SAN FRANCISCO--Nov 20, 2015: Choice of Games announced today that "A Study in Steampunk: Choice by Gaslight," the latest in their "Hosted Games" line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available on Steam, iOS, and Android. It's 25% off until December 1.
Steam-powered mechs meet forbidden sorcery! Inspired by Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde, and Jack the Ripper, "A Study in Steampunk: Choice by Gaslight" is an epic 277,000-word interactive mystery novel by Heather Albano, co-author of "Choice of Broadsides," "Choice of Zombies," and "Choice of Romance: Affairs of the Court." 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.
For example, you have only an instant when a foreign spy draws a pistol on your friend and comrade, while you remain unnoticed. What will you do?
A) I draw the enemy's attention to myself and away from my friend.
B) I raise my own revolver and drop the spy where he stands before he can fire.
C) I scoop up a convenient chunk of brick and throw it hard. If I can smash the glass of the building opposite, the enemy may be distracted--and will not be reflexively firing at my position.
The game is afoot! In a world of gaslit streets, mysteriously long-lived foreign nobles, and master criminals, will you defend your Empire from spies or overthrow it from within? Advocate science and reason or learn forbidden magic? Romance men, women, both, or neither? End as a healer, a freedom fighter, a vigilante, or a traitor?
The fate of the Empire is in your hands!
https://www.choiceofgames.com/user-contributed/study-in-steampunk/
https://www.choiceofgames.com/press-files/screenshots/study-in-steampunk/
About the Author
Heather Albano has co-authored five Choice of Games titles--Choice of Broadsides, Choice of Zombies, and the Affairs of the Court trilogy. When not writing for Choice of Games, she works on interactive audio dramas, educational games, the occasional RPG supplement, and time travel novels.
Heather fell in love with Victorian fiction after reading The Hound of the Baskervilles at age twelve, and therefore has quite literally been collecting material for this game since middle-school. She and her husband live in Massachusetts with two cats named Mina and Mycroft (after Harker and Holmes, of course).
"I wanted to write something that celebrated the tropes of Victorian popular fiction and investigated them at the same time," said Heather Albano, author of "A Study in Steampunk: Choice by Gaslight." "I first intended it to be a novel, but as I constructed the world--a world painted entirely in shades of gray, where steam tech was both a weapon against dark sorcery and a threat to healing magic, where you could interact with the dark gritty city as innocently as Sherlock Holmes chasing criminals or equally well decide that the government of England was the true enemy--a world where any viewpoint was viable, depending only on your perspective--I realized the most interesting thing about this story was its choice points."
"Sometimes you're just born at the right time. A generation ago, I would have had to pick one path through the world and make it a novel. Now I have a platform that lets me share all the inherent stories at once, in the form of a game."
About Choice of Games and Hosted Games
Choice of Games was founded by Dan Fabulich and Adam Strong-Morse in 2009. They produce text-based interactive novels for mobile platforms and the web, combining the delicious freedom of the 1980s' choose-a-path gamebooks with the depth and scope of a bestselling novel. Choice of Games adventures have been awarded First Place in IntroComp 2011 (Choice of Zombies), "Best Roleplaying Game of the Year" by JayIsGames (Choice of the Dragon), and Honorable Mention in the IGF Nuovo Awards (Choice of Broadsides).
In addition to developing their own games in-house, Choice of Games has created an easy-to-use programming language for writing text-based games, ChoiceScript, and publishes games written by other designers. Heather Albano used ChoiceScript to develop "A Study in Steampunk: Choice by Gaslight" for Choice of Games' "Hosted Games" label, under which anyone can write and publish an interactive novel.
Contact:
Dan Fabulich
Hosted Games LLC
https://www.choiceofgames.com/press/
press@choiceofgames.com
