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We’re proud to announce that Choice of Robots, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire. It’s 40% off until January 2.

The robots you design will change the world! Will you show them the true meaning of love, or conquer Alaska with your robot army?

“Choice of Robots” is an epic 300,000-word interactive sci-fi novel by Kevin Gold, 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.

Play out thirty years of your life as a brilliant robot maker, from graduate school near the present day to a future in which your robots have changed everything. Depending on your choices, your robots may be independent or obedient, clumsy or graceful, empathic or cold … and you yourself may live to an old age happily married or alone with only robots to comfort you.

Play as male or female, gay or straight, with nine characters to romance, four alternate climax chapters, and over seventy achievements to unlock.

• Build a unique robot character–you choose everything from its shape to what it calls you
• Instigate or prevent a robotic uprising
• Teach your robots to love humanity, or disdain it
• Build an artificial intelligence suitable to take control of the world’s governments
• Start a war against the United States, and win
• Marry a human or an advanced robot, and start a family

We need your support to continue delivering our games on Steam. Our goal is to release our entire catalog of interactive novels on Steam. Based on the performance of Choice of the Deathless, Thieves’ Gambit: Curse of the Black Cat, and Mecha Ace, Valve has allowed us to ship Choice of Robots plus one additional game TBD. We’ll need to continue to deliver outstanding results to prove that interactive fiction can be successful on Steam.

We’re asking all of our fans to follow us on Steam. Even if you don’t use Steam that much, it will be a big help if you sign up to follow us there, because the more followers we get, the better visibility we get on Steam’s curator list. (Our goal is to hit 3,000 followers for our Steam curation page; we’re about 12% of the way there as I write this!)

When you follow us, you’ll see our games and our recommended games right on your Steam home page. It’s free, and it’s a big help to us, so follow us today!

We hope you enjoy playing Choice of Robots. 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 store ranking. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

We’re proud to announce that Psy High, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, and, via the Chrome Web Store, Windows, OS X, and Linux.

When the kids at your high school start developing psychic powers, you and your friends must team up to stop the principal from taking over the world!

Psy High is an interactive teen supernatural mystery novel by Rebecca Slitt, 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.

Play as male or female; gay, straight, or bi. Will you be a jock or a brain? Popular or ignored? Use your psychic powers to help others, or to take what you want. Win a coveted scholarship, star in the Drama Club play–or lose it all and spend your senior year in juvenile detention. How much are you willing to sacrifice to get ahead in the world?

Can you solve the case? Can you save the school? And most importantly, can you find a date to the prom?

• Solve mysteries in the classic teen-detective genre with a supernatural twist
• Find your place in the cutthroat high-school social scene: be an athlete, an actor, a brain, or a rebel
• Uncover the truth about your small town and its secrets
• Instead of stopping the principal, why not steal his powers for yourself, or even join him in his plan for world domination?
• Find your one true love, or more than one! (They never talked about love triangles in trigonometry!)

We hope you enjoy playing Psy High. 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.

Choice of Games is proud to announce that Creatures Such as We by Lynnea Glasser is now available for free on iOS, Android, and our web site.

Creatures Such as We is a philosophical interactive romance novel 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’s completely free, including no in-game advertisements and no in-app purchases.

In Creatures Such as We, living on the moon is lonely, and stressful, and exhausting. Video games have always offered you an escape to a better life. The easy, happy life you wish you had. Which makes it so frustrating when the game you’ve been playing ends badly. But you have a chance to figure it out, because the next tourist group is the game’s designers. You can debate with them about art, inspire them with the beauty of outer space, get closer to any one specific designer in particular, and finally find out how to get the ending you always wanted.

• Immerse in the beautiful setting of a moon-bound tourist destination a tourist destination.
• Explore the meaning of gaming as a form of artistic expression with a cast of game designers.
• Inspire profound discussions, courage, and even love with the visiting space tourists.
• Six unique character paths, with options to be romantic or maintain strict professionalism.
• Play both your character, and the character of the game-within-a-game.
• Decide for yourself the best way to bridge the gap between game players and designers.
• Inclusive options for gender identity, orientation, race, and age.

Creatures Such as We is One of the Best Games of IFComp

Lynnea wrote Creatures Such as We in ChoiceScript as part of the 20th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp), where it took second place.

One of the beautiful things about IFComp is that people post lots and lots of online reviews for IFComp games. Leigh Alexander posted about Creatures Such as We in The Guardian. Emily Short posted a full review and highlighted it in her “top tier” (best of the competition) roundup, calling it “Well-paced and richly written.”

If you enjoy Creatures Such as We, you might also want to try another of Lynnea Glasser’s games, Coloratura, which won last year’s IFComp and won “Best Game” in the 2013 XYZZY awards. Coloratura was originally parser-based interactive fiction, where you type your actions instead of clicking on them, but Lynnea later rewrote Coloratura in Twine, which may be easier to try for those of you who are unused to parser-based games.

CoG fans would probably also enjoy a few other choice-based IF games from this year’s IFComp, including:

• AlethiCorp by Simon Christiansen, an alternate-reality web site from the future
• With Those We Love Alive by Porpentine, a game that asks you to draw on your own body with a pen or sharpie while you play
• Krypteia by Kateri, a game about lycanthropy, but also about queerness and social identity
• Missive by Joey Fu, in which a series of mysterious letters tell the story of an old love triangle that ended in murder

(IFComp is open to the general public to vote for the best games, and it was very tempting to post about it here, but, in coordination with the competition organizers, we decided not to post about IFComp on our blog or forums until the competition was over, remembering what happened when Choice of Games fans flooded the XYZZY ballot box in 2012. Now that the competition is finished, we’re more than happy to publish Creatures Such as We under our “Choice of Games” label.)

First, we’d like to announce that one of our bestselling games, Mecha Ace, is now available on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Buy it today for 34% off the regular price!

Second, we’re announcing that The Ascot is now available under our “Hosted Games” program for iOS, Android, and the web.

Mecha Ace: Duel giant mechs with plasma sabers to save us all

Step into the cockpit of a giant robot in an interstellar civil war! Customize your mecha to duel against enemy pilots with “monosaber” plasma swords. Find glory, disgrace, and even love.

“Mecha Ace” is a thrilling interactive sci-fi novel by Paul Wang, where your choices control the story. The game is entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

We need your support to continue delivering our games on Steam. Our goal is to release our entire catalog of interactive novels on Steam. Based on the performance of Heroes Rise, Valve has allowed us to ship Choice of the Deathless, Thieves’ Gambit: Curse of the Black Cat, and Mecha Ace. We’ll need to continue to deliver outstanding results to prove that interactive fiction can be successful on Steam.

We’re asking all of our fans to follow us on Steam. Even if you don’t use Steam that much, it will be a big help if you sign up to follow us there, because the more followers we get, the better visibility we get on Steam’s curator list. (Our goal is to hit 3,000 followers for our Steam curation page; we’re about 9% of the way there after just a week!)

When you follow us, you’ll see our games and our recommended games right on your Steam home page. It’s free, and it’s a big help to us, so follow us today!

The Ascot: Excitement! Adventure! Want treasure? (Y/N)

In The Ascot, anything might happen to you on the way to the convenience store. You might even run into a guy handing out cursed ascots that lead you to lost fortunes guarded by terrible monsters. Can you nab 100% of the Hizkwelderbang fortune, or will you be lunch for the Eagle Beast?

“The Ascot” was nominated for a 2009 XYZZY Award for “Best Individual Puzzle,” which is extra impressive when you consider that in this game, you have to speak through an electronic interpreter that only allows you to say “Yes” or “No.” Can you find the best ending with just shaking and nodding?

We hope you enjoy playing Mecha Ace and The Ascot. We encourage you to tell your friends about them, and recommend our games on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the sales charts. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank!

Starting today, you can buy our games for 34% off on Steam! (Sale ends December 2.) This includes the Heroes Rise Trilogy, Choice of the Deathless, and our newest game, Thieves’ Gambit: The Curse of the Black Cat.

We need your support to continue delivering our games on Steam. Steam has introduced a powerful new curation system, that lets you follow people and organizations that recommend good games. We’ve set up our own Steam curation page to recommend our favorite choice-based games, and we’d like you to follow us.

Our goal is to hit 3,000 followers for our Steam curation page. Even if you don’t use Steam that much, it will be a big help if you sign up to follow us there, because the more followers we get, the better visibility we get on Steam’s curator list.

When you follow us, you’ll see our games and our recommended games right on your Steam home page. It’s free, and it’s a big help to us, so follow us today!

Apple released iOS 8.1.1 today, which fixes a bug in iOS 8 that prevented our games from working in iOS VoiceOver mode. Visually impaired users who upgrade to iOS 8.1.1 can now play our games normally.

Have you ever wanted to write an interactive novel? November is National Novel Writing Month or “NaNoWriMo” for short. This year, thousands of authors will write 50,000 words of fiction between November 1st and November 30th.

Of course, most NaNoWriMo authors will write traditional linear novels this year, but we’d like to invite you use ChoiceScript to write an interactive NaNoWriMo novel. ChoiceScript is a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice games (MCGs) like ours. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience.

And you won’t be alone! A number of authors on our forum are going to work on their novels this month together, reporting their progress and encouraging each other to finish.

When you’re finished, you can even submit your finished ChoiceScript game to us; we’ll host it for you publicly and give you a share of the revenue your game produces.

Choice of Games wishes all participants of NaNoWriMo the best of luck. Happy writing!

Choice of the Deathless, Max Gladstone’s interactive necromantic legal thriller, is 34% off on Steam, starting today. The sale ends November 2nd.

If you’ve ever wanted to be an undead skeleton lawyer wizard working with clients from another plane of reality–and who hasn’t?–this is your game.

Buy it today at our lowest price ever!

Choice of Games condemns the misogyny and hate speech of the GamerGate movement.

GamerGate’s primary effect is to drive women from the gaming community. For many participants in GamerGate, stigmatizing and threatening women gamers, game designers, and game commentators is not merely an effect of GamerGate, but is the underlying purpose. Even GamerGaters who do not themselves engage in hate speech against women contribute to the hostile environment of GamerGate when they hold themselves out as comrades-in-arms with people who make rape and murder threats, who engage in doxxing attacks against women for speaking out against GamerGate, and who strive to make the gaming community unwelcoming to women.

Feminism is a core value of Choice of Games. We believe that women, girls, and genderqueer individuals constitute a vital part of the gaming community; they are equally important and as welcome as men and boys. We are proud that many of our authors are women, many of the gamers who enjoy our games are women, and our professional staff includes both women and men.

Choice of Games is proud to fight for social justice. We oppose GamerGate, and we stand with the women who are making a better, more diverse gaming community.

Today, Choice of Games is proud to announce two new games. First, Thieves’ Gambit: The Curse of the Black Cat, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available on Steam, iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire.

Second, we’re announcing that Divided We Fall is now available under our “Hosted Games” program for iOS, Android, and the Chrome Web Store.

Steal the world’s unluckiest diamond in “Thieves’ Gambit: The Curse of the Black Cat”

You’re the world’s greatest jewel thief! Well, second greatest. But if you and your team of talented crooks can steal the Black Cat, the world’s unluckiest diamond, you’ll be legendary!

Thieves’ Gambit: The Curse of the Black Cat is an interactive heist caper by Dana Duffield, 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.

The Black Cat has never been stolen, its previous owners all having died under improbably unfortunate circumstances. Break into the palace of San Castellano, pinch the gem, evade the relentless Inspector Leclerc and get away before you succumb to the Curse of the Black Cat!

Play as male or female; gay, straight, or bi. Choose your methods and your motives. Will you be an honorable thief or a ruthless criminal? A technical genius or a master of disguise? Who can you trust, and who will you double-cross?

• 100,000-word tale of adventure and intrigue
• Fast cars
• High fashion
• State-of-the-art spy gadgets
• Double-cross or be double-crossed

“Divided We Fall” is a Spanish Civil War epic

The Spanish Civil War is the setting of Divided We Fall. In 1936, Spain was a nation bitterly divided by politics, religion and class. These tensions exploded into one of the most brutal and ideological conflicts in history, the Spanish Civil War.

Shape the lives of four Spaniards on both sides of the divide; will they be brutalised, stay true to their principles or even survive? You decide in this 130,000 word illustrated interactive epic.

We hope you enjoy playing Thieves’ Gambit: The Curse of the Black Cat and Divided We Fall. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend our games 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.