snowynight

The Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp) is an annual celebration of new, text-driven digital games and stories from independent creators. You can play as many of the entries as you like and vote for them in a ballot (requires a free signup). The vote is up to 15 Oct. I have played several of the choice based entries playable online.

Games I have finished and like:

Saltwrack: "A crew of three. A lost city, far in the north. A thousand miles of toxic ice. Plot your course, manage supplies, study apocalypse biota, and don't lose your mind. You'll find out why the world was ruined, or die trying. Content warning: This is a work of horror; it gets grim. Specific content warnings are available in the game's ABOUT page."

thoughts: I like it most. Very atmospheric, and the resource management gameplay really matches how grim and strange the world is.

Pharos Fidelis: "A romantic island getaway. CW: graphic violence, sexually suggestive content, toxic academia, denial of agency, hunger, death. Postmodern fantasy-horror gay demon melodrama"

thoughts: I find the world building with demon summoning intriguing. The gay reluctant summoner/demon romance is nice. I also like the check point system: saving me time to replay. 

The Litchfield Mystery: "A wealthy businessman, dead in his study. Eight suspects, harbouring secrets and twisted truths. "There's always more to it than meets the eye..." To others, a tired cliché. To you, the cardinal principle that has successfully guided you in all your cases as The Sleuth. And you, Detective Pearce, are not about to let this one go cold."

thoughts: The walkthrough is very detailed and useful. The clues are reasonable, and the solution makes sense.

The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens: "When you find yourself sleepwalking in the lush ornamental gardens of the Sylvan Villa, you must discover how to break the thrall of a mysterious trance. You will be aided in your journey by the gardens' keepers: a gardener, a botanist, a librarian, and an enigmatic hermit. Form bonds of friendship or pursue a slow-burn romance as you roleplay, helping these companions with quests that draw you deeper into their individual stories."

thoughts: It's a cosy fantasy adventure with a good mix of puzzles. The NPc are cute and I love spending time with them. I also like the thoughtful ending choices, The creator(s) also created Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade (solving a mystery before an opera opening) & The Path of Totality (cozy fantasy road trip adventure), which are both enjoyable

Penthesileia: "Your husband is a very important man, he tells you; many would like to see his head on a silver platter. Content warning: Material may not be suitable for children; please note strong language, as well as allusions to death, sexual themes, and violence"

thoughts: It's linear and quite obvious how the plot will go, but it's satisfying to play to the end.

I have bought the HRT Harm Reduction Toolkit Bundle and checked out two titles new to me first: Breakfast Cult and #iHunt: The RPG. Here are my first impression from reading about the books.

Breakfast Cult: "a Fate Accelerated TTRPG about cosmic horror mysteries and high school drama. " The art is colourful and cartoon style, which I think fit the game theme well. The book presents the setting and rules very clearly. Each character has a secret agenda so they may work at cross purpose amid cosmic horror investigation and teen drama. Depending on the game, the secret can range from more silly and high school drama trope (eg: Crush on X) to more serious (eg: Secret cultist). It provides pre-gen characters and scenarios so you can start a game easily. If you like Buffy, Harry Potter, or Soul Eaters, I think it'll serve well.


#iHunt: The RPG. "Killing monsters in the gig economy": It's a much darker game than Breakfast Cult. You play monster hunters who are also gig workers barely surviving on what they earn, dealing with sales tax and banking trouble. The book is thick - ~329 pages. The starting fiction set the setting's grim and depressing mood. The text (including the rules) is written in a more angry conversational tone, which YMMV whether you like it or not. There are robust advice about creating monsters, setting and the game rules. I think it does its focus very well.

Overall it's a worthwhile purchase for a good cause.


Current charity bundle bundles on sale:

HRT Harm Reduction Toolkit Bundle (30 items for $25): "100% of the proceeds of this bundle go directly toward Distribute Aid's efforts to supply kits of 1 year's necessary medical equipment into the hands of trans people in needs for free." #iHunt and Breakfast Cult are among the offers. Offer ends in 9 days, 21 hours.

Link from stepnix. Thank you!

California Fire Relief Bundle (Buy 422 items for $10) All proceeds, minus processing fees, go to CORE (Community Organized Relief Effort), a Los Angeles-based organization which offers direct monetary support to survivors of the fires, and supports projects for fire resilience in affected areas (and potential disaster zones). Offer ends in 11 days 23 hours.

You can check out this Reddit comment to see highlighted video game offers with good review on Steam.


RPGs for Accessible Gaming (247 items for $10): "Money raised from this charity bundle will help fund production for sets of d4s, d6s, d8s, and d10s of DOTS RPG Project's Signature Braille Dice." If you haven't already got the games, Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, Neon Nights and Glitter Heart are among the bigger titles. Offer ends in 20 days, 23 hours.

Also Link from stepnix:
Amor per Valencia / Love for Valencia Bundle ($5 for 771 items: 179 video games & 493 tabletop RPG):

On October 29th, the Valencia region received a year's worth of rain in just eight hours, which devastated much of the towns in Valencia, Spain. It's the worst natural disaster to hit Spain this century. Over 230 people were killed. The donations will go to Projecte Butterfly, a project that seeks to help those affected to recover their homes. Offer ends in 1 month, 29 days.

Solo But Not Alone 5! Solo Tabletop RPG Charity Bundle: 107 items for $10. Offer ends in 2 months, 19 days. I posted a signal boost post about the bundle.

Emoji Kitchen let you merge two emoji to create a grand new one. You can start playing by entering "Emoji Kitchen" in google search, or use this alternative emoji kitchen creator

Murdle: Daily logic puzzle to solve mystery

Drench: ‘Drench’ the entire board in one single color within limited turns

Dungelon: guess the dungeon composition in 6 guesses

"Today, smash your heroic nemesis! Tomorrow, build a doomsday device to take over the world! But, wait, are your henchpeople going on strike?!"

Top Villain: Total Domination is a 228,000-word interactive comedy supervillain novel by Brandon Greer, which you play a supervillain planning world domination in Saturday cartoon style. The main character (MC) has to deal with the interplanetary hero Matchless Man (which the MC can choose to have foeyay with), an intrepid reporter caught snooping in their lair, and a surprise inspection from the supervillain organization Multitude of Murderous Malcontents, with rules against world domination. And MC's henchpeople went on strike.

And MC's mum was calling.

Review:

It's silly and endearing fun, a love letter to the colourful and weird Saturday cartoons. I love a lot at the jokes in the games. It's very forgiving in stat check, but the plot is linear, so it may affect the replayability. Matchless Man and the reporter Whitney Wang had a lot of depth.

Fallen Hero is a text based interactive novel series that you play a powerful telepath ex-superhero who returns and is now the newest supervillain. There are two games: Rebirth and Retribution so far in a planned 4 game series. There are loads of identity porn (the player character can possess other people and am juggling two bodies and three identities), hurt/comfort, complicated messed up relationship with other characters with hidden depth, and interesting world building. You can play a male, female, or genderqueer character and dates an evil scientist, the PC's former teammates, the young hero idolizing the PC, or The PC's most dangerous opponent on the team, or at the same time.

What I like about the series is the wide variety of freedom and story variables. You can play a mass killing monster, or a soft hearted villain who the others suspects that they aren't villain at all. The replayability is high because you can choose the PC's motives, their method of supervillaincy and their choice in different missions. I'm often surprised by how I miss when reading others' playthrough.

Free Demo to the Fallen Hero series
Fallen Hero: Rebirth (The first game)
Fallen Hero Retribution  (The Second game)

Post of links to helpful Guides

All are free, no ads and open source, unless specified otherwise

Heriswap: a match-3 game with soothing background music and graphic. It has 3 different game modes (score race, time attack and 100 seconds) and 3 difficulty settings. Available on F-droid only

Simon Tatham's Puzzles: a collection of 40 single-player logic puzzle games including minesweeper, sudoku, and bridges. Puzzles are generated on demand and adjustable. Available on Google play & F-droid. There's a web option too.

Mindustry: a hybrid of tower defense, RTS, and factory game very popular on Steam. Available on Google play & F-droid

Shattered Pixel Dungeon: a traditional roguelike dungeon crawler with pixel art graphics, randomly generated levels, and lots of variety and replayability: Available on Google play & F-droid

Unciv: "An open-source reimplementation of the most famous civilization-building game ever". Available on Google play & F-droid

Freshman Magic: Spellbooks and Tangled Sheets is a male/male text based choose your romance game set in a magic university with dueling, murder mystery and five potential love interests. You play a gay freshman who has to secure his magical dueling full scholarship, balance his school life and social life and meet love interests from a wide spectrum. However, students are missing from the school and the player character can be the next victim if he isn't careful.

Gameplay wise I really enjoy it because of its good writing, lots of meaningful and clearly worded choices, and interesting potential love interests. When dueling, you can choose different magic style and tactics to win. You can decide what approach to tackle exams or assignments. You can choose to how hardworking your character is. The mystery isn't hard to solve but the tension is well depicted.

The romance aspect is good too. There are lovable jock, shy tutor, rich sexy librarian, mysterious senior and loyal best friend, which adds to the replayability. What I like most is that your character can choose to flirt and have casual sex with different guys before going steady (or not), or romance his prospective boyfriend by hanging out rather than hooking up.

I have really enjoyed the game and replayed it a lot of time for all the achievements. Definitely recommended to fellow text based m/m romance game lovers.

I love playing idle games, simulation games and puzzle games on my phone. Here are my favourite found this year so far.

• Broki: a block puzzle game with nice aesthetic, six different types of game modes and daily challenges
• Cards of Terra: a fantasy themed solitaire-like card game in which we attempted to remove cards by dragging one over another to let them engage in a battle. With many kinds of card units with different effects, it gradually becomes challenging
• Coromon: the Pokemon RPG that Nintendo will probably never gives us.
• Grimoire Incremental: an idle game that tells a story of unearthing ancient magic and grappling to understand and wield it.
• I Love Hue Too: a relaxing game that seriously challenges your sensitivity to colours.

The Hosted Games label is for user submitted games, so the quality and the content varies more than the Choice of Games label.

My Top Five: Kiss from Death, Donor, Wayhaven Chronicles series, The Parenting Simulator, A Study in Steampunk: Choice by Gaslight (sorted by publishing date)

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Choice of Games is a company that specialized in publishing text-based, multiple-choice games. Growing up, I really love Choose Your Own Adventure books and Give Yourself Goosebumps, where your choice can determine the story outcome. I also really enjoy Lone Wolf Gamebooks Therefore I play a lot of games in their Choice of Games labels, Hosted Games (user submitted games) and Heart's Choice label (romance focus games).

My general like: Games that focus on character relationship, a lot of freedom for players to shape the game outcome, sf&f or unconventional setting

My general dislike: games that force a certain outcome on players, games that a wrong choice can result in game over or doesn't tell the players clearly what they are expected to satisfy the requirements, games that requires an excel sheet to figure out resource allocation, fake choices,

It's very difficult to rank my favourite among the 106 Choice of Games I have played, but here's part one of my top ten list, not sorted in any order:  Mask of the Plague Doctor, Chronicon Apocalyptica, Cannonfire Concerto, Choice of the Deathless, and Choice of Robots

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