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We’re proud to announce that Paranormal Preparatory School, 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 18th!

This boarding school for supernaturals isn’t hell, but it is on top of it! Can you make peace between the vampire and werewolf students, close the portal to hell, and save the world?

Paranormal Preparatory School is a 340,000-word interactive comedic dark fantasy novel by David Spain. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You’re the only mortal human student at Cavalcade Academy, a school for supernatural beings. Zombies, werewolves, vampires, and more live and study within its ivy-clad walls. Centuries of hatred between vampires and werewolves have led to deep divides between the two species, and this school is the latest battleground. Your eldritch magic powers will be essential to earn the respect of your peers.

With the opening of the elite St. Mary’s Academy next door–a private school full of pampered, privileged mortal humans–your fellow supernatural students will face their first interaction with humanity. Your school’s reputation is at stake, to say nothing of what the wealthy upper-class St. Mary’s students will think of their paranormal neighbors!

And now, as a portal to hell opens beneath Cavalcade Academy, you’ll need to ally with vampires, werewolves, humans, a ghost, and a cyborg zombie to close it. Make the wrong decisions, and it could mean the end of you, your classmates, and perhaps even the entire world.

Oh, and don’t forget to study for your math exam!

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, asexual, or poly
• Choose a side in a centuries–old feud: ally with the vampire clan or werewolf pack; or try to heal the rift between them.
• Save the world from the encroaching flames of hell that rise through the portal near your school.
• Help your classmates promote undead rights–or flee back to the mortal realm.
• Infiltrate the elite neighboring school to discover the origin of your frightening visions.
• Accept a vampire’s kiss, return a werewolf’s passion, or transcend the boundaries of death to love a zombie.

It’s the end of the world. Don’t be late for class!

We hope you enjoy playing Paranormal Preparatory School. 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.

This boarding school for supernaturals isn’t hell, but it is on top of it! Can you make peace between the vampire and werewolf students, close the portal to hell, and save the world? Paranormal Preparatory School is a 340,000-word interactive comedic dark fantasy novel by David Spain. I sat down with David to talk about his upcoming game and the nature of horror and supernatural fiction.

Paranormal Preparatory School releases this Thursday, August 11th. You can play the first three chapters today for free.

You’re an author of horror fiction, but this is your first foray into interactive fiction, I think? Tell me about yourself and your work.

Yes: this is the first interactive work I’ve ever done, though I definitely regret not trying this form sooner. My other works – novels, scripts, and screenplays – have all been linear pieces: a set ending for the story to reach, and the enjoyment’s come from experimenting within that structure. In terms of horror, I’ve written two screenplays: Partake is a class-based horror (think Eyes Wide Shut meets the Tory Party), while Homecoming, which I wrote with my cousin, Joseph Morgan, is a horror-comedy about a village who want to burn a young woman at the stake, only to find that she’s got her own views when it comes to that plan, as well as a vast assortment of weaponry. Joseph and I have also written A Murder at Thornton Manor, a golden age-style murder-mystery play in which the actors die while the characters stay alive.

I live in the Gateshead, in the North East of England, which is where I worked on (wept over? drank through?) my PhD in Creative Writing. For that, I wrote a political novel, A Northern Exit (its working title, Naked Upon Brexit, was rejected for not treating politics seriously enough, which seems a tad unfair at this point). That was actually a lot of fun, particularly when I had to change the entire narrative on two separate occasions to accommodate the results of the EU Referendum and the 2016 US Presidential Election, and the whole experience has led to an enduring love of political fiction and a mild-to-moderate ache in my liver.

Actually, although it’s not supernatural fiction, A Northern Exit is probably the work that’s most closely related to Paranormal Preparatory School thanks to the narrative tone. Its protagonist, Tom, tends to describe both local and national politics with a deadpan cynicism that would seem very familiar to anyone playing Paranormal Preparatory School . Just replace vampires with Conservatives, werewolves with Geordies, and the hellmouth for the regrettable brutalist architecture you can find in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Why a prep school?

I think that schools offer a lot of possibilities as a setting, particularly for an adventure like this. You’ve got vampires and werewolves still locked in an ancient blood feud, but they’re in a social structure where they still need to behave, look smart, and not fight. And then there’s the contrast between the species conflict and the far more universal struggle between school students and teachers who assign you a four-page essay on whether or not Vincentio in Measure for Measure needs to start taking his job a bit more seriously. Which is a fun dynamic.

There’s also the escapism angle, which is always linked with school for me (catch me paying attention in a maths lesson at fifteen years old). If someone told me today that I had to close a hellmouth and save the world, I’d probably tell them that I’d not had the requisite training and they’d need to get in touch with my line manager, who’s on a two-week holiday. But if they’d asked me while I was at school, I’d happily have picked up the nearest hockey stick and charged headlong towards the flames and, more importantly, away from a double period chemistry class. It’s the kind of cheerful, anarchic sense of purpose you can only dream of as an adult.

What did you find most enticing about writing in this new format?

I think it was discovering just how much you can do with it and how much oomph it adds to a story. What I’m trying to do whenever I write a story, no matter the form or genre, is reach a reader and provoke an emotional reaction from them. So doing that with a piece of fiction where the reader is actually making the decisions has been an amazing experience.

There’s also the culpability of the reader in this format. They’re not just reading an account of events, but actively participating, which really amplifies the emotion, whether it’s satisfaction, relief, or horror. What I really hope is that people playing Paranormal Prep get moments where the consequences of their actions really resonate with them.

And what was most challenging for you?

Sort of linked to my last answer: the amount of stuff that you could do by intertwining the code and the narrative is amazing, and the real challenge was finding out new stuff and wanting to include it. I came to this completely new to coding of any kind, and I really wish I’d known more about it before starting.

The other part was multiple endings. Usually, my writing style is knowing how my story ends and carefully building everything towards it. In this case, dealing with all the what-ifs and but-onlys was a very different experience to anything I’d done before, and there were moments of staring at my notes or screen without knowing what the hell I wanted to say next.

But honestly, these are the kinds of things that have made this such a fantastic experience. I love getting challenged and having to learn new things, and this has been a format that’s made sure of both.

What do you hope our players will notice about Paranormal Preparatory School ?

If I had to choose anything, I’d say the humour. Terry Pratchett was the author who made me realise that I wanted to be a writer (while Robin Jarvis was the one who made me realise I loved horror), and the sheer brilliance of his narrative, whether from the wordplay, the innuendo, or the masses of different references, is a huge part of that, and it’s something I’ve tried to include in my own writing voice. Hopefully, anyone playing this game will really enjoy that element.

Is writing in a supernatural world a departure for you or within your personal bailiwick of horror?

Actually, yes: I’ve used supernatural settings and characters in other works, but my horror’s always been rooted in reality so far: human monsters and the real world. That’s not out of any particular ideology or anything – I think Hereditary is just as effective as Midsommar, for example – but rather a case of not having written everything I want to write yet. Basically, whatever I find scary, I’ll use it. I would definitely like, at some stage, to write a pure vampire horror; it’s just a matter of getting around to it.

What are you working on next?

God, so much. I’ve got a bunch of projects I’m involved in at the moment: Joseph and I are working on a fantasy comedy at the moment (Lord of the Rings meets Death of Stalin seems like the best description) as well as a sci-fi comedy about trying to escape a parallel universe. I’ve got some other collaborations on the go too, specifically crime and horror movies, which are a lot of fun to work on.

As for my independent work, I’m finishing off the editing on a fantasy novel called The Royalists and starting on a science-fiction story that I’m consistently failing to think up a title for. The plan is to keep writing until I die, or until there’s some sort of legal action. Either/or.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Walk the path of a legendary mage, and uncover the dark secrets of your heritage! Will you seek revenge, or pursue a path to reconciliation? It’s 25% off until August 11th!

“A Mage Reborn: Book One” is a thrilling 154,000-word interactive fantasy novel written by Adam Alamsyah. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You’ve spent many years on the run from your turbulent past, outmaneuvering your darkest demons for as long as you can remember. After a short stint of hard-earned peace in a village where no one knows your secrets, you are once again thrown headfirst into danger and excitement. An expansive web of royal politics and magical intrigue threatens to swallow the continent whole, and you find yourself right in the thick of the action.

The world churns with danger and arcane secrets at every turn, and the task of navigating it has fallen to you. Will your fearsome powers see you safely to the other side? What kind of legacy will you leave behind?

• Play as a man, woman, or non-binary.
• Walk the path of a legendary mage, combining four different schools of magic to devastating effects.
• Find love with a warrior king or an aspiring saintess, weaving the start of a romance that transcends lifetimes.
• Sift through the memories of your past, and decide how they will determine your future.
• Uncover the secrets of your dark heritage, and harness the tremendous powers that course through your bloodline.
• Strike a bargain with arcane deities beyond your ken, and invoke their powers on the field of battle—at a steep price.
• Rise to lofty heights as the right hand of royalty, and navigate a fall from grace that results in your execution.
• Prime yourself for revenge or reconciliation, while the truths of the world slowly unfold around you.

Adam 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!

Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy are finally tying the knot. Their friends and family have gathered around them to celebrate the happy occasion. Nothing could go wrong…until the unimaginable happens and a murder is committed. It’s 40% off until August 11th!

“Pride and Prejudice and Murder” is a 210,000 word interactive murder-mystery novel by Abigail Shaffer Fuller and 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.

In a room full of loved ones, one of them is a coldblooded killer. Who can be trusted? And what secrets lie hidden underneath a well-crafted murder?

Solve the crime by navigating through multiple pathways and multiple choices. Read the story through the narrator of your choice in order to see different perspectives. You never know where the next clue will lie, or who has the darkest secret to expose.

• Expose a killer in this thrilling sequel to Jane Austen’s classic novel
• Watch the mystery unfold through more than 10 different narrators
• Play out multiple endings
• Interact with all of the classic Pride and Prejudice characters
• Choose where you want the story to go

Abigail and Michael 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 Dragon and the Djinn, 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 40% off until August 4th!

You hold a djinn in a bottle. Make a wish! Will you slay the dragon, or overthrow the emir? Or will you free the djinn, and accept the consequences?

The Dragon and the Djinn is a 710,000 word interactive Arab epic fantasy novel by Athar Fikry, 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.

A dragon terrorizes the grand city of Ghariba – the same dragon that slew the city’s emira. Now a new emir, Alaaeldin, sits upon the throne. He throws lavish parties for the nobility while religious and social unrest churns beneath the city’s surface – and as the dragon’s devastating attacks worsen day by day.

You have come to Ghariba in pursuit of your sister. She stole the magical sword that you made, claiming that it is her destiny to slay the dragon.

But your destiny finds you instead. Jaafar, the Grand Wazir, hands you an unexplained gift, the most precious and dangerous thing of all: a djinn who will grant your every wish. (You may wish as many times as you like! Wish and wish and wish, until your djinn has had enough, twists your words against you, and destroys you with your own wishes.)

With your djinn in your hands, every faction is now vying for your aid. You must use your wits, your words, your strength, and your magic to navigate the politics of the palace, the city, and even the world beyond.

How will you use your wishes? Will you protect Ghariba from the dragon by helping your sister? Will you slay the dragon yourself? Will you listen to those who consider it sacred and want to keep it safe? Will you be able to unravel the mystery behind the dragon’s sudden appearance? Or will you simply take advantage of the chaos to make yourself the richest person in Ghariba?

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bi; cis or trans; aromantic, asexual, or both, with many shadings of asexuality!
• Race through the skies on a magic carpet.
• Use your djinn to wish for information, wealth, and more – or free the djinn and discover even more wonders.
• Slay a dragon – or save it, and help it speak so that it can tell you its secrets.
• Achieve your destiny as a grand magician, a silver-tongued poet, the protector of the realm, or something even greater.
• Secure the reign of Emir Alaaeldin or join forces with those who would depose him—and even take the throne for yourself!
• Find love with a dragon-slaying warrior, a charming court poet, an idealistic prophet, a lofty priestess, a wealthy noble—or even a djinn!

Be careful what you wish for…

We hope you enjoy playing The Dragon and the Djinn. 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.

You hold a djinn in a bottle. Make a wish! Will you slay the dragon, or overthrow the emir? Or will you free the djinn, and accept the consequences? The Dragon and the Djinn is a 710,000 word interactive Arab epic fantasy novel by Athar Fikry. I sat down with Athar to discuss the genesis of the game and its lore. The Dragon and the Djinn releases this Thursday, July 28th. You can play the first four chapters for free, today. 

This is such an incredible game, vastly different from anything we have published before. Tell me about your background and the genesis of this story.

Thank you, you’re far too kind. Here’s hoping for a slew of games in The Dragon and the Djinn’s vein to follow!

The genesis of this story, now that I think about it, probably started when I was listening to a podcast summarizing the original Aladdin story. Now, I’m Egyptian, so the Aladdin story and other stories from 1001 Nights have been a sort of ambient noise in the background for a lot of my life. There was a local radio series about them ages ago, plenty of pop culture references and so on, but listening to it in English was a different experience. I’m sure other bilinguals can relate—things live in different parts of my brain in different languages, and the fantasy writer part is in English.

So when Aladdin wished for a palace and servants and riches, my fantasy writer brain sat up and said, “Hang on, where did they come from?”

Because djinn aren’t all-powerful. They can’t create from nothing. In the Muslim tradition I was raised in—and take this with a grain of salt, because I’m not Muslim anymore—it’s emphasized that even when djinn can seem to have knowledge of the future, for instance, it’s only because they eavesdropped on heaven. No phenomenal cosmic powers here. So if Aladdin’s genie can’t know the unknown or click his fingers and make something from nothing, where did it all come from?

Then I smashed that together with my fascination for people adjacent to Chosen Ones and here we are, a truly absurd number of words later.

What about the djinn legends intrigued you as a setting for interactive fiction?

The thing is, djinn aren’t quite legends here in Egypt. Not really. They’re mentioned in the Quran and therefore many people consider them very real, just the sort of real you don’t tend to talk about. For me, djinn have always lived in that sort of in-between space where you scoff at the superstition in the bright light of morning and then it’s half-dark and you’re alone in the house and rushing past a mirror in your hallway, chased by the whisper of what if?

Djinn are versatile too, which is very fun. Supposedly, they live in a world adjacent to ours, but also in the hidden spaces of our world. They have different powers and rankings, some are good and some are bad, some are tied to you and some want to lure you to a horrible end and some live their lives as far away from humans as they can get. There’s a lot of material to play with here.

You’re obviously very steeped in fantasy lore–what books, games, artwork, or films inspired you as you were writing this game?

I have a very distinct memory of this one time I was reading S.A. Chakraborty’s The City of Brass on my phone at work, and I remember coming across the word aywa which means yes in Egyptian Arabic, and just…the sheer delight of recognition there. It’s such a small thing, that aywa, but I am often very skeptical of books set in Egypt—more often than not they’re actually set in what I like to call Pyramidland and they just don’t know it—and the bright fizzle of, “Oh that’s mine, I recognize it!” was very heady. Invoking that feeling in others has driven a lot of my writing for this game.

Otherwise, I could go on about my fantasy touchstones—Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series for its voice, the effect of Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan as the first time I saw an Arab protagonist in a fantasy novel—but truthfully when I was actually writing, I was grabbing inspiration from everywhere I could and very little of it was from epic high-fantasy books.

I looked to translations of Arabic novels like Basma Abdelaziz’s The Queue to see how the translators grappled with communicating the society to a foreign audience. I looked to other SWANA fantasy writers to see how they handled bringing their cultures into made-up worlds, and Somaiya Daud’s Mirage comes to mind. I played a truly ridiculous amount of rpgs to get a feel for choices and when they worked for me and when they made me feel cheated and, needless to say, Disco Elysium was a revelation. I found a lot of inspiration from live play ttrpgs like Dimension 20 for how gleefully they take from, riff off of, and gently poke fun at fantasy tropes. I’ve also been pickling myself in horror audio dramas for the past several years, each a master class in developing atmosphere and distinct character voices. I’m especially fascinated by what Malevolent is doing right now, as an interactive podcast.

But strangely, looking back, I think the most inspiration I got was from a twitter thread. I wish I could find it again now, but I think it was a conversation (or maybe multiple conversations) started by author Jeannette Ng, which emphasized how often creators of color who choose to bring their non-Western cultures to their writing face a certain pressure for their stories to be historically accurate and capital-C Correct and how we should get to be silly with it. So often people expect our creations to be educational and representative of our cultures, and meanwhile European-based fantasies can swan about mixing eras and languages and architectural styles and having potatoes and all sorts of fun. So I decided I also wanted to have fun with my setting.

Don’t get me wrong, I still did an absurd amount of historical research—did you know the Abbasids had ice-based desserts?—but Ghariba is not meant to represent one specific city in one specific time, per se, so much as evoke the general feel of one. I combined historical details with some details of my day-to-day life here in Cairo, mixed Arabic dialects in some cases and in other cases entirely avoided naming things, so as not to tie them to a specific region. I took what I thought was cool and threw away what wasn’t, remixed myths and stories to my liking, and then there’s a bunch of stuff I just invented whole-cloth. It’s been an interesting experiment, and I hope readers have as much fun in this setting as I did.

This game is 700,000 words long, and so is quite the fantasy epic. What were the challenges for you of writing such a long game?

Okay I’m going to be glib for a second here: the main challenge of writing such a long game was…the writing.

No, hang on, hear me out.

The issue was twofold. First, I hadn’t realized quite what a behemoth this game would turn out to be. I knew it would be big, obviously, but it’s a bit like I’d psyched myself up to eat an elephant and then just as I’d finished snacking on its trunk, I realized it was actually just a third of a dragon’s tail and whoo boy, I still had a lot to go. In hindsight, of course, I should have known, considering I start chapter two with the player in four possible locations (pro tip: don’t do this) but when I was mired in the middle it felt like an insurmountable thing. Especially as I started having to deal with the consequences of my very many branches and figure out what could and could not be trimmed back and how to fit it all together. It took me a good long while to just push through.

Second is that…well, it took me a good long while to push through.

I started writing The Dragon and the Djinn in 2018. Now I don’t know about you, but four years is a very long time. I switched careers, got my ADHD diagnosis, developed carpal tunnel, lost my gender somewhere along the way, not to mention witnessed the world becoming, broadly, a trashfire. Each of those things influenced me and changed how I work, how I write, how much I can write, and what I want to write, and so my earlier chapters had to be changed to reflect that as well and whatever couldn’t be reworked, I added to later on. I’m glad I had the time to let the draft grow and develop this way (and I have a lot of appreciation for the CoG team for being flexible enough to give me that time) but the changes I needed to make certainly weren’t helping the workload any.

What do you think will surprise players about The Dragon and the Djinn?

Ooh, that’s difficult to say. I mean, surprise relies largely on expectations, right? And it’s difficult to predict what players’ expectations will be, going into this game. I suppose players may end up surprised by how much Arabic they’re osmosing, because I sure do use a lot of it, or how many stories and myths I’ve chopped up and stuffed into various nooks and crannies throughout.

Or by my horrible Disney’s Aladdin-based jokes because I couldn’t resist.

I also really, really hope my fellow aro and ace players are pleasantly surprised by some of the relationship options I’ve written.

What are you working on next?

I’m currently a contributing writer on Emerald Templars, a dark fantasy ttrpg, and I’ve been having a blast slowly wading into the ttrpg space. I have a few short ttrpgs of my own in the works as well, including at least one that will be set in the world of The Dragon and the Djinn. It’s a Honey Heist hack wherein players are flying carpets, and I think it’s going to be very fun.

Otherwise, I’ve been focusing on short stories, mostly to remind myself I am indeed capable of finishing projects without them turning into nonsense behemoths. To prove me wrong, a new game concept has decided to gently gnaw on my brain. I suppose it was only a matter of time before all the horror I’ve been consuming consumed me as well, and IF seems like the perfect medium for exploring the agency (or lack thereof) of a horror protagonist. Whether it’s with this concept or something else, though, I doubt this will be my last foray into ChoiceScript. I just hope my next will be more…contained, shall we say.