For the first time, we’re offering our fans a chance to pre-order our next game, A Midsummer Night’s Choice by Kreg Segall.

We’ll release the game to the public on Thursday, August 25th; you can buy it today at a discounted price. If you buy it here on our website, you’ll be able to play it on your preferred device (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, or Linux) when the game comes out.

Fairy outlaws invade a Shakespearean comedy!

In this Shakespearean comedy adventure, can forbidden love conquer adorable fairy outlaws?

A Midsummer Night’s Choice is a 190,000-word interactive fantasy novel by Kreg Segall, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind”

When your father, the Duke, tries to force you to marry, you’ll leave civilization behind as you flee in disguise, cross-dressed, into the enchanted forest. Mistaken identities, inexplicable bears, and tiny but fearsome fairies await! (Seriously, they wear little walnut shells for helmets, and ride armored baby bunnies into battle.)

Will you fall into the mysterious Faerie Queene’s clutches? Will you (or your identical doppelganger) find true love? Or will your father’s spies find you first?

Hold on to your heart! The course of true love never did run smooth.

• Play as male or female, gay, straight, or bi.
• Inspire the world with your noble deeds, or play everything for laughs.
• Star in a play within a play. (Er, within a game…that you are playing.)
• Become a jester, a diplomat, a knight, a poet, a shepherd–or leave the world behind and join the fairy court.
• Why is there a bear?!

How the pre-order works

Today: Anyone can go to our A Midsummer Night’s Choice page, play the first part of the game for free on our website, and purchase the game at a discounted price.

But the rest of the game is not available to play today, even if you pay now. Everyone who pre-orders the game will get to play it when it becomes available to the public on August 25th.

iOS/Android: On August 25th, we’ll make A Midsummer Night’s Choice available as a free app. Anyone can play the first part of the game for free on iOS and Android (or on our website). Once you reach the end of the free trial, the app will ask you to either purchase the game or “restore” your purchase.

If you’ve pre-ordered the game on our website, you’ll be able to restore your purchase on iOS/Android at no additional charge, unlocking the rest of the game.

Windows/Mac/Linux: On August 25th, players who have purchased the game on our website will be able to download the game directly from us. We’ll make downloads available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

On launch day, (but not before then) the game will also be available to purchase on Steam. We’re not allowed to make our games available for pre-order on Steam yet — that option is available only to larger publishers — but if our pre-order experiment is a hit, we hope to be able to use our data to justify offering pre-orders on Steam as well.

We’ve never done this before

This is the first time Choice of Games has offered a game to the public for pre-order. We think of it as an experiment; we hope to learn a lot about what you’d like to see in the course of the next few weeks. If the experiment is a hit, we’ll try to make more of our games available for pre-order. If our players aren’t interested in pre-ordering, we might modify the experiment next time, or give up on pre-order sales and try something else.