
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Finished both Fallen Hero games. Exceptionally good and right up my alley both in the characters and the style of writing. It was so good that I'm worried that everything else would be downhill from here. The only annoyance is that it ends on another cliffhanger and I think that my particular variation is a particularly nasty cliffhanger. Jack Trades fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 17:28
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Jack Trades posted:Finished both Fallen Hero games. You’ve got some good gaming ahead of you. All the ones recommended in the long post above are excellent choices. I’ll add the Vampire: The Masquerade Night Road game to that list if you like VTM flavor. But for real those are all the cream of the crop. Choice of Rebels is also quite good and interesting because it adds in some weird branching and a segment of the game that—mechanics spoiler— involves a settlement management minigame and has overall very good prose but it’s supposed to be a trilogy, and there’s been no news of the followup iirc. Otherwise, do any/all of what’s been recommended and only then start digging through the other stuff because the quality gets uneven after that imho.
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Jul 15, 2023 17:36
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Choice of Games has an omnibus/store app on mobile and you can search the games by rank there. There is a guy who's actually played through every single Choicescript game (that were available at the time he did this) and he said that if you sort the games by rank, it aligns closely to how he himself would rank the games best to worst, so it's pretty reliable.
Megazver fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 17:41
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Thanks, I'll check those out. Once I've recovered emotionally. The game hit me right in the feels, very similar to what I felt when playing Disco Elysium. Too many too-real-for-comfort and getting the "Backstabbed" ending didn't make it easier.
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Jul 15, 2023 17:48
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https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=antiquarian.death https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sichris.patanoir Death off the Cuff and Patanoir are now free for Android. I no longer actively maintain the apps, so I can't guarantee that they work properly on the newest devices.
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Jul 15, 2023 18:10
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Jack Trades posted:Thanks, I'll check those out. If you want to tell us a bit more, I may be able to tailor my recommendations a bit further. For choice of games' games and other interactive fictions I may know.
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Jul 15, 2023 18:10
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Loddfafnir posted:I don't know your tastes but in the same "system": I like Magics a lot better, personally. In between those two, he actually released Choice of Alexandria, but it's his least successful by far, leading him to go, "Huh, so people want biiiiig fantasy stories? Well, alright then..."
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Jul 15, 2023 18:44
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Loddfafnir posted:If you want to tell us a bit more, I may be able to tailor my recommendations a bit further. For choice of games' games and other interactive fictions I may know. Main character engaging in- or recovering from self-destructive behavior because of previous trauma hits me very close to home. Even more so if there's a tragic romance involved. Fallen Hero in particular having plentiful cosmetic choices made it so much easier to immerse myself in it too.
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Jul 15, 2023 19:04
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Jack Trades posted:Main character engaging in- or recovering from self-destructive behavior because of previous trauma hits me very close to home. Even more so if there's a tragic romance involved. Fallen Hero was tailor-made for you indeed. If you can bear a game being the first volume of a series, "I, the forgotten one" deals with trauma and PTSD. I found its end satisfying, and the story great. There is also The Grim and I, a short standalone about emotional baggage.
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Jul 15, 2023 21:23
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SimonChris posted:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=antiquarian.death Oh? What will happen with the Steam versions? I saw Patanoir was on sale on the big summer one but I forgot to add it to cart when I did my last minute shopping. I assume they won't be removed at the very least.
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Jul 15, 2023 23:15
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Saoshyant posted:Oh? What will happen with the Steam versions? I saw Patanoir was on sale on the big summer one but I forgot to add it to cart when I did my last minute shopping. I assume they won't be removed at the very least. This only applies to the Android apps. The Steam versions are still supported.
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Jul 16, 2023 09:23
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Loddfafnir posted:If you play on Steam, I can recommend this to manage saves on the choice of games engine: https://github.com/yasirkula/UnityChoiceOfGamesSaveManager Is there anything like that for Android? Reading on my phone is a much more convenient format but the fact that you can keep only one save at a time really makes me hesitate about replaying Fallen Hero. Although, even if there isn't a save manager I might as well just re-play it again once the third game comes out. The game is a little unfair on your first playthrough because it often asks you to make decisions based on your backstory, like deciding what your motivations and your relationships with characters are, before it tells you the details of your backstory. I really can't fault the author though. It does make for a much exciting reading to have story reveals happen at more appropriate times, and it does push the player towards replaying the game, even though it feels a little unfair when it happens.
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Jul 16, 2023 11:22
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unattended spaghetti posted:Choice of Rebels is also quite good and interesting because it adds in some weird branching and a segment of the game that—mechanics spoiler— involves a settlement management minigame and has overall very good prose but it’s supposed to be a trilogy, and there’s been no news of the followup iirc. There's no release date yet, but it does have a steam page. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2457410/Choice_of_Rebels_Stormwright/
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Jul 16, 2023 13:35
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Jack Trades posted:Is there anything like that for Android? There isn't as far as I know. But I can tell you something you may not know: buy the games on steam and you can retrieve them to the web client and the omnibus apps on this page: https://www.choiceofgames.com/transferring-purchases/
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Jul 16, 2023 17:48
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Dr Kool-AIDS posted:There's no release date yet, but it does have a steam page. Oh nice. I thought mechanically this was one of the more interesting games. Really cool setting, too. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Infinity games took about a decade to see finished.
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Jul 16, 2023 19:15
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"This is an attempt to create an ambitious and complex choice-based narrative entirely within Google Forms. The game is designed to push the format to its limits, making the best of its strengths, whilst working around its limitations. " okay that's officially the worst game engine I can think of https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=uzupc0dhil9kaol
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Jul 17, 2023 00:26
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StrixNebulosa posted:"This is an attempt to create an ambitious and complex choice-based narrative entirely within Google Forms. The game is designed to push the format to its limits, making the best of its strengths, whilst working around its limitations. " and I thought trying to run a CYOA through a webcomic site was a bad idea edit: there's no save feature, they had to resort to a code system Lunatic Sledge fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Jul 17, 2023 |
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Jul 17, 2023 00:52
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So while I've been reading 50 Years of Text Adventures, I've also been enjoying the weird little offshoots it recommends, and here's one I think is worth sharing: from Hunt the Wumpus, here's Hunter, in Darkness by Andrew Plotkin. It's a short, mildly difficult homage to Wumpus huntin' that's really good at capturing tension and horror and how hosed up caves are, and I had a really good time with it. Here's an early taster: quote:Bottom of Pit
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Jul 17, 2023 17:44
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Checking out some of the recommendations. Started with Choice of Magics, read the first two chapters, and I don't think I'm feeling it. The worldbuilding is interesting but the writing is really really flat. Like a children's story. It spends no time developing anything and what you see is what you get when it comes to the choices. I wouldn't call it bad necessarily but I'm not finding it particularly engrossing.
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Jul 17, 2023 21:29
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Jack Trades posted:Checking out some of the recommendations. Started with Choice of Magics, read the first two chapters, and I don't think I'm feeling it. This is the style of the books I've played by this author. If you feel this way, you probably won't like their other books either.
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Jul 17, 2023 23:40
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Jack Trades posted:Checking out some of the recommendations. Started with Choice of Magics, read the first two chapters, and I don't think I'm feeling it. Yeah, the "Choice of X" tends to fall into that pattern of writing from what I recall; if that's enough to pull you out of the story I'm thinking it'll probably nag at you throughout the entire series. I forget, were you around when Counterfeit Monkey was being discussed in the thread? It was sometime early this year, January or Februaryish, since it was the book of the month for either Feb or March if I recall correctly. I think you might enjoy the writing if you haven't played through it already and don't get stonewalled by the UI early on; I did, at least.
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Jul 18, 2023 00:33
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StrixNebulosa posted:So while I've been reading 50 Years of Text Adventures, I've also been enjoying the weird little offshoots it recommends, and here's one I think is worth sharing: Hunter, In Darkness is interesting in how it plays with IF conventions. This essay is mostly about Shade rather than Hunter, In Darkness, but it discusses the way Hunter subverts the usual IF treatment of light and darkness: https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/enlightening-interactive-fiction-andrew-plotkins-shade/ The really notable thing, which I think Plotkin himself has discussed, is the way Hunter describes something resembling an actual cave. The early parts of Colossal Cave Adventure did this to an extent, reflecting Crowther's actual spelunking experience, but there's been a tendency, from the Woods-written parts of Adventure onwards, for IF to have "cave" settings that feel more like abandoned shopping malls or office buildings. This is partly because a lot of the mainframe-era IF games (including the original version of Zork) were basically attempts to make a bigger and harder version of Adventure by people who had no caving experience and were more interested in puzzles than in atmosphere. (It didn't help that Crowther's use of the caving term "room" is easily misunderstood as something more like an actual room in a building.) Later IF with cave settings tends to be conscious pastiche of Zork or similar games, so there's not much actual cave atmosphere. Edit: To be fair, Zork is supposed to be set in the "Great Underground Empire," so maybe it's supposed to be more like Montreal's Underground City than a natural cave complex? Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Jul 18, 2023 |
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Jul 18, 2023 01:39
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Silver2195 posted:To be fair, Zork is supposed to be set in the "Great Underground Empire," so maybe it's supposed to be more like Montreal's Underground City than a natural cave complex? And lo, after more than 30 years I get the joke in The Lurking Horror. It's set in a fictional recreation of MIT called the George Underwood Edwards Institute of Technology. Which is abbreviated as "GUE Tech".
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Jul 18, 2023 09:06
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Decided to skip Choice of Magic and started on Wayhaven instead. I'm only a few chapters in but I find the premise to be pretty intriguing. I'm enjoying the writing so far, even though it was clearly written for a female protagonist first. Some of parts feel pretty silly with a male protagonist, if not unintentionally comedic. It's not big enough of a thing to take me out of the experience yet at least.
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Jul 19, 2023 14:17
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Jack Trades posted:Checking out some of the recommendations. Started with Choice of Magics, read the first two chapters, and I don't think I'm feeling it. I feel like those are the weakest two chapters by far and the game's writing, and especially its choice design, vastly improves as it goes on. Chapters three and four have tons of different ways they can play out and potential outcomes, and by the time you reach the last 2-3 chapters they have so many possible starting conditions and paths through that they're essentially ungraphable.
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Jul 19, 2023 14:30
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That reminds me of one Choicescript game that came out recently (which I didn't read) where all the gender variable romance options were between 5'7" and 6'3" Not hard to imagine which orientation was written for first!
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Jul 19, 2023 14:30
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The way Wayhaven consistently expects you to be able to grade your level of attraction to another character on a scale of 1 to 4, based off a single sentence description, is very strange to me.
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Jul 19, 2023 17:35
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I'm through the first Wayhaven game and I did enjoy it overall but I strongly dislike how it handles some of the choices. It will constantly stop you and ask you, the player, "which one of these 4 characters do you want to see in the next scene" and...I don't know? I'm not the writer here, why don't you write the story instead? And then near the end the game goes "which of the 4 characters do you want to romance in the future?" despite the game barely giving you an option to interact with those characters in the first place. It felt really loving weird. I basically ended up running through the game 4 times, picking only one for every scene for each run, so that I can get some reasonable context for which one I liked most. It was particularly annoying because of the engine those games are using that doesn't have saves or an option to back up. I'm really not sure what the writer's intentions were here, but I'm also really not the target audience for these types of stories so maybe it's...uhhh...how you do things. Either way, it wasn't bad enough for me to want to stop. Just confusing. I'm curious enough to continue with the next game for now.
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Jul 21, 2023 12:25
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Silver2195 posted:This essay is mostly about Shade rather than Hunter, In Darkness, but it discusses the way Hunter subverts the usual IF treatment of light and darkness: https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/enlightening-interactive-fiction-andrew-plotkins-shade/ Good read but play Shade before you click this.
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Jul 21, 2023 12:57
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Finished the 3 Wayhaven games. It was enjoyable, reminded me a lot of the urban fantasy schlock I used to devour by the dozens as a teenager. I was really expecting it to be a trilogy so the cliffhanger was pretty unexpected. I think my next one will be "I, the Forgotten One".
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Jul 24, 2023 15:06
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Jack Trades posted:I think my next one will be "I, the Forgotten One". There is a lot of trauma in this one. Have "fun"!
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Jul 24, 2023 16:24
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I'm roughly 1/3rd into the I, the Forgotten One and boy is it a tough read. It's really skirting the line of being misery porn.
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Jul 30, 2023 08:40
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Jack Trades posted:Finished the 3 Wayhaven games. It was enjoyable, reminded me a lot of the urban fantasy schlock I used to devour by the dozens as a teenager. Yeah, pretty sure I remember the author saying they have like 7 books total planned for that series. Getting into any multi-book IF is a rough business when it can be several years between releases (increasing in dev time as they progress due to coding complexities as more variables are added to the mix) and functionally like one person writing/coding the entire thing so reasonably high risk of the series being left incomplete. 5 years between books in the Fallen Hero series is a punch to the stomach, especially with how Retribution ends.
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Jul 31, 2023 15:02
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