A Study in Steampunk: Choice by Gaslight
This is an amazingly good book. Not just a game, it’s a good book. This is very well written not just as a book but as a game. Every choice you make actually does count. Branching storyline aside, every choice helps you build a character that feels very organic.
It’s also strikingly accurate to the period without boring you to death with the details. The usual choices of sexuality are less prevelent in the more descrtionary aditudes of the Victrian-esque setting. And you can’t be a woman or chose your background, likely because this is a setting where women are bared from a good number of things. Whether your character is okay with such things is up to you. As is whether you try to change them.
– Real player with 99.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Choose Your Own Adventure Indie Games.
Of all the “Choice of” games I’ve played this one has to be my favorite. While it draws inspiration from classic tales, it succesfully weaves in creative and original storylines that keep you hooked. I usually just do a single playthrough of a game and go back to quickly change my choices and skim through the different outcomes, but I actually felt compelled to take my time and enjoyed replaying Choice by Gaslight. The characters feel real and their personalities and views make them enjoyable to interact with. They’re people and have certain opinions set in stone, but they aren’t as prone to flipping out on you if you do one thing wrong like a lot of the other games seem to do. The author was thoughtful enough to give you a whole list of dialogue options to choose from so you don’t feel as penciled in or as forced into a strong opinion when you mean to be moderate like many other Choice Of games often do. The characters and story as easy to get invested in and fall in love with (i don’t want to admit how many times i’ve replayed this to re-romance one character cough Alexandra cough) and the game gives you many chances to develop your MC. It also, thankfully, has opportunities to save your progress as the end of each act. It’s a shame that they gender-lock your MC and have no character relationship meter like some other Choice Of games have, but I can’t recommend this game enough and only pray that there’s hopefully a sequel for it someday.
– Real player with 52.1 hrs in game
Fog Factory - Game Maker
I expected much more. This Game-Maker sadly suffers from a lack of ambition and creative thought. The UI design is lacking, the audio rarely works and the game is incredibly imbalanced. Hopefully in the future this can be improved, although that may take a lot of work.
– Real player with 0.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Choose Your Own Adventure Interactive Fiction Games.
Who Are You, Mr. Cooper?
Update Nothing new. Dev abandonment. Game is short as heck. If you’re bored and want a game ONLY worth $1, buy it. But it won’t entertain you for that long. Otherwise, DO NOT BUY. Not a lot of content.
Update 1 Review Better. But stillvery repetitive. Dev fixed the robbing issue constantly happening as well as improving the minigames. Try Your Luck Money game still fails me more than anything.
It’s still work work work sleep get robbed work work shop sleep work work sleep buys an item work sleep work work, repeat with an occasional time of going to the Inventors area.
– Real player with 3.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Choose Your Own Adventure Indie Games.
More frustrating than fun. The minigames are chaotic, way too fast, and tediously repetitive. Constantly being robbed, blocked, and attacked is both boring and tiresome. I guess the story is interesting enough, but for a primarily text-based game, the quality of the writing is very poor – an editor would be a great investment here.
– Real player with 3.9 hrs in game
Haven Moon
The short of it:
Haven Moon is a relaxing diversion into a visually pleasing world. It’s almost criminally short, however, and at times its puzzles can be a little obtuse and arbitrary. I give it a thumbs-up because it matches the description in the store, kept me entertained for a time, and is quite an impressive game when you take into account that it was the product of a sole contributor.
The long of it:
The environment and buildings have obvious nods to Myst and Jules Verne. In particular, the influence of Myst is incredibly strong. Gameplay elements such as powering things up before you can solve their puzzles, traveling between small, isolated environments using fanciful means, and deciding on an ending once you’ve collected everything all make appearances. For those who enjoy a world that itself is a puzzle, rather than a world that happens to have puzzles in it, by and large this fits the bill. The locations have matching music that subtly adds to the mood of each space, and I believe a lot of people would want their interior decorator to take inspiration from the places you visit while playing.
– Real player with 15.6 hrs in game
The harsh summary:
This is a piece of beautiful graphical art with a few puzzles thrown in and uses something akin to and as believable as a government cover story for depth.
The in depth description:
I very much enjoyed the game. If it was priced more to its playtime and story and not to its beauty, I would give it a serious thumbs up. I feel like it is a stunningly beautiful person (in my case a woman) who lacks any personality worth mentioning. Great to look at but will not keep your attention beyond a few hours. It is very Mystesque but lacks Myst’s depth, story immersion, and length. Actual casual, non-rushed, and lazy play time is 5 hours (possibly less for others). My time played says 14 hours, however I spent more than half of my time on projects in the house or watching Netflix, but did not exit the game, I just left it on the ESC menu. While the story concept is fairly good, but it lacks any real depth. The story part of this game is in written notes, and there are not very many to read. As with all Adventure/Puzzle games replay ability is minimal at best so such a short playtime is very disappointing. When I read the Dev’s comment “It is neither too long nor too short”, I thought to myself “well then I should be able to get at least a good couple of days out of it. Not just a few hours. To sum up, the game itself is good but I cannot recommend at its current price due to lack of content. I would rather pay more for something more developed and not just a beautiful painting.
– Real player with 14.6 hrs in game
Blimps
This game is fantastic. It’s a roguelike, not quite like instant death, but in that, you can potentially end up in a crushing amount of debt based on how crappy of a captain you are. But if you are an excellent decision-making-capitalist-smuggling-hacker, you can dig yourself out of any hole you might find yourself in this game. Besides, you can always just start a new game.
There’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s not that hard to read the Help tips and what Falcon tells you to do. I like the fact that it has its own way of doing things. The game itself is like an operating system mainframe. It reminds me of FTL and a bit of the old school PC Sim City that had all those secret text-based codes!
– Real player with 5.8 hrs in game
I really enjoy this game, but it’s not for everyone, especially people who only play modern games. This game is purposely trying to appear as a classic Commodore 64 game. That alone makes it interestingly enough to pick up. The art seems perfect for the tone of the game, which is somewhat silly in places while still never overshadowing the rest of the game.
The reason its not for gamers who only play contemporary games is because it almost too perfectly emulates a C64 game you picked up from a garage sale with no manual. It provides almost no instruction of what to do or how to do it. The first 10 minutes are going to be spent trying to figure out how to leave the hangar. You’ll be flying around slowly putting together what does what and where you need to do what in. Heck, there isn’t even any auto-save (at least, none that I have found).
– Real player with 2.8 hrs in game
80 Days
This interactive narrative of the steampunk variety encompases the adventure of Passepartout, a french valet who provides service for his master, Phileas Fogg - of whom has wagered £20,000 that he can travel around the world in 80 Days. This immensely dialogue rich game immerses the player in a world (with a little imagination) not too dissimilar from our own. Set in the 1872 it explores not only the geological but plunges into the philosophical and ethical as you converse with people around the world in every country.
– Real player with 78.1 hrs in game
I bought this on a whim in a sale and then didn’t play it for a little while because looking at the screenshots on the store page didn’t make me super enthused for it. I know the description and tags show that it is heavily narrative-based but I just want to emphasise that because if I had seen more narrative screenshots, I probably would have bought and played it sooner.
The things I love the most are the setting and the writing. I don’t normally get very enthused about steampunk but I really liked this universe. Part of what can make me iffy about things taking inspiration from the Victoria era is the colonialism, but this game addresses these issues and doesn’t just hide them away. The world is full of anti-colonial conflicts, revolutions, and discussion of slavery and you can often talk to characters directly impacted. There are also plenty of women in the world doing non-traditional things (which you can choose to be shocked by, usually). The writing is of a very high quality and the narrative choices frequent (with impacts ranging from minimal/non-existent to huge). I can’t even imagine the full extent of the script, although I’m sure it will become apparent if I play it many more times! I really love being Passepartout and I find myself very engaged by the narrative.
– Real player with 42.4 hrs in game
Karaski: What Goes Up…
It’s October 1923, my name is Jan Kowalski and I am honored to be one of the first passengers onboard the airship A. A. Karaski. When I joined this miracle of technology, I was excited with curiosity, how it works and what I’ll experience during the flight. I actually thought that I would spend the entire journey in a bar on the upper deck sipping fancy whiskey with casual conversation. After boarding, I picked up a boarding pass, introduced myself to a guide of the airship and headed to my cabin. Well, was just going to, because just around the corner I somehow fainted and my plan was screwed a little. A lot.
– Real player with 21.6 hrs in game
Take to the skies in this whodunit mystery. You will take on the role of a passenger on this one of a kind airship, but something has gone wrong. The airship has been sabotage, but who has done it. Was it you? Will you be able to uncover who did it? Will you be caught snooping around and have everyone expect you of doing this heinous act?
In Karaski: What Goes Up… this is exactly what you’ll be doing. You will be playing through the game with your main mission being to get to the bottom of the mystery of the sabotage, but there are other quests that you can take on to perhaps pry information from other passengers. In this game you will have the chance to bribe guards to look the other way, entice passengers with the promise of alcohol, and of course gain tools that will allow you access to different areas of the ship.
– Real player with 8.6 hrs in game
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
I love the AA Franchise, and this port is well done and nice to be played on chill moments. Would have liked more languages (like Italian), but the English localization is very well done and immersive. Wish there will be other ports, and am looking for some new games! Please Capcom 3
– Real player with 160.8 hrs in game
Couldn’t recommend this more if I tried, I went through these two games more quickly than Barok van Zieks could slam his leg on the table.
Great setting, very memorable characters and soundtrack, and a lot of new gameplay elements that were so much fun to go through.
The two games feel very well connected and bring up very interesting points about the judicial system in its setting, as well as cultural aspects.
I’d also like to praise the writing and the pacing of the story and character development (and there is a lot of development, trust me), the story combines a good mixture of comic relief and more serious and intense moments, much like what we were already used to in previous Ace Attorney games.
– Real player with 111.5 hrs in game
The Wickie
1936 and junior lighthouse keeper Bill Cromarty is sent to St Pandora’s Rock, 100 miles off the west coast of Scotland to help staff the lighthouse and learn the ropes from Captain Malin and his assistant lighthouse keeper.
Captain Malin will assign you your duties and it is up to you to complete them to the best of your abilities to keep the lighthouse running smoothly to prevent loss of shipping and life.
Nothing is as it would seem. Are you going to keep your head and do your work, or will you investigate what is happening on this large and fully explorable island?
Keep your sanity. Decide your face and the fate of everyone else in this fully 3d FPS adventure, taking place over 14 days. Will you go home, a job well done? Will you discover that there is so, so much more happening on the island?
NPC Characters are presented differently to the rest of the world to make them stand out, with a design style that stands apart from the rest of the game deliberately. The island has a full realistic weather system that can handle rain, snow and storms, water simulations, above and below water interactions, including swimming, and many different paths to follow, the game features professional voice acting and an enchanting period based musical score.
Faerie’s Bargain: The Price of Business
Where to begin.
Ultimately, I wish I could give them a meh review, rather then a straight thumbs up or down. I really wanted to love and enjoy this title, being a fan of magic, folklore, fantasy, etc. But in the end, I’ve had more bad then good.
To begin with, the story at times is very dense with unfamiliar terms and strange convoluted choices. Halfway through the first chapter, it was so hard to really understand exactly what was going on and what my choice options would do that I resorted to reading the coding just to get a better idea. But even that became a convoluted mess, as the labeling for choice stats and their effects is so odd that even with the code guiding me, I never really knew what outcome I would get. A seemingly obvious devious decision (even using the term devious in its text) would fail despite my devious stat being higher then my forthright! And a choice you think would obviously boost a stat (like being compassionate), at times instead boosted ambition. Making it really hard to know what the heck result you could expect to get. Couple that with very convoluted writing at times, and by the end of the faerie merchant council, I was so tired of the story that I had to quit just to give my brain a break after realizing the story was STILL going.
– Real player with 13.0 hrs in game
Steam forces us to select a positive recommendation or a negative judgement : there is no option to be neutral, hesitant. Consequently, I do not wish to be a nuisance to a developer’s sales by selecting a thumb-down option. This game is an example of a product I am hesitant to recommend, but also, hesitant to reject. I may only give my very personal, subjective feedback – opinions not applicable to all types of players.
I am mostly an emotional role-player, so, to enjoy a game, I must feel immersed into my game persona – as soon as possible.
– Real player with 12.4 hrs in game