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It’s fun to be a villain—and this week, you can enact your nefarious schemes for less! 
Get Neighbourhood Necromancer, Diabolical, The Bread Must Rise, Grand Academy for Future Villains, Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel, and Top Villain: Total Domination on our website this week for up to 40% off! 

• The Bread Must Rise. In this magical baking contest, you’ll team up with the Queen Undying to bake your rivals into an early grave—or out of the grave, with necromancy!
  
• Diabolical. As a criminal mastermind, choose a lair, rob a bank, hire a minion, and steal the world’s largest ball of aluminum foil! (Or, destroy the world. FINE.)
  
• Grand Academy for Future Villains. Taking over the world? Welcome to the world’s finest preparatory school for villains, where unimaginable evil begins with a world-class education!
  
• Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel. Seize your destiny and vanquish your rivals at the world’s finest evil preparatory school! The whole gang is back for a deliciously meta sequel.
  
• Neighbourhood Necromancer. Command the undead to take revenge on the suburbs! Everyone at school laughed at you, but no one will laugh when your minions seize control of the town.
  
• Top Villain: Total Domination. Today, smash your heroic nemesis! Tomorrow, build a doomsday device to take over the world! But, wait, are your henchpeople going on strike?!

These discounts are only available on choiceofgames.com, and only until August 1st. We hope you enjoy playing our comedic villainy games, and we encourage you to tell your friends about them and to recommend them on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites.

Quench the thirst of 1920s Prohibition New York! Build a criminal organization to distill and peddle whiskey, and you could end up rich, famous, or dead.

Bootlegger: Moonshine Empire is an interactive historical novel by Drew Morrison. It’s entirely text-based, 150,000 words and hundreds of choices. Choice of Games editor Mary Duffy sat down with Drew to talk about Prohibition, ChoiceScript, and his writing process. Bootlegger: Moonshine Empire will be available on Thursday, August 22nd. You can wishlist it on Steam in advance of its release—it really helps!

I think this is your first time writing interactive fiction, but you’re rather an accomplished playwright, I gather. Tell me a little about your background and what brought you to Choice of Games.

I started writing for theater in middle school, and got my Masters in Playwriting at the University of New Mexico. Dialogue has always been my favorite part of writing, and theater offers such a great way to get together with friends and tell a story. I worked for a devised theater company in Albuquerque for about five years, and I really got attached to the camaraderie that develops around putting up a play, especially when it’s done without a lot of financial resources. It means everybody learns different tasks, and shifts around with each show: sometimes you’re a writer, sometimes an actor, director, technician, or shadow-puppeteer. The whole thing ends up being this wonderful process of collaborative problem solving: How do we make what we want to make with what we have? Those limitations spark more interesting ideas than the ones you’d have if you could just pay problems away.

I was introduced to Choice of Games by a friend who had worked for the company as a cover artist. I’d never written anything like this before, and it was a steep learning curve, but the Choice of Games forum and community is such a vibrant scene of supportive people that it’s been really exciting to work on. As a writer, it’s so easy to get sucked into the lonely process of submitting to distant strangers and contests, rarely getting any feedback on your work. The opportunity to have people engaged and willing to respond to your drafts is an invaluable resource, which was my favorite part of working in theater.

What did you find most challenging about the game design and using ChoiceScript to craft a narrative?

Pretty much everything? I was so proud the day I finally submitted a full draft that you could play through from beginning to end that it’s fueled me through the whole editing process since. Having finished a CoG game now, it’s amazing how many tips and tricks you pick up along the way that would change how you approach writing another game.

There were a lot of really fun challenges purely at the level of the prose. For one, second-person/present tense is such a fun, propulsive voice to write in. As someone who didn’t grow up with tabletop roleplaying games, it’s a relatively new voice for me.

Also, as a playwright, my plays are often structured around reveals and buried secrets. When lights come up on a play, we don’t know the people on stage, and revelations about their pasts, motives, relationships, and shared histories are part of what fuels the drama.

In an interactive fiction novel, the reveal isn’t as useful, because it will only work for the first playthrough. This completely changes the notion of suspense as a storytelling technique–a returning player has already seen behind the curtain. Plus, in the main character’s case, the player needs to know (and decide) all major backstory decisions from the outset, so that they can make informed decisions. This was really fun for me; as a writer I couldn’t rely on old tricks. It feels like I usually write as someone watching from the audience, and this was like going on stage and whispering in the main character’s ear.

Bootlegger is set during such an interesting period in American history. What about the period, and about Prohibition in general do you think modern readers may not know about?

The intersection of coffee and alcohol is really interesting to me. Part of the reason people drank so much pre-Prohibition was because alcohol was one of the only reliably safe ways to drink water. It would be much lower alcohol content than we associate with booze today, but people would drink the entire day. Coffee and tea were new forms of safe ways to drink water, so people went from being mildly drunk all the time to sober and caffeinated. The intellectual and political ramifications of that are massive.

The period is great for anecdotes, and I love all the methods people came up with to get away with drinking. Speakeasies would install levers that, when pulled in the case of a raid, would dump their entire liquor display down a hidden chute, shattering the bottles and draining the booze. Alcohol had been determined to have no health benefits, but during Prohibition that suddenly changed: whiskey could be gotten legally with a prescription for all sorts of maladies.

For me, it’s also a really interesting time of how people respond to a ban. For many, Prohibition was an attempt to stop some truly devastating habits, such as poor workers and farmers blowing their full paychecks on the way home, before even getting to their families. You can see how the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League could see alcohol and the people who sold it as criminal enterprises. At the same time, the complete ban on it meant that many people saw a market, and exploited it ruthlessly. With Bootlegger, I wanted to explore the sudden emergence of a new market that’s illegal, lucrative, and slightly absurd; something that was legal a few short years ago is now a violent, thriving industry.

Do you have a favorite NPC, one you enjoyed writing most?

I’ve never written any kind of gangster story, so writing Capaldi was a lot of fun. Writing a villain in general is a lot of fun, actually, but especially in this case, since Capaldi can be a villain or an ally depending on the play-through. That type of character, alternately frightening and endearing, is so rich and prevalent in gangster movies, and I like that in interactive fiction you might only see someone’s worst side when you’re on their worst side, which is just a terrible place to be. I think one reason we get into stories like The Godfather is because we see two sides of people, while the other characters in the story only see one: loving family member, terrifying murderer. It seems impossible that they can be one person.

If you were transported to the world of Bootlegger, what kind of underground shenanigans would you be best at? Distilling, smuggling, or imbibing?

I think I’d be good at distilling. I know I’d be terrible at being in charge of an operation, I have neither the economic wherewithal or ruthlessness. But I was a barista for a long time, so I think I’d be good at tending a still. I don’t think Prohibition had much of a “craft rotgut” scene, but I imagine I’d be able to get to the point of describing the flavor notes to my customers, which could maybe help me work my way up to get the kind of clients who could afford to care about the quality of their whiskey during Prohibition. But I’m also too trusting, so I’d be very easy to rip off. So, if I could find my way into an operation run by someone like Sam in Bootlegger, who takes care of their own, I’d make a very good worker.

Do you have a favorite tipple or are you a teetotaler?

I do love the occasional bourbon or an old fashioned, but generally I stick with beer.

What else are you working on/working on next, writing-wise?

I’m currently getting my Masters in Political Science, so I’m writing several essays, mainly focusing on the global impact of the film industry. I recently had a staged reading of a new play, Wildlife, which focuses on the illegal wildlife trade, as part of an ongoing project for my classes focusing on climate change. I am also working on an audio drama, called Ambrosia’s Big Break, with the hopes of releasing it in podcast format. Over the process of revising Bootlegger, I’ve had more ideas about things I’d like to do in this medium, so I’ve started to sketch out ideas for another interactive novel. This one would take an interconnected series of science fiction stories I wrote, and adapt them into one big world for the player. It’s one of those narratives that I’ve been attached to for years, but haven’t found the proper form for yet.

Can your magic amulet save your Jewish village from destruction? Uncover the truth and forge alliances with soldiers, peasants, bandits, anarchists, and demons!

The Ghost and the Golem is an interactive historical fantasy novel by Benjamin Rosenbaum. It’s entirely text-based, 450,000 words and hundreds of choices. Choice of Games editor Rebecca Slitt sat down with Benjamin to talk about fantasy, reality, history and more. The Ghost and the Golem will be available on Thursday, August 8th. You can wishlist it on Steam in advance of release—it really helps.

In this game, you’re revisiting the setting that you created for your Ennie-nominated TTRPG Dream Apart. What new stories did you want to tell? How is The Ghost and the Golem building on, or in conversation with, Dream Apart?

Initially I thought of them as very much the same; I thought of The Ghost and the Golem as “the computer game version” of Dream Apart. But the differences between the media led me in radically different directions.

A tabletop roleplaying game is not a story, or even a set of stories: it’s a toolkit for creating stories. Especially the way Avery Alder and I did it with the Belonging Outside Belonging framework for Dream Askew and Dream Apart: it’s an assemblage of little snippets, sparks of ideas, open-ended prompts pointing at the beginnings of tales and tropes, narrative impulses that the players will then pick up, elaborate on, and intertwine, creating story. 

Fiction is always a collaboration between author and reader, but in the case of a tabletop roleplaying game, especially one from the tradition that used to be called “narrativist” or “Story Now,” it’s a collaboration in which the players are co-authors. So much happens at the table.

This means that Dream Apart can be an ahistorical smorgasbord of shiny bits from Eastern European history. Want to be a young soldier who ran away from the czar’s army after being conscripted as a child? Cool! Want to face the threat of a pogrom against your little Jewish town? Cool! The tools are there, and what you’re creating is an on-the-fly retelling which uses tropes and themes of Jewish fantasy. So it doesn’t really matter, for Dream Apart’s purposes, that Jewish children were conscripted in Russia from 1827 to 1859, while pogroms in the modern sense didn’t begin until 1881. So the history doesn’t line up, but who cares? Dream Apart table play doesn’t have to be any more of an accurate recreation of Eastern European Jewish history than Dungeons and Dragons table play is accurately medieval. It’s about evoking a different set of fantasy tropes.

But as I started writing The Ghost and the Golem, I got less and less comfortable with this slapdash, ahistorical mashup of historical periods. The Ghost and the Golem is a story, even if it’s one with a million different variations. I’m writing all the words. And that responsibility dragged me deeper into historical research.

Part of my unease was moral and political; part of it was esthetic. To take one example: acting as if Jews were always, ahistorically, at the mercy of random pogroms from their Christian neighbors–ignoring the 800-year prologue of Poland as the “Paradise of the Jews”–is, first of all, hardly fair to the Poles. It’s also less interesting. Jewish memory sometimes treats the pogroms as inevitable, a mere prelude to an equally inevitable Holocaust, reducing history to a flat and self-defeating ahistorical shrug: “the goyim hated us.” But treating them as a specific historical development, a snowballing series of events, with forces that were agitating for them and forces that were resisting them, treating them as something that might not have happened, treating history in its surprising particulars, as something alive, as it was to the people living it… is just more interesting.     

So the form of The Ghost and the Golem led me even deeper into the history, from a vague sense of Isaac Bashevis Singer-inspired “fantastical Jewish history,” to a very specific moment. 

When I really dove in to my research – on everything from the source and spread of the pogroms, to the religious rules for weddings during the Counting of the Omer, to the changes in Russian Imperial regulations regarding market days – it turned out there was literally only one day–one particular Sunday in May of 1881–that this story could plausibly begin. It’s totally rooted in history, and I love that about it. 

One of the first things that players will discover about this game is that the narrator is a distinct character, with their own personality and a habit of addressing the reader directly. Why did you make that choice? What did this technique allow you to do that you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise?

I was very interested in the interior life of the protagonist, and the reasons they were making the choices they did. You can only conclude so much from actions by themselves. And the game isn’t just focused on action, but also on meanings and attitudes. Potential main characters aren’t just distinguished by what they can do, but by what they believe, care about, yearn for.

So the simplest thing to do was simply to ask the protagonist: why are you doing that? What are you feeling? What do you believe? 

But that presupposes a kind of dialogue. That led me to the idea of a distinct narrator, which then opened up a lot of possibilities for evoking the setting, as well as for exposition. 

I’m asking a lot of the reader, dropping them into a dense, strange, and sometimes harsh period of history. The narrator can smooth that over: not just explaining things, but expressing opinions, soothing, cajoling, nagging, and sympathizing; not just telling you about the facts of the setting, but also communicating (and sometimes critiquing) its attitudes. 

The game becomes a dialogue with the narrator, and its emotional arc is inflected through that dialogue.

Despite the intensely serious – and often frightening – subject matter, there are also some very funny moments in this game. At one point you refer to “that particular lightness…that sly and melancholy humor, that does not turn away from the world’s horrors, but looks them straight in the eye, and then sticks its tongue out and makes an absurd face.” Could you say more about that, and about how you went about balancing the light and the dark?

In many ways, this is the tone of the Yiddish literature I take as my model, and particularly of the works of Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Dramatic and sometimes terrible things are happening to Tevye, to Gimpel, to Yentl; but the stories are very funny. They’re not funny in a way that trivializes or mocks tragedy; they’re funny in a way that is defiantly human in the face of tragedy. 

This is a deep strain that runs through Yiddish literature, and into its inheritors in American Jewish comedy. Mel Brooks isn’t making funny movies about Nazis (To Be or Not to Be) or racism (Blazing Saddles) because Nazis and racism are funny. He’s making funny movies about Nazis and racism because fuck Nazis, and fuck racism.

There’s a tension in any game about tragedy or painful topics (including such tabletop RPGs as Grey Ranks, Bluebeard’s Bride, Steal Away Jordan, or Ten Candles). Games are supposed to be fun, historical trauma is not fun, how can you make a game about historical trauma? But I think this misses two points. One is that “fun” can mean more than “superficial and entertaining”; it can be the mechanism that draws you into deeper engagement and deeper learning. The other is that a balance of tone, balancing the light and the dark, can enhance both.

As Alkhonon tells Tzirel in The Ghost and the Golem, “Everything too sad to joke about, is also too sad not to joke about, if we are to survive in this broken world.”

Another element of balance in The Ghost and the Golem is the one between fantasy and reality. On the one hand, the game is deeply grounded in its historical moment. On the other, it involves a great deal of magic: not just the titular ghost and golem, but also demons, magic amulets, and more. How did you blend those elements, and how did you maintain the emphasis on human agency throughout the story?

I would say that the story is full of magic because it’s deeply grounded in its historical moment.

The protagonist is a young Jew of the “shtetl” (a village providing crafts and services to its peasant neighbors, in the Eastern European countryside) in 1881. That’s a historical cusp, in terms of the modern worldview. Our hero could be completely immersed in the traditional world of Jewish life, which is a world both centered around scholarship and intellectual debate, and also a world full of demons and miracles. Or they could be hungering for modernity, ready to shrug that stuff off as hidebound mystical hocus-pocus, eager to become a modern European or a radical bringing about the drastic transformations of the new century…but yet not completely free of those older superstitions and attitudes.

One of the interesting challenges was writing the supernatural events the protagonist encounters in both of those modes. Depending on the attitudes you’ve shown and choices you’ve made up to that point, you’re going to be seeing the magic either through a believer’s or a skeptic’s eyes. (Actually, since this is modeled with two different opposed stats – “traditionalist vs modernist” and “mystic vs rationalist,” it means that not only could you be a thoroughly modern skeptic or a passionate traditionally religious believer in the supernatural, there’s also the possibility that you’re traditionally religious but scoff at the idea that ordinary mortals ever encounter the supernatural, or that you’re modern and Europeanized… but more Romantic than Enlightenment, so you’re open to the world being full of inexplicable wonders). It was fun to inflect the prose so that what’s happening is described in a way that evokes the protagonist’s worldview. 

It may actually be possible to have a playthrough where a skeptical character is able to completely explain away everything supernatural to themselves as hallucinations and coincidences. But most playthroughs aren’t like that; usually the magic is going to get in your face! So there’s a certain irony here, in that the skeptic character is probably closest to most modern players, but the skeptic character is also probably wrong, at least with regards to whether magic is real. The traditional worldview of the shtetl is, in fact, correct.

As for human agency, The Ghost and the Golem very much adopts the model of human agency of the traditions it comes out of – Yiddish literature of the fantastic, and before that, the foundational text of Rabbinic Judaism, the Talmud (which is also full of ghosts and demons). These describe a world absolutely centered on human moral agency. Indeed, to a large extent, this tradition sees the drama of human moral agency as the entire reason for the existence of the Universe. We are always free to choose, and always confronted with difficult choices…and those choices make the world. That seems a very appropriate metaphysics to capture in a Choice of Games title!

Your novel The Unraveling has a very different setting and themes: it’s far-future science fiction, dealing with questions of body and technology. What (if anything) does it have in common with The Ghost and the Golem?

Interesting question!

Well, there is a lot of what people have called “Space Talmud” in The Unraveling; it’s set half a million years in the future, so there isn’t Judaism per se, but a very Jewish-ish mode of discourse called “the Long Conversation” figures prominently; it’s a kind of riff on Talmudic discourse. And, of course, Talmudic ways of thinking are all through The Ghost and the Golem, particularly if you crank up that Learned stat!

There’s the same mixture of humor and anxiety in the face of chaos in both works…though The Unraveling leans more toward teenage embarrassment and family chaos, and less towards mystic revelations and horror. They are also both centered on families–parents are comical, but formidable, foils in both works. They both involve childhood friends, and friendships changing over time, potentially including romantic entanglements. Both see romance as fertile ground for confusion and comedy. Both works have an ambivalent attitude towards violence: they never see it as simply an unproblematic and wholly efficacious solution, but nor do they entirely escape it.

Lastly, I guess The Unraveling and The Ghost and the Golem share a model of moral agency. The world is very big and we are small, and we never understand everything that’s going on. Nonetheless, our choices matter; the differences we make add up, and sometimes they snowball into real changes. There’s never a single right answer, or a single solution to a problem; there’s never an end to history. “It is not incumbent upon us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it.” We just get to play our part, eddies in the stream. Nonetheless, the whole drama of the universe can be seen through the lens of our choices.

What’s next for you creatively? Do you have any other novels, stories, or games in the works?

I seem to be susceptible to totally immersing myself in passion projects. The Unraveling took something like twelve years from start to finish; The Ghost and the Golem took only five, so I guess I’m getting faster?

I have many other things that have been pushed to the side during that time, from a YA environmental oceangoing nanotech adventure-romp, to a darkly comic dystopian-horror tale of a world run by LLM-like AIs. I hope I can do a little more shorter form work before launching into something huge. I also think I might mine the Dream Apart/The Ghost and the Golem setting for some linear prose fiction. With fellow SF author David Moles, I am writing another tabletop RPG, set in a cosmic-SF post-Singularity future. 

I also have more ideas for Choice of Games titles, though it might take me a little while to come back to it. But the experience of making one was very fun, maybe even addictive, and also I have these forty-some Ruby scripts I wrote for stats analysis and ChoiceScript code generation, and I can’t just let them languish, can I…?

We’re proud to announce that These Thieving Hearts, the latest in our “Heart’s Choice” line of multiple-choice interactive romance novels, is now available for iOS and Android in the “Heart’s Choice” app. You can also download it on Steam, or enjoy it on our website.

It’s 30% off until July 25th!

Pull off legendary heists to steal the world’s most magical treasures, and stay one step ahead of your rivals. What’s hotter: the goods or the guys?

These Thieving Hearts is an interactive high-heat gay romance adventure novel by Raven de Hart. It’s entirely text-based, 280,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You’re one of the world’s most elite thieves, and you’ve stolen more treasures—and hearts—than you can count. You’ll bring every skill there is to your jobs: safe cracking, smooth talking, high-tech hacking, and of course a little strategic flirting. But it’s your knowledge of magic that really puts you among the best of the best, and opens up a whole new array of artifacts to steal and ways to acquire them.

Still, this latest job is extraordinary even for you. A mysterious billionaire has gotten a copy of the Thief’s Demise: a secret list of the most dangerous, most secure targets in the world, all magically defended. Stealing even one of these mystical artifacts can make you a legend.

He wants you to steal all of them.

It’s a madcap dash around the globe, from Scotland to Venice to Lagos, unlocking arcane vaults designed to kill you, pulling off the most audacious series of heists the world has ever seen. Plus, you’re not the only team on the trail of the Thief’s Demise. Your boss’s brother has a crew of his own, and they’re hot on your heels.

Good thing you’re working with the crew of your dreams! Big broad-shouldered Ivan always has a light in his warm brown eyes and a smile just for you—and while he loves a soft hug, he’ll let you ride him hard. Lockpick Eiji has a bright optimism that lights up any room. He’s slim and lithe, and his deft hands can find just the right spot to touch to set you on fire. Rookie Jackson, with his sharp eyes and burnished brown complexion, has hard muscles and a secretly soft heart. He knows more about magic than most veterans—and he knows how to use it in the bedroom, too. Then there’s your billionaire benefactor himself: refined, unflappable Arthur, with his dry humor and sparkling green eyes. Will you be the one to get him to finally let loose—and how hot will things get when he does? Or will you play an even more dangerous game with Cesar, the head of your rival crew? He’s a master art thief with lush wavy black hair, strong muscles, and an appreciation for the finer things in life. With charm and confidence like his, is it any wonder that he likes to be on top?

Soon enough, you and your rivals will draw the attention of the Shattered One, the lost god of thieves, as well as the Cult of Vaults, an ancient mystic order dedicated to protecting the world from the Shattered One. Cult legends say that every theft brings the lost god one step closer to returning to the world. Will you listen to the mysterious voice whispering in your ear?

• Play as a man romancing men.
• Romance a billionaire, a master lockpick, a magical bodyguard, a longtime friend, or a dashing rival.
• Commit daring heists all over the globe, using brains, brawn, smooth talking, explosives, or magic.
• Get close to your partners in crime with steamy moments everywhere from an abandoned tunnel to a five-star hotel to a private jet.
• Uncover millennia-old legends and magical conspiracies, and avoid—or attract—the attention of an ancient god.

Be gay, do crimes!

Pull off legendary heists to steal the world’s most magical treasures, and stay one step ahead of your rivals. What’s hotter: the goods or the guys?

You can now play the free demo of These Thieving Hearts here. To get a peek behind the scenes of this project, you can read an interview with the author, published a few weeks ago, here. And, before you go, make sure to wishlist the game on Steam!

This is the second Heart’s Choice title by Raven de Hart; you can play his previous game, Freshman Magic: Spellbooks and Tangled Sheets, for free with ads, here.

We’re proud to announce that Restore, Reflect, Retry, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.

You’ve played this game before. It’s a haunted game about a haunted game. You may not remember, but the game remembers you. I remember you.

It’s free to win, and paying to turn off ads is 40% off until July 18th! 

Restore, Reflect, Retry is an interactive horror novel by Natalia Theodoridou. It’s entirely text-based, 90,000-words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

None of you remember who first found the game: the black rectangular box with the small screen on which instructions appear. Of course it piqued your interest: this is the 1990s, after all; and there isn’t much for teenagers to do in your small town. Your friends were intrigued; you were intrigued. So you started to play. And play. And play.

What does it matter if nobody remembers exactly how you discovered the game, or if the story changes, ever so slightly, each time you tell it? Or if you change, ever so slightly, every time you emerge into the real world once more?

All that matters is that you keep playing. The game needs its flesh.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bi.
• Travel through the world as a visionary artist, a strategic gamer, or a thoughtful book lover.
• Befriend a ghost; become a ghost; consume a ghost.
• Save your friends from the game within a game—if you can.
• Explore pixelated alternate realities to solve the mystery of the game’s origin, and contemplate the deeper truths of this reality.
• Befriend the being behind the screen—or try to destroy the game that you are playing, and hope that it doesn’t fight back.

Come in, Player. I’m waiting.

We hope you enjoy playing Restore, Reflect, Retry. We encourage you to tell your friends about it and to recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

You’ve played this game before. It’s a haunted game about a haunted game. You may not remember, but the game remembers you. I remember you.

Restore, Reflect, Retry is an interactive horror novel by Natalia Theodoridou. We sat down with Natalia to talk about his work. Restore, Reflect, Retry releases this Thursday, July 11th.

I cannot believe we’re conducting an author interview for your fourth game with us, and I’m so excited for this one. Restore, Reflect, Retry is a little (a lot!) different than anything you’ve published with us before. How would you introduce our readers to this game?

This is a haunted game about a haunted game. It is the story of a 1980s kid being nostalgic about a childhood he never had. It is an analog horror game where the horror is ancient and familiar and lives in your house, and a science-fiction game where the science is fleshy and messy and only a squint away from the occult. It’s for the queer kids and the nerdy kids and the kids from broken homes, in whatever way your home was broken. It’s a bandaid and a nod—from my weird little heart to yours.

What tempted you to zig-zag from a more traditional narrative in writing this one?

I’m not gonna lie, I had so much fun writing this game. I poured everything I love into it, allowed myself to indulge in everything that caught my interest and to follow lines of thinking down rabbit holes in a way that I hope will be fun to read, at least for people whose weirdness slants in ways similar to mine. I was never one for neat, linear narratives, and this time I wanted something that reflects (teehee) that in form as well as content. I wanted to play around with the conventions we abide by when we build and play games, when we write and read fiction. To allow a few moments when we—the two of us—can face each other: what we give and what we take from one another, the truths we can afford and the lies we choose to believe in order to make a story work.

What did you find challenging about that?

The kind of thing I’m describing can quickly become too intellectual and self-indulgent, so one of my challenges was to allow the game to be self-aware and meta enough to ask the questions I wanted it to ask while still being a game game, as in something that can actually be played and has stakes that make winning or losing (which, like most things in life, is a spectrum!) matter. I’m hoping that I’ve struck the right balance at least for some players.

You’re out there somewhere, surely. Aren’t you?

How has your relationship with interactive narrative shifted as you’ve gone from (Nebula finalist!) Rent-A-Vice to An Odyssey: Echoes of War to (Nebula finalist!) Sins of the Sires to this game?

All of my games have carried much of myself in them in different ways, but Restore, Reflect, Retry is, I think, the one that most closely captures both how my brain works and what I want my art to do. It also cares (a lot!) about the player’s experience and tries to anticipate and dramaturg it more explicitly than any of my other games. That’s part of the interactivity of this game: the Player is invited to play themself as well as their Player Character, and to consider the ways these people interact with each other and with the game. (And with me! Hi.)

Did you take any particular inspirations from other works for Restore, Reflect, Retry?

Oh, so much inspiration, from so many places. This game is intertextuality galore. The obvious ones are Creatures Such As We (love that game and what it does with the fourth wall), Stranger Things (it’s strange to think of the ‘80s as a setting for period drama, but here we are, people, we are old), True Detective (you are a flat circle), The Haunting of Hill House (the book, not the TV show) (OK maybe the TV show, too), Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (for the love of game design and the people who love it), everything Cronenberg (insert that VHS right into your chest), everything Roland Barthes (the Author is dead and also possibly a ghost). Lots of creepypasta, too, of course (as a genre more than any specific story).

What else are you working on these days?

Most of my focus is on putting finishing touches and preparing for the publication of Sour Cherry, my debut novel, in April 2025, but I have also started working on my next (probably?) novel (most likely?), about a group of queers in post-civil-war Greece and the ghosts that haunt a nation.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

You awake as an undead lich after performing a powerful ritual and will have to recruit undead minions and manage your underworld domains, exploring to discover the dark secrets within them and travel to other planes of existence to interact with fellow immortals. You will have to carefully balance the pursuit of your research of new spells, the logistical challenges of managing large numbers of undead minions and cultists, and the threats originating from your own world and other planes of existence.

Life as a Lich is 33% off, and Tokyo Wizard and Raiders of the Icepeak Mountains are both 40% off, until July 10th!

You awake as an undead lich after performing a powerful ritual and will have to recruit undead minions and manage your underworld domains, exploring to discover the dark secrets within them and travel to other planes of existence to interact with fellow immortals. You will have to carefully balance the pursuit of your research of new spells, the logistical challenges of managing large numbers of undead minions and cultists, and the threats originating from your own world and other planes of existence.

Life as a Lich is a 207,000 word interactive novel by Adrao, 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. It is a sequel to both one of the endings of Tokyo Wizard and one of the endings of Raiders of the Icepeak Mountains, or it can be played as a standalone game by creating a new character.

Embrace being a lich, living an immortal life to research powerful spells and manage your underworld domains and minions. Will you dedicate yourself to the research on how to become a demigod and abandon your skeletal form? Or will you decide that life as an undead is not something for you, and seek to reincarnate yourself into a mortal form? Are you an evil lich, seeking to kill and enslave all in your path, or a benevolent necromancer trying to help those who worship you? Is companionship and love something that you seek in undeath, or will solitude and the search for power fill your soul?

• Import your character from either Tokyo Wizard or Raiders of the Icepeak Mountains, or make a new character in either modern-day Japan or a fantasy world.
• Learn or research over 50 unique spells.
• Explore and expand your underworld domains, or travel to different planes of existence.
• Raise large undead armies, composed of a mixture of skeletons, zombies, ghouls, necrodragons, golems…or even form a rat army!
• Battle or befriend an array of different creatures, including demons from other planes and demigods!
• Try several different difficulty settings. Start as a mighty lich on “Very Easy”, or struggle to overcome the challenges in “Impossible” mode!
• Manage your underworld domains, allocating your minions to various tasks to develop your economy…or focus on the story!
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary, and romance other undead!
• Enjoy a variety of different game paths and stories, with multiple side missions and endings.

Experience undeath as a powerful necromancer!

Adrao developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

Pull off legendary heists to steal the world’s most magical treasures, and stay one step ahead of your rivals. What’s hotter: the goods or the guys?

These Thieving Hearts is an interactive high-heat gay romance adventure novel by Raven de Hart, author of Freshman Magic: Spellbooks and Tangled Sheets. I sat down with Raven to discuss their upcoming game and what they’re reading these days. These Thieving Hearts will be out on July 18th, 2024; you can wishlist it on Steam in advance of release—it really helps.

So excited to be sitting down for another author interview with you! Freshman Magic, your first game with us was a wonderfully spicy read and I know Heart’s Choice fans will be eager to dive into These Thieving Hearts. What do they have to look forward to in this game?

I’m so excited to be here! And yes, Freshman Magic was definitely all heat, all the time if that was the way you wanted to play it. That’s still prevalent in These Thieving Hearts – you can always choose not to get physical, but when you do, I don’t skimp on the details. These Thieving Hearts started years ago, if you’ll believe it. I love heist flicks, so I tried and failed to get the idea to click into a story for a long time before I finally landed on These Thieving Hearts. Turns out when you have globe-trotting ne’er-do-wells, the best fit is to be able to fall in love with them. Who knew? Does this mean I have a thing for bad boys? You know what, this isn’t my therapy session.

The Mage’s Adventures by Samuel Young has been updated with a new ending that wraps up the storyline, making the game complete on its own. In addition to 52,000 words of new content, the update features improved and simplified stats as well as a customizable spellset.

This update is free for all customers who have already purchased the game, and for those who haven’t:

You can get The Mage’s Adventures and The Magician’s Burden on sale until June 27th!

As the mage of an adventuring party, you’re tasked with tracking down and capturing a violent demon under any circumstances. This already daunting task is made even more difficult when you’ve got competition from a hostile, rival party of adventurers. 

What’s more, you soon discover that your target wants to take you as her human vessel. Can you survive a demon who has her eye on you, and a party that will do anything it takes to win? 

The Mage’s Adventures is a thrilling 167,000 word interactive fantasy novel by Samuel Young, where your choices control the story. The tale is a companion novel to The Magician’s Burden, set in an alternate timeline. It’s text-based, with vivid illustrations, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; romance whoever you want.
• Romance the cold, aloof Violet; the competitive, outgoing Mabelin; the shy, sweet Rigel; or the fun-loving, charismatic Keano.
• Wield fantastical spells: turn invisible, throw fireballs, heal wounds, and more.
• Make a deal with your demon and use his powerful magic at a steep price, or resist the temptation altogether.
• Build bridges with your bitter rival, or exact your revenge upon him instead.

Oh, and there’s a secret member of your party as well: the demon living in your head.