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We’re proud to announce that Forbidden Magic, 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 40% off until August 31st!

As a paranormal agent, your job is to keep magic under wraps. Can you catch a magical arsonist before you lose your heart?

Forbidden Magic is a 145,000-word interactive paranormal romance game by Frances Pauli, author of Brimstone Manor. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You’re a mage on parole for a crime you didn’t commit. Or, maybe you did, but you certainly didn’t intend to get caught. For penance, you’ve been assigned to the Organization for the Protection of Sorcerous Secrets, a task force dedicated to keeping the paranormal out of the public eye.

The vampire who works in the basement is out to get you. Your boss is literally a devil. And they’ve assigned you a hellhound for a partner, a shapeshifter who just happens to be your high-school crush. (Or, choose your own background! Maybe you were the hellhound’s crush? Or perhaps you were rivals, instead?)

Whether you use your superior sleuthing skills, rely on some magic of your own, or resort to dirty tactics, it’s not the worst gig. Hunting down rogues and mopping up public displays of magic could even be fun. But when a magical arsonist goes on a rampage, you’ll need all the help you can get to keep the city safe and to keep your secrets, even if it means working with a human from a rival agency.

The closer you get to finding the arsonist, the closer you get to losing your heart. You used to be very close with the hellhound-shifter who’s now your OPSS partner. Could there be the sparks of something more? Your job is to keep magic out of mortal hands, but wouldn’t it be nice to put yourself in the hands of that tall, broad-shouldered rival agent? Or perhaps you’ll take this opportunity to seduce your boss, the dazzlingly competent and even more dazzlingly dressed devil? And then there’s the suspect whose vulnerability just might melt your heart…

• Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay, straight, or bi.
• Romance a shifter, devil, mage, or even an ordinary human.
• Choose your relationship trope: friends-to-lovers, friends-to-enemies-to-lovers, second-chance romance, and more.
• Choose your magical specialty and build your power!
• Investigate crime in a hidden magical part of the city: fey-owned nightclubs, elf-run diners, secret government agencies, and more.
• Work to keep magic a secret, or unleash forbidden knowledge into the wider world.

As the city burns, let your heart catch fire!

We hope you enjoy playing Forbidden Magic. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and 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.

As a paranormal agent, your job is to keep magic under wraps. Can you catch a magical arsonist before you lose your heart?

Forbidden Magic is a 145,000-word interactive paranormal romance game by Frances Pauli, author of Brimstone Manor. I sat down with Frances to talk about her work and her process.

Forbidden Magic releases this Thursday, August 24th. You can play the first three chapters for free today.

This is your second foray into interactive fiction after your fantastic first Heart’s Choice title, Brimstone Manor. But you’re also a seasoned fiction writer. Please tell our readers about your other writing!

I write novels and short stories across the speculative genres, romance, and humor. Many of my stories feature animal characters, or animal-like aliens, or shifters. Very occasionally, I write about ordinary humans, but even then, you’re likely to find an animal or two among the mix.

What did you find surprising about writing an interactive romance?

It’s really challenging. I feel like reader (or player) expectations are very different from writing a linear narrative. It was interesting to see how readers of interactive romance have very distinct ideas about how they want to play their character and I enjoyed trying to give them enough options to satisfy so many diverse ideas.

Do you particularly enjoy writing in the supernatural genre?

I really do. There’s something about the supernatural that fascinates me, in particular because it has echoes of our own, very relatable, reality but takes things one step farther into the fantastical.

Where did you find inspiration during the writing process?

Everywhere really. Story ideas seem to be all around us, in real life, in the news, in our dreams. I find the really challenging part is deciding which ones to focus on and turn into a working project.

What are you working on now/next?

Currently I am writing fantasy romances in a world populated by horses. The characters come from four different herds with striking differences and yet very universal challenges and feelings. I’m excited by the prospect of showing how individuals from distinct and separate origins can band together to face a shared foe, to discover their own heroism, and of course, find romance.

We’re proud to announce that Top Villain: Total Domination, 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.

It’s 33% off until August 24!

Today, smash your heroic nemesis! Tomorrow, build a doomsday device to take over the world! But, wait, are your henchpeople going on strike?!

Top Villain: Total Domination is a 228,000-word interactive comedy supervillain novel by Brandon Greer. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You are the world’s most villainous supervillain, heck-bent on conquering the world. Carrying on your parents’ villainous legacy, you have built your ideal secret lair and filled it with (mostly) loyal and competent henchpeople. You have honed all kinds of villainous skills, and thanks to your musical-theater training, you know how to make a dramatic entrance and construct the perfect evil monologue. You regularly rob banks and travel by jet pack–when you’re not teleporting, that is–and you are hatching the absolute perfect plan to take over the world. Life is good. (Or evil. Which is good.) With your powers, smarts, and good looks, what can possibly stand in your way?

But there is a thorn in your side. A valiant yellow-clad thorn, with rippling muscles and chiseled jaw: the interplanetary hero Matchless Man. You may have defeated him in the past, but you know that heroes never give up. How will you bring this horrible hero down: will you turn him into a villain like you, negate his powers, or just fight him? And what will you do about his equally horrible and equally heroic friends? (Ugh! Why do heroes always have friends?) Then there’s the intrepid reporter that your henchpeople caught snooping on your secret lair: will you suborn them with your seductive wiles, or will you become the scoop of a lifetime? On top of that, the supervillain organization Multitude of Murderous Malcontents seems to have all of these silly rules about world domination, and they’re conducting a surprise inspection! And, yes, your henchpeople are definitely going on strike.

Oh, also, your mom keeps calling.

Can’t a villain just build a giant world-destroying doomsday weapon in peace?

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, pan, or asexual
• Choose your powers: ice, fire, or telepathy. Or just be so villainously awesome that you don’t need any powers!
• When your henchpeople go on strike, resolve it with charm, or fear
• Attend Villain-Con and meet (or exploit) your biggest fan.
• Customize your lair with gadgets and fabulous decor!
• Disrupt the formation of a heroic league of heroes: turn them against each other, or just destroy their headquarters!
• Defeat your arch-nemesis! And also your regular nemesis! You have a lot of nemesises. Nemeses.
• Deal with your daddy issues. And mommy issues. You’ve got almost as many issues as you have nemeses.
• Romance your chief hench-sidekick, an intrepid reporter, or your heroic nemesis.

This is your chance to stoop to new lows! Mwahahahaha!

We hope you enjoy playing Top Villain: Total Domination. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and 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.

Today, smash your heroic nemesis! Tomorrow, build a doomsday device to take over the world! But, wait, are your henchpeople going on strike?!

Top Villain: Total Domination is a 228,000-word interactive comedy supervillain novel by Brandon Greer. I sat down with Brandon to discuss the villainous inspiration behind the game and his process.

Top Villain: Total Domination releases this Thursday, August 17th. You can play the first three chapters today, for free.

What was the inspiration for this game?

It would probably be easier to list what didn’t inspire Top Villain. At the surface, a lot of my influences were other subversive takes on the classic comic book genre: Mega Mind, Despicable Me, Watchmen, and Venture Bros., all of whom turn the classic hero vs. villain conflict on their heads. That the character of Superman inspired a lot of the game goes without saying. Of course, another major influence was Hamlet, from which I cribbed a major plot point as well as the titles for most of the chapters of the game. I think Disco Elysium inspired a lot of the gameplay as well. I loved that game’s notion of “all right, here’s the chance to say the next wacky, outrageous thing.” But I also liked that the game had this incredibly sincere core, exploring a hurt character who tries to soothe his feelings of loss, frustration, and self-criticism with copious substance abuse. I feel like Top Villain does that too, but substitute the alcohol and drugs with bank robberies and giant lasers.

Do you have any favorite villains from other media—comic books, films, TV series?

I am a big horror guy, so I love Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Dracula, and Patrick Bateman. Essentially, I’ll watch any big ham with a sharp object. But when it comes to non-horror media, I like Lex Luthor, the Green Goblin, Richard III, Baron Harkonnen, Macbeth, Khan Noonien Singh, and (of course) Darth Vader. There is something absolutely compelling about a person with power, influence, and almost militaristic might who is absolutely insane under his calm, collected surface. I think the concept that someone who does not deserve power can obtain it and exploit it is so thoroughly terrifying. Yet I can’t look away. But if we’re talking about villains like the ones in Top Villain, then I’d say Skeletor. You can’t watch a single scene of classic Skeletor and not smile a little. The guy makes looking goofy cool.

Who was your favorite non-player character to write?

Over time, it became Smartica, the PC’s number one henchperson. At first, she was more of a background character that served as more of a litmus test with how dissatisfied the player’s lackeys were. But over time, she became her own character. She’s probably the person who is nicest to the player, and I really do think she has the most intriguing character arc of all the non- player characters. In many ways, by the end of the rewriting process, she ended up not only helping craft a much-improved resolution to the game, but she reinforced one of its major themes as well. This game would not be what it is without her, and I cannot thank my alpha and beta
testers enough for asking for more of her.

What surprised you about the writing process?

I was surprised how much I could write. Since the novel requires the narrative to change depending on a player’s decisions, that meant that I had to write out each scenario for each choice, each success, each failure, and so on.

At first, I struggled to get to the mandated 150,000 words my contract required. But thank God for my editors and beta testers, because they gave me so many more ideas on how to add new scenarios, jokes, and character interactions to flesh the game out more. The game now sits around 200,000 words, which is a little longer than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and a little shorter than Moby-Dick. Now, compare that to some of the other Choice of Games available, and that is short. I never could have imagined that I could have written a 200,000-word anything. Even the novel manuscript I have in my desk drawer is barely 50,000 (cough, cough, literary agents, if you’re reading this). But, hey, there is a first time for everything. I can only hope my next Choice of Games game is Stephen King-length.

What are you working on now/next?

I have a lot of irons in the fire, as well as a nice pair of oven mitts with which to juggle them. I’m wanting to adapt Codename: Blank, a podcast I did a while back, into a comic book series. In Houston, someone will be performing a reading of a play I wrote sometime in October. I also have a skeleton of an idea for a novel that I’m still refining a little.

And you know I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

As the eldest child of the Usurper King, you were always meant to inherit your father’s stolen throne. When the lost heir of the dynasty he ended resurfaces, bent on revenge, you face a difficult choice. Your father’s enemies don’t have to be your own. 

Without allies, the Kidia heir has no hope of taking the throne back, but you could offer them that hope. By allying with his enemy against your father, you could expedite your inheritance and end a dynastic feud, all at once. Always assuming that the vengeful heir is willing to share royal power with you. 

Turncoat Chronicle is a 180,000-word interactive novel by Hazel Gold. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

• Play as male, female, nonbinary, or genderfluid; gay, straight, bi, asexual, or aromantic. 
• Befriend your family’s oldest enemy and end a dynastic grudge. 
• Or, use your wiles to get close to your enemy and secretly plot against them. 
• Rely on your court connections and diplomatic skills to earn your enemy’s trust. 
• Recruit a trustworthy ally to act as a royal doppelganger. 
• Guide your chosen consort as they acclimate to the demands of court life. 
• Aim for the crown, or pull the strings in secret, behind the scenes. 
• Plot your father’s downfall by blade or poison. 
• Or, remain loyal to your father and strive to earn his approval. 
• Take a chance and trust the one who could betray you, and perhaps even fall in love. 

Either way, your decisions will go down in history! 

Turncoat Chronicle is 33% off until August 10th!

Hazel 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.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

After a career where you’ve achieved everything but a championship, you have one last chance. However, the strongest team ever is led by your biggest rival, who is also great greatest player of all time. Can you finally overcome the biggest hurdle in your career?

Last Chance Quarterback is a 115,000-word interactive novel by Chris Viola, author of Super Star Soccer Striker. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. Choose your play style, your personality, and even your team.

• Play as male like the rest of the league or be the sport’s first female or nonbinary star.
• Romance a partner of your choice.
• Choose how you present yourself to your family, the media, and your teammates, developing a full personality.
• Feel the highs and lows of having to rival the greatest player of all time.
• Choose between being a team-first player to increase your chances of victory or boosting your own reputation by increasing your career stats.
• Choose between playing as a powerhouse who can make the big throw, a precise and consistent player, a quick-thinking leader, a shifty fast-on-your-feet scrambler, and more.

The team’s fate rests on your shoulders. Can you handle the pressure?

Last Chance Quarterback is 40% off until August 10th!

Chris 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 Elite Status: Platinum Concierge, 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.

It’s 38% off until August 3rd!

How far would you go to make a billionaire’s dreams come true? Find the unfindable and do the impossible? It’s all in a day’s work for an employee of Platinum Concierge.

Elite Status: Platinum Concierge is a 500,000-word interactive contemporary drama by Emily Short, with additional content by Harris Powell-Smith, 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.

Charter a helicopter on fifteen minutes’ notice to bypass LA rush-hour traffic? Transport a priceless emerald-and-diamond necklace across three continents? Arrange a candlelit dinner in a cave with waiters rappelling down the walls? No problem at all. You have your finger on the pulse of every brand, trend, and connection of the still-new 21st century.

But you also get to see the darkness behind the glitter: the excess, the waste, the callousness of the overly wealthy, the sacrifices that your colleagues make to help already-privileged people’s wishes come true.

As your slate of clients grows, you’ll need to bring every bit of professional skill that you’ve got. When clients’ requests take you close to the edge of legality—and sometimes, over it—will you still grant their wishes? Will you cover up your clients’ misdeeds, no matter how far they go? Will you try to convince them to walk a different path? Will you join them for the ride, basking in the luxury of their lifestyle—and possibly even becoming fabulously wealthy yourself? Will you help your fellow concierges rise along with you, or will you betray and undermine them at every turn?

What will you sacrifice to help your clients? How close will you get to them? How high will you climb in your own quest for wealth and power?

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bi.
• Mingle with Hollywood stars, tech moguls, art connoisseurs, and more!
• Plug into an international network of fellow concierges. What secrets might you learn from them?
• Travel the globe in search of the most fabulous objects and experiences for your clients
• Stick to your principles and donate your fortune to good causes, or break every law and flee from the consequences
• Romance a rebellious trust-funder (whose mom just happens to be one of your most high-value clients), an idealistic journalist, an ambitious co-worker, a whimsical tech millionaire—or even your suave and experienced boss.

Remember, it’s your job to pull out all the stops and help every client achieve the perfect Elite Status.

We hope you enjoy playing Elite Status: Platinum Concierge. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and 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.

How far would you go to make a billionaire’s dreams come true? Find the unfindable and do the impossible? It’s all in a day’s work for an employee of Platinum Concierge.

Elite Status: Platinum Concierge is a 500,000-word interactive contemporary drama by Emily Short. I sat down with Emily to talk about the game, COG’s brand of interactive fiction, and the ways in which interactive fiction and gaming have evolved for Emily over the last few years.

Elite Status: Platinum Concierge releases this Thursday, July 27th. You can play the first few chapters today, for free.

This project evolved over the course of several years, as many of our games do. I’d love to know what you thought about working with the “ChoiceScript machine” and the kinds of structures that lend themselves to ChoiceScript games. You’ve written about Choice of Games’ unique IF flavor before and it’s been a pleasure to see your mind at work on these things.

One of the things I like about the ChoiceScript structure and the CoG brand is the way it leans into customisation of the player character. That invites the author to think about how different kinds of people with different skills would approach the story world, and it functions as a kind of constant story prompt.

Obviously, that protagonist customisation plays into stat checks on different options. In Elite Status I also saw an opportunity to use that PC customisation not only to determine which options succeeded, but also to set up stakes and framing for certain choices as well.

For instance, the protagonist in Elite Status can have a varying level of confidence and self-assurance. Characters with low self-assurance might be less likely to succeed when they need to bluff with a client — but they also have more internal monologue about the risks of a given situation. Meanwhile, protagonists who are well attuned to their clients get a bit more internal monologue about how NPCs are feeling and reacting — because the idea is that you’re more able to read that information at sight.

One thing I’ve effused to others about Elite Status is that the story is a unique real-world tale in our library of games. You play a concierge–a kind of personal fixer for the ultra-wealthy or famous which is a real thing that us plebs are not necessarily aware of. What inspired this as a slice of the world to explore?

When I started writing — quite a long time ago now! — I had just recently come to realise how much day-to-day realities differ for people in different wealth brackets, so that the very wealthy almost seem to live in an alternate universe that works very differently from the one inhabited by most of us. That seemed like space for a bit of comedic writing, using that universe for color and poking a bit of fun at it at the same time.

As time passed, I felt less lighthearted about some of those topics. Ultimately, I think Elite Status winds up dealing with those themes a little more seriously, though I hope readers will still find it entertaining.

I also liked being able to write about real-world travel and use that as a backdrop to the character interactions. I do a fair amount of traveling myself, so while I haven’t been to every location you visit in the game, there’s a decent amount of firsthand research there. That gave me lots of concrete details to work with, often things I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of inventing for a fantasy setting and might not have discovered via online research.

You’ve been working on this game and of course, Failbetter Games projects for the last several years. What has evolved in your thinking about narrative or design in that time?

I’ve always been interested in capturing human connections. How do we relate to non-player characters? What mechanics and writing features can we use to make those connections feel nuanced, realistic, and compelling? What can we say about human relationships through interactive media that we couldn’t convey through non-interactive ones?

Over the years, I’ve spent a fair bit of time and energy on the question of modeling the non-player characters and thinking about mechanics (and in some cases AI tech) to allow for meaningful NPC engagement.

The last few years have been a bit of a class on modeling the player character as well. An emotional connection between PC and NPC is less robust if the player character isn’t also well-defined personality — and yet we don’t always want to force the player to play a predefined character.

That raises interesting challenges like: how do we find out what the player intends for their character? How do we pick up on the player’s intention and make it into an important part of gameplay? How do we let NPCs respond meaningfully to the persona the player is putting forward?

That’s something that came up in Elite Status, but also in Mask of the Rose, a project I worked on for Failbetter Games. It’s a visual novel in appearance, but with a lot more protagonist customisation than most visual novels allow — including the ability to play as an ace and/or aromantic character, and to customise a lot of features of how your character acts in social situations.

What is next for you?

I’m just finishing up at Failbetter and moving on to doing some AAA consulting alongside experimental work of my own for a while. The past couple of full-time jobs I’ve had, while very rewarding, haven’t left me with as much time as I’d like to do personal projects. And I’ve got a big Steam backlog to catch up on, too…

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Survival, horror, and an interactive adventure await those who travel to the dangerous Island of Carnage. Will you escape the bloody carnage that plagues the island, or will you fall victim to it?

Island of Carnage is a 50,000 word interactive survival horror novel by Theodore Nolan, 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.

In this game, you start as a struggling journalist who has a tip for a big story that could launch your career. You travel to a remote island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, fraught with seismic activity, to begin your investigation of a company known as OWL.

Your goal on the island is to gather enough evidence to try and expose OWL for its exploitation of the island for its resources. But survival and escape quickly supersede your initial journalistic endeavors.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary, genderfluid; gay, straight, bi, or ace, and even poly.
• Explore a mysterious island wracked by earthquakes and other perils.
• Face hordes bloodthirsty mutated creatures that crave human flesh.
• Gather evidence to expose corporate exploitation and corruption.
• Team up with your new friends to survive!

Your journey will take you across an island filled with peril, adventure, and life-and-death choices. Survival won’t be easy, but with new friends and your trusty weapon for protection, escape from the island might be possible. Can you escape the Island Of Carnage, or will you end up as a meal for a hungry horde of red-eyed cannibals?

Content Warning: The story Island Of Carnage contains blood, violence, and gore. The flesh-eating creatures, you, and anything else alive on the island can die in this adventure/horror game of survival.

Theodore 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.

Raiders of the Icepeak Mountains, the popular game by Adrao, has been updated with  20,000 words of new content. This update includes a new side quest, four more romance options, more secret rooms, new monsters, and an additional spell, as well as new artwork!

This update is free for all customers who have already purchased the game, and for those who haven’t: get Raiders of the Icepeak Mountains on sale until July 13th!

The orc tribes of Icepeak Mountains are threatening human settlements. Do you have the courage and determination to defeat their clans? Try to survive deadly dungeons and level up as an adventurer.

Raiders of the Icepeak Mountains is a 140,000 word interactive gamebook by Adrao, where a combination of your choices and the roll of dice will determine your destiny. The game is text-based, with artwork allowing you the chance to actually see the exotic locations and dungeons you will visit on your journey.

You will start as a novice adventurer, either a fighter, cleric, wizard or rogue, and level up through a series of quests, either those related to the main story of the game, or other side adventures. The dungeons you will visit have some element of randomness to them, ensuring that even if you play multiple times you will still discover some new secret rooms and monsters. You will have to carefully choose between the abilities and spells at your disposal, and manage well the treasure you loot to buy a variety of objects that can help you in your quests.

• A gamebook similar to those written in the 1980s and 1990s.
• A dice-based RPG with Roguelike elements. No two games will be the same.
• Detailed branching narrative system.
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary. However, do note that there is no romance to be found here.
• Four character classes to choose from: fighter, wizard, cleric or rogue.
• Over 30 different spells to choose from. Will you use a vampiric ray to absorb the energy of your enemies and heal yourself, or the invisibility spell to pass by them without being noticed?
• Multiple types of melee attacks and abilities to use. Cripple your enemies with powerful blows, or adopt a defence stance.
• Dozens of magic objects to use, from magic weapons to potions or scrolls.
• Hordes of enemies to fight, each with their own characteristics and weak points. Will you manage to defeat orc warlords, overcome powerful elementals, and slay mighty dragons?
• Several illustrations to enhance your experience.
• Try several different difficulty settings. Play as a mighty invincible hero, or struggle to defeat the game on the harder modes. What is the maximum score you can reach?