For a while I kept seeding advertisements about the text-based games from the company called Choice of Games and I was intrigued. I was a big fan of both the Choose Your Own Adventure types books with no game mechanics and well as proper game books with rules and mechanics growing up, and I still love the idea of using text to tell stories in video games. Then there’s the incredible diversity of titles they have so far and how they advertise the limitless possibilities of the options available. Harness the power of your imagination indeed!
Of course there’s no way that could actually be true unless the text were somehow procedurally generated (and there is something like that in development thought that is outside the scope of this post). We can estimate how big such a game truly is from its word count so that’s why I decided to give this one a try as it has a word count of over 200,000, one of the larger ones I’ve seen so far. Unfortunately I didn’t realize at the time that this was released under the Hosted Games label which is different from the actual Choice of Games label in that these are considered self-published. I take that to mean that this hasn’t passed their in-house quality control and editing processes and, yes, this title does indeed have quality issues aplenty.
The premise of this particular title is that the world is both invaded by aliens and plagued by a zombie uprising at the same time and you’re an ordinary human being trying to survive all the craziness. One thing that this new generation of game books have in common is that, in line with today’s progressive sensibilities, the main character can be any gender or sexual orientation. This means that there’s a character generation section that has you pick these aspects as well as prioritize which attributes like strength or intelligence your character is good at. This game handles this very clumsily via a dream sequence. After this, there’s a stats page that keeps track of these numbers as well as the status of your relationships with other characters.
As I noted the terribleness of the starting dream sequence only presages the awful quality of the rest of the writing. The tone is light and bantering, even when truly awful things are going on such as zombies eating people’s faces off or the main character is being serious about saying “I love you” to someone. There are basic spelling mistakes scattered throughout the text and a very generic nowhereness to the setting. It feels vaguely like you’re somewhere in North America but there are no definitive place names. But perhaps worst of all that the various statistics and choices soon enough feel fake. Regardless of your stats and your choices you’re funnelled down certain fixed paths in the game. There are multiple outcomes that are possible but as far as I can tell, they are all variations of either helping the aliens or fighting against them and each different ending has like only a page that tells you what happens.
The prose itself is bland and completely uninspired. Ordinarily I would be very wary of people who claim that they could be a writer if they wanted to be, but the writing here is so plain that I really think I could do a better job. I read a ton of fanfiction and original web fiction so I can tell you that almost anything you could read for free online is far better than this. The plot is asinine, there’s no imagination and everything is railroaded. For example, regardless of what you choose, your character is always the coolest, most powerful hero due to the plot. You also get to pick a love interest just because you are the hero. This is just hands down a dumb book.
As I noted, this is one of the self-published titles and I suppose that the ones that Choice of Games release themselves must be better than this. They do seem to be a good bit shorter in word count than this one but quality is more important than quantity anyway. I suppose that I will give one of their titles a try one of these days, especially one of the better reviewed ones, but I’m not feeling very enthusiastic at the moment.