Play through Pride and Prejudice, the classic romance novel! You are a young woman in 1813, hoping to find your true love. But which of your five suitors will you favor? The aloof nobleman Mr. Darcy? The amiable Mr. Bingley? The stuffy Mr. Collins, the kind-hearted Colonel Fitzwilliam, or the villainous Mr. Wickham? It’s 33% off until June 14th!
The Courting of Miss Bennet is a 200,000 word interactive romance novel by Michael Gray, 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.
• Find love in the Regency era!
• Play through the classic novel!
• Choose from five different bachelors!
• Experience courting in 1800’s England!
Find your happy ending today!
Michael Gray 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.
Battle the amok mummy of a disreputable love potion huckster while filming the story of the century! There is a news story here bigger than any antiques show. How will you cover it without getting killed and to what lengths will you go to bring home the story of the century? It’s 33% off until June 8th!
A Mummy Is Not An Antique is a 52,000 word interactive novel by Randy Condon, 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.
You play as the producer of a PBS antiques appraisal show, dutifully starting another on-site episode while managing the eccentric personalities of your cast and crew. Events go pear-shaped when a guest arrives with a mummified human body, allegedly the corpse of the local legendary Bog Mummy. Quickly a menagerie of forest shamans, a priest, show-security, a southern gentleman and his supposed grandchildren squabble with increasing fervor over ownership of the body.
• Play as male, female, or non-binary.
• Enjoy a comedy-horror adventure battling (and filming) the supernatural.
• Trade quips with the mummy of Professor Thadeus Frost, salesman extraordinaire of love potion and other dubious concoctions.
• Discover the secrets of the mysterious scroll behind all these shenanigans.
• Risk you and your crew’s life and limb to get the story. But how far is too far? You decide.
• Five different endings available, depending upon your choices.
Randy Condon 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.
We’re proud to announce that Rent-a-Vice, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, iOS, and Android. It’s 25% off until May 31st!
What doesn’t kill you…kills someone else, and leads you down an ethical rabbit hole. In the near future, paying users can rent the “virtual experiences” of other people. These “feeders” sublet their own bodies, at the risk of their own lives, so that customers can safely enjoy extreme, potentially self-destructive vices, like binge eating, cliff diving, or worse.
Rent-a-Vice is a 150,000-word interactive cyberpunk-noir mystery novel by Natalia Theodoridou, 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.
You’re a private investigator with a bad habit, an ex, and mountains of debt–troubles so deep that you stand to lose custody of your kid. When a mysterious client asks for your help finding their missing lover in the seamy world of virtual experience, it’s up to you to gather evidence, experience the technology for yourself, and solve the case.
Delve into the darkest corners of the clandestine Rent-a-Vice industry. If you believe the etho-politicians, VE compromises the well-being of society, and normalizes vice and disorder. But what are users after? Is it entertainment, or something deeper? And is there anything in it for the feeders, other than profit?
As for you, will you resist your own vices, or go all in?
• Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay, straight, or bisexual.
• Fight or embrace your personal demons, struggle against the machinery of power, and find friendship in unlikely places.
• Save those in trouble or extort them for your silence, or go rogue and burn the entire industry to the ground.
• Expose corruption or exploit it for your gain.
• Test your skills as a PI while you share other people’s experiences of life and death.
• Trade favors to retain custody of your child; reunite with your ex, or find romance with someone new.
• Become a champion for the marginalized, usher in a new ethical standard, or step on corpses to climb to the top.
We hope you enjoy playing Rent-a-Vice. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, 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.
What doesn’t kill you…kills someone else, and leads you down an ethical rabbit hole. In the near future, paying users can rent the “virtual experiences” of other people. These “feeders” sublet their own bodies, at the risk of their own lives, so that customers can safely enjoy extreme, potentially self-destructive vices, like binge eating, cliff diving, or worse. Rent-a-Vice is a 150,000-word interactive cyberpunk-noir mystery novel by Natalia Theodoridou. I sat down with Natalia to talk about her game, and the challenges of writing dark. Rent-a-Vice releases this Thursday, May 24th.
What inspired you to write Rent-a-Vice?
This is always the hardest question for me to answer. I can rarely trace the process of creating something from inspiration to end result with straight lines; it’s usually made up of fragments, glimpses, half-remembered things. If I could, I would answer every such question with a collage. The one for Rent-a-Vice would include news articles about virtual reality and empathy games, the cost of mediating and sharing individual experience, Being John Malkovich, a Ray Bradbury story in which a girl could see through other people’s eyes…probably a lot more. But, in its core themes, this is very much a personal piece about addiction and self-harm: how we survive, how we piece ourselves back together, how we connect with each other, how we hold on, how we go on.
How did you start in the world of interactive fiction?
Tory Hoke invited me to contribute to the inaugural issue of sub-Q, a magazine for interactive fiction, back in 2015. I love experimentation and trying out different literary formats, so I was immediately hooked by the new possibilities afforded by the genre. The piece that resulted was “Sleepless.” It takes place in this world where people gradually stop sleeping, and interactive fiction allowed me to explore things that would have been impossible in any other medium: hallucinations, the double vision of sleeplessness, things flickering in the corner of your eye. In the end, “the story itself” was inextricable from the medium; that’s what I like most about interactive fiction. It is impossible to tell this story in any other way, and that’s how it should be.
Rent-a-Vice is arguably the “darkest” game we’ve ever released. What were some of the challenges in writing it?
My writing tends to be rather dark, so some of the challenges I faced with Rent-a-Vice I face with everything I write: how to produce something that talks about dark themes without causing harm (hence the heavy content warnings with which this game comes), and without being utterly depressing. Or, if it is, there needs to be some other use for this darkness: building empathy or understanding; letting some stranger out there know that they’re not the only person on earth to have thought this terrible thought or to have felt that horrible feeling; taking a walk in someone else’s head for a minute–something. I do like fiction that is uplifting and hopeful, but I don’t think that everything always has to be that way; both as a creator and as a reader, I find that rather oppressive. Sometimes, sharing someone else’s darkness can be all you need to make it through the day. You know that Oscar Wilde quote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”? Sometimes you don’t even need the stars; you just need to know there’s someone else down there with you, or that there’s someone else out there who has been where you’ve been.
Because Rent-a-Vice is a game as well as an interactive novel, there was the additional challenge of making this material compelling enough to sustain multiple playthroughs, and to explore a dark situation without imposing thoughts and feelings on players. I think that, ultimately, the difficulty this caused was also my reward: I got to hold these themes that mean so much to me up to the light and explore them from multiple angles, inhabiting different attitudes and points of view. This was a real gift.
How do you find working with ChoiceScript?
I absolutely love it. It’s incredibly writer-friendly and intuitive, but also robust enough to guide a writer towards setting up the game in a way that works. Writing with ChoiceScript really drives home the idea that a single playthrough is always a complete story, but it’s never the whole story. I think this helped me become a better writer by forcing me to interrogate the choices my characters make even in non-interactive stories–to take into account the ghosts of all the choices not made, the paths not taken. It may have also infected my life in the same way a little bit.
What are you writing next?
I am off to the Clarion West Writers Workshop soon, so I will be working on short fiction this summer, but after that I plan to go back to longer work. I would also like to try my hand at another game–something more plot-focused and fun this time. Hopefully.
You survived the fall semester, but things are heating up this winter in Speck, Nebraska! A new villain with mysterious motives emerges to terrorize your city! New professors push you and your classmates harder than ever before! New information is revealed about Zenith-training schools in New York and San Francisco! And if that’s not enough, one of the world’s deadliest villains has promised to return before the end of the semester to finish what she started in the fall! It’s 20% off until May 24th!
Community College Hero: Knowledge is Power is a superpowered 200,000 word interactive novel by Eric Moser, 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.
• Seek retribution for your classmate’s death or focus on protecting the innocent!
• Pursue Zenith power, study battle tactics, or plan to revive the villainous mantle of Dr. Stench!
• Match wits with a mysterious new non-Zenith villain!
• Travel to other cities to rub shoulders with world famous heroes!
• Prepare with your friends and professors for the return of the murderous Manipulator!
Eric Moser 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.
It is the year 2090. An asteroid has been found on a collision course with Earth. There is no stopping it. You have been assigned the task of creating an interstellar spaceship to travel the stars to Kepler 62e, the only confirmed life supporting planet discovered. It’s 33% off until May 17th!
The Kepler Colony: Evacuation is a 170,000 word interactive science fiction novel by Andy Why, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
You and your team of advisers will face many challenges along the way. When should you notify the public? How will you allocate tickets on the ship? What sacrifices will you make to ensure your project is successful? Time is on your side—for now.
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay or straight.
• Play as over 40 different countries, or make your own.
• Choose between a cryogenic ship or a generation model. Why not both?
• Trade with other nations as they battle to build their own spaceships.
• Decide who’s gets to be saved—and who’s left behind.
The fate of your nation is in your hands.
Andy Why 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.
1st Place 180 Files: The Aegis Project by Megan Hall
A tense spy thriller full of twists, gadgets, and emotional depth.
2nd Place Tale of Two Cranes by Michelle Balaban and Stephanie Balaban
An epic story of war, peace, magic, and politics in ancient China.
3rd Place The Twelve Trials by Douglas DiCicco
A high-stakes fantasy competition judged by the gods themselves.
Honorable Mention The Aegis Saga by Charles Parkes
A fantasy epic that pushes the boundaries of narrative and ChoiceScript.
Finalists (alphabetical by title): The Butler Did It by Daniel Jonathan Elliot The Lawless Ones by Avery Moore The Magician’s Burden by Samuel Harrison Young
There were 21 qualifying games in all. The author pool included both first-timers and veterans; and the genres ranged from high fantasy to gritty dystopia to steampunk. We were thrilled with the enthusiasm, creativity, and hard work that we saw in all the contest entries—and even more, with the active, engaged, supportive community of ChoiceScript authors that the contest fostered.
We’re still considering the possibility of a second contest in the future.
Thank you to everyone who entered! Completing a full-length ChoiceScript game is an achievement in itself.
Become a village junk collector with high, magic ambitions to rule in Northwest or Northeast Oz. Multiple cases of mistaken identity involve everybody in Oz from the original Frank L. Baum Oz characters to even yourself. You will be thrust into intrigue and suspense at every turn as you try to replace the dead Wicked Witch of the West and Wicked Witch of the East. It’s 50% off until May 8th!
NE By NW Oz is a 30,000 word interactive novel by Ron Baxley, Jr., 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.
You may soon discover that some may or may not want you to have any of this roles but to remain as you are.
Ron Baxley, Jr. 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.
We’re proud to announce that The Road to Canterbury, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, iOS, and Android. It’s 25% off until May 3rd!
May the best story win! Enter the medieval world of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where your journey, and the stories you tell, will change history.
The Road to Canterbury is a 175,000-word interactive medieval adventure novel by Kate Heartfield, 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.
London, 1375. The Black Prince of England is dying, and peace with France hangs in the balance.
You are a young pauper on a secret mission. Join a pilgrimage to Canterbury with the powerful noblewoman Philippa de Roet, co-sister-in-law to the Black Prince, and Philippa’s husband, Geoffrey Chaucer himself, the customs agent, spy, and occasional poet. Your mission is to persuade Philippa to change the course of history.
You’ll fight raiders and knights, aid or foil an assassin, fire up a peasants’ revolt, and change your luck for the better or worse. And of course, there’s a storytelling contest with a big prize—one you intend to win.
• Play as male, female or non-binary, and as gay, straight, bi, asexual and/or aromantic
• Travel the ancient route of Watling Street from Southwark to Canterbury
• Win a prize in the storytelling contest
• A quest, a joust, a trial by combat? All in a week’s work
• Persuade an influential noblewoman to change her politics
• Find love with a knight, a squire, or a traveler from distant lands
• Become a knight, or the head of an abbey, or a powerful player in London’s merchant guilds
• Solve the mystery that haunts your family
• Declare your loyalty to England or to France and determine the outcome of the Hundred Years’ War
The Hundred Years’ war is heating up: will you stoke the flames on the Road to Canterbury?
We hope you enjoy playing The Road to Canterbury. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, 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.
London, 1375. The Black Prince of England is dying, and peace with France hangs in the balance. You are a young pauper on a secret mission. Join a pilgrimage to Canterbury with the powerful noblewoman Philippa de Roet, co-sister-in-law to the Black Prince, and Philippa’s husband, Geoffrey Chaucer himself, the customs agent, spy, and occasional poet. Your mission is to persuade Philippa to change the course of history. The Road to Canterburyis a 175,000 word interactive medieval adventure novel by Kate Heartfield. I sat down with Kate to talk about The Canterbury Tales and her experiences writing The Road to Canterbury, which releases this Thursday, April 26th.
What inspired this game? Obviously The Canterbury Tales did, but I mean what inspired you to write this game?
The Canterbury Tales seemed perfectly suited to an interactive adaptation: after all, Chaucer describes a very interactive form of story-telling, in which the pilgrims interrupt each other’s stories, or choose their own tales in response to each other. Chaucer gave us a set of timeless and entertaining characters, and I was eager to put them (or people very like them) on the road together and see what happened. I’m also very interested in the politics that ran through Geoffrey Chaucer’s life: I majored in political science, so I’m always fascinated by those undercurrents in history.
What did you find most challenging about writing interactive fiction?
I have a tendency to get tangled up in my plots, even with a single linear storyline, so keeping everything clear in my own mind was a challenge. Although I do outline, I am also the kind of writer whose tales evolve in the telling, so I wrote myself into corners more than once, or ended up with bugs because I ended a scene with a different conception of the plot than I’d started it with.
Did you have a favorite character in this game?
Oh, that’s a tough call! Probably Philippa de Roet, who in real life was not only married to Chaucer but was also right in the middle of all the intrigue at the English court at the time. Next to the player’s, her decisions matter most in the game, and she has a complex, thoughtful personality.
What do you want players to know about this period of history and the folks who populate it?
One thing that was in the back of my mind as I wrote the game is that medieval Europe was not as homogeneous as it’s often portrayed. There were, for example, people of color and people of various religious beliefs, in 14th century England, and the notions we have about what women could and couldn’t do in the Middle Ages tend to be overly simplistic.
Medieval Europe wasn’t static, either. The England of 1375 was changing, largely because of the social and economic effects of the Black Death a generation before. Parliament’s influence was growing, and the game takes place only six years before the Peasants’ Revolt. It’s also right in the middle of the Hundred Years War between France and England. Many of the pilgrims’ concerns are not that different from ours today: they argue about tariffs and trade, for example, and about whether pacifism is a viable ideology.
What else are you working on now?
My debut novel will be in bookstores in mid-May, and the ebook version is releasing April 24. It’s a historical fantasy set in 14th century Flanders, called Armed in Her Fashion, and as it happens, the epigraph is a quote from The Canterbury Tales.
In late 2018, I’ll have a time-travel novella called Alice Payne Arrives out from Tor.com Publications. I’m working on the sequel to that novella now.
I’m also working on a bunch of short fiction, and I’m in the early stages of planning another project for Choice of Games. Stay tuned!
Short answer, Bernard Pivot-style questionnaire:
Favorite color? Dark green.
Favorite word? Unbeknownst.
Profession, other than your own you would like to attempt? Archaeologist.
Profession you would never want to attempt? Anything more than three feet off the ground.
Middle English or Modern Translation? Middle English (the Penguin Classics edition glosses the difficult words very nicely) but I also like the Usborne illustrated edition for kids.
Steam
Twitter
Facebook
Tumblr
RSS Feed
