It’s 20% off until October 1st! Furthermore, as a special offer, if you purchase Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road by 11:59pm PDT on September 25th, we’ll unlock the options to play as Clan Tremere or Caitiff, “Usurpers and Outcasts,” for free. (Note: Steam purchasers who purchase during the release day period automatically have the DLC, no need to send us a receipt!)
The elders have entrusted you, an elite vampire courier, to deliver their secrets. Can you outrun the hunters, the other drivers, and the rising sun?
Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road is a 650,000-word interactive horror novel by Kyle Marquis, based on Vampire: The Masquerade and set in the World of Darkness shared story universe. 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 a new Dark Age for the dead. When the Second Inquisition’s vampire hunters hacked phone lines and computer networks to expose and destroy vampires all over the world, the elders turned to undead couriers like you. For ten years, you’ve raced across the desert between cities, delivering vital information and supplies. But when an old friend reappears with a plan to disrupt the blood trade across the American Southwest, everything you’ve built starts crashing down.
Outrun the Competition. Drive, hide, or fight back! Unleash the powers of your blood in ancient Disciplines to change form, vanish from sight, or dominate the minds of your enemies. Employ blood magic, inhuman strength, and the creatures of the night to escape destruction—or just run your enemies off the road and keep driving.
Deliver or Die. All secrets have an expiration date—and so do you. Race across the desert to deliver secrets, promises, and threats. Do whatever it takes to drop off your parcel. But when the job is done, will you stick around to exploit the situation?
Run Down Your Prey. Only blood can sate the Hunger. Charm, seduce, or seize what you need, but don’t let anyone know what you are. If you break the Masquerade, your fellow vampires will destroy you for your indiscretions, assuming the Second Inquisition doesn’t find you first.
Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bi.
Hunt the alleys and back roads of the American Southwest to stave off hunger and resist the frenzied call of the Beast.
Join the Camarilla—the immortal society of the vampire elite—or break its hold on the border states.
Confront the horrors of your immortal existence in illegal hospitals, disease-ridden prison camps, and forgotten research facilities littered with failed experiments.
Modify your car for speed, durability, or smuggling, but remember—wherever you’re going, you have to get there by dawn.
Unlock the ability to play as Tremere or Caitiff with the Usurpers and Outcasts DLC.
Death is a hard road. You drive it every night.
We hope you enjoy playing Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road. 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.
The elders have entrusted you, an elite vampire courier, to deliver their secrets. Can you outrun the hunters, the other drivers, and the rising sun? Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road is a 650,000-word interactive novel by Kyle Marquis. I sat down with Kyle to talk about writing in the World of Darkness shared story universe, and Kyle’s abiding love for the opera.
As a special offer, if you purchase the game on release day, and send us your proof of purchase, we will give you the “Usurpers and Outcasts” IAP, featuring the options to play as Tremere or Caitiff for free!
As I learned from your Outstar interview here, you actually have experience playing Vampire: The Masquerade? Tell me about your background with that.
I followed a pretty common trajectory for gamers in the 90s: I fell in love with Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, fell out of love when I wanted a game with more bite, and then went all-in for the World of Darkness. I ran Vampire and Mage games, organized live-action role-playing events, and listened to a lot of industrial music about vampires.
My favorite part of writing in the World of Darkness was seeing how much our world—our regular world—has changed. Everything is cleaner now, even though a lot of people are even worse off. I had these weird little moments writing Night Road where I tried to describe a trash-strewn alley, but the trash has all changed! No more Styrofoam McDonald’s cartons, no more thick carpets of broken needles. Everything got cleaned up; people in charge learned how to hide the rot where tourists won’t see it. So that’s how I approached vampires. Everyone has a camera; you can’t just let it all hang out like you could thirty years ago. That makes everyone brittle and on edge, and it means that all the awful stuff happens behind closed doors, where no one can find out.
What’s the most off-the-wall idea you pitched to WOD that they accepted?
They were really tolerant of my eccentricities. I play it pretty straight when you’re in Tucson (your base of operations), but Night Road gets weird real fast once you’re out in the desert. Out where the Masquerade is a problem for “city ticks,” you’ll encounter polymorphic Gangrel inspired by Coyote (the shapeshifting god), swarming packs of necro-clones, Sabbat relics, and at least one Rolls-Royce with an aircraft engine in it. I think there’s also a giant crossbow for killing equally giant vampires. And Stonehenge.
I wanted to avoid the “ancient tomb” vibe a lot of Vampire material has, especially since, look, has “ancient tomb” stuff ever been cooler than the Ankaran Sarcophagus in Bloodlines 1? Why even compete with that? So Night Road skews toward mad science, forgotten experiments, and—especially with the Sabbat—this weird, eerie feeling that these people are just gone, leaving their art and science behind. What happened to them? Why did they vanish, leaving these empty monuments in the desert?
It’s sometimes easy for VTM players to slip from the mode of personal horror into that of blood-drinking superheroes. Night Road is very much not about being a superhero, but rather the gritty night-to-night existence of sleeping in dumpsters and scrounging enough cash to fill up the tank of your car. How did you navigate a balance between the spirit of the game, player expectations for doing cool vampiric stuff, and player satisfaction with what needs to happen in the story?
It wasn’t easy when I ran tabletop Vampire either, because hey: we’re all here to have a good time, to take charge of our destinies in a way we can’t in real life. No one wants to be a vampire nobody…at least not past chapter 2. But as a writer and game designer, you learn ways to give players a bit of dignity even if their characters are sad-sack dirtbags no one likes. Think of that first haven in Bloodlines 1: what a shithole! But it was your shithole. (Also nowadays that place would go for $2,600 a month, but never mind that.) You give players a bit of ownership, a bit of real choice—something Choice of Games stories allow for—and they won’t mind fighting stray dogs for rat blood.
Also, Night Road isn’t just a story, it’s a game, too. It takes some skill and attention to do well. You want to drive a Lamborghini and live in a Spanish mission with your sexy ghoul and the Prince at your beck and call? You better fight for it, and you better win those fights.
This was quite an ambitious project from a design standpoint. You previously wrote variable-order scenes for Silverworld, but that was only one set of three. Here, you did two sets of three. Any regrets?
Oh yeah, a lot of regrets. It was incredibly stupid of me to do that, but the results are great and the players are going to have fun. Freedom to move around was one of my key design goals going in, and I’m glad I kept the variable-order scenes despite all the headaches they caused me.
Let’s keep this between you, me, and everyone reading this interview, but one inspiration for Night Road is the old LucasArts comedy-adventure game Sam & Max Hit the Road. I wanted to give players a feeling that they could go where they wanted—at least sometimes. Because of how they’re designed, all Choice of Games stories have a relentless forward pace, but like with Silverworld, I wanted to introduce a few choices about where you went first, and why. Also like with Silverworld, I wanted a chance for players to shape their own environment a bit: when you’re back in Tucson, you can acquire property, check out guns ‘n’ gear, learn new skills and powers, even go on mini-missions with your ghoul. Because once you’re back on the road, you’re racing for your next destination.
How do you decompress from writing vampires all day?
I have a garden and a cat, and I cook—mostly Italian food. Please don’t use any pictures of my everyday life in the promotional material; no one would buy my Vampire stuff if they saw my cat lounging in the sun in front of that green bean trellis.
You tweeted a lot about opera while you were writing this game. Did you end up drawing on those stories for this game? Or was it just a way to decompress?
Around two-thirds of the way through designing a Choice of Games story, the pace always gets crazy. It’s because you know what the whole game needs to look like, so if you’re not careful, you’ll work every waking hour pushing toward that finish line. Opera meant that every night at 6 pm, I stopped and made myself do something else. It kept me from burning out, which is important: Night Road is over six hundred thousand words. That’s 4-5 Draculas, back to back!
What was it like working in a circumscribed environment: sharing Invidia Caul with Coteries of New York, watching LA by Night for potential overlaps, being careful to color within the lines of the official WOD lore…
One of the first things I did when developing Night Road was write up a list of things I wasn’t going to include, either because of editorial request, because they never excited me, or because they just weren’t going to work in a courier story. The World of Darkness is so huge that the real risk is overlap: I spent time checking developer notes for other games to make sure I wasn’t doing something that was going to show up elsewhere. But as I said, I received quite a bit of leeway from WOD. Night Road is unambiguously Vampire: The Masquerade, but it’s also definitely filtered through my perspective on the World of Darkness. You really grapple with the Masquerade as a concept, because I think the Masquerade, as an idea, is really cool. Other elements of the setting are skewed from the baseline but still recognizable: Julian Sim is an “Anarch,” but he’s not part of the movement–he’s doing his own weird thing; Tucson has a Gangrel Prince who used to be a First World War fighter pilot and who keeps spying on you with his eagle. In Tucson I wanted to strike a balance between the recognizable and the weird. You shouldn’t ever feel comfortable in the World of Darkness; you shouldn’t be able to walk into a new town and say “That’s the Prince, that’s the local Anarch, this is just like the last town.”
A lot of the canon-continuity work is just about sending the occasional warning email: “Hey, I want to talk about El Paso; is there anything I need to know?” “Hey, I’m bringing back an obscure plot line from a story from 1991 that no one remembers; is that okay?”
You originally wanted to pitch a Mummy game for the WOD license. What was the idea there?
I threw a lot of oddball ideas out when Choice of Games and WOD were working out initial plans for this partnership, from a hardboiled Mummy game where you investigate serial killers by taking on the appearances of their favored victims to…does anyone know what the Qyrl is? No one? Well, the World of Darkness has always been full of weird little corners, and I think that’s where a lot of the horror lies.
Writing for Vampire: The Masquerade is a balancing act in many ways, not just in terms of balancing the ugliness of vampire existence against the player’s understandable desire to be an awesome creature of the night. Balancing horror with WOD’s need to systematize their setting is hard. I was reading Rilke’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Briggs, while writing the first draft of Night Road, and I had the strange realization that a single scene in that novel—a memory of being a small child, and looking under a table, reaching into the darkness, and seeing another hand reach for your hand—was creepier than a lot of scenes in my ostensible horror game. So when I started the second draft, I drew from the more obscure corners of the World of Darkness and populated the story with the unknown, the incomprehensible—things that were a part of the setting, but not categorized and systematized the way Camarilla vampires are. Things that feel wrong and confusing, that shake even a veteran player out of their complacency. There’s bad weird shit out there, and even if you survive it, you might not ever learn its name.
Favorite clan?
Tremere. And not just because blood magic is cool. My favorite thing about the Tremere is how they (sort of) got their start in a completely different game with a different setting and metaphysics (Ars Magica). So they never quite fit in with Vampire. It’s like you can look over their left shoulder and see a whole different universe out there. I love how, no matter how canon changes to try to fit them smoothly into the setting, they never feel like they quite belong. They’re intruders from someone else’s game.
Favorite Tradition?
Do you know that when I was a little black-clad mall rat back before The Matrix came out I thought Vampire: The Masquerade was the least political of the World of Darkness games? I mean, Werewolf’s environmentalism and Mage’s defiant misreading of Baudrillard made their politics obvious, but I really went around for years unaware that a game about sadistic old parasites hogging all the resources and letting their descendants fight for the scraps was political. I was pretty stupid.
To return to the question, I’m very simple and I love the First Tradition: the Masquerade—don’t let mortals know what you are. I love it because it’s such a naked demonstration of “power does what it wants.” What’s a Masquerade violation? Whatever the Prince says. Is creating a ghoul a Masquerade violation? Is feeding? What about just being one of those really ugly clans, like the Nosferatu? Who knows, man. It looks like there’s some kind of coherent ideology, but the Masquerade—even more so than the other Traditions—is just an exercise in naked power. It was always fun running tabletop games, once I figured out what Vampire: The Masquerade was really all about, when new players started to realize that. Wait a minute, this government doesn’t reflect a consistent internal ideology at all! It’s just a load of self-serving bullshit to keep a bunch of old psychopaths in power? And a few minutes later they’d get their heads ripped off. Good times.
Who is your favorite vampire in books/tv/movies and why?
In my media-addled brain there’s a kind of statistical average “cool vampire,” an amalgam character created by comics, anime, and paperbacks I absorbed when I was young and impressionable, not the sophisticated and discriminating aesthete I am now. It’s hard to pull a single character out of that morass of gunfights, sex and witchcraft, but I think the closest single character might be Sonja Blue, of Sunglasses After Dark and subsequent novels. The Sonja Blue novels are violent, fast-paced, almost gleefully cruel at times; they’re not sophisticated entertainment, but if I want sophisticated entertainment I don’t read about vampires, you know? I just want someone to kick ass, live forever, and maybe feel bad about it.
We’re super excited for the release of Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road on September 24th!
As a special offer, if you purchase Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road by 11:59pm PDT on September 25th, you can email us a copy of the receipt and we will credit you the “Usurpers and Outcasts IAP,” featuring the options to play as Tremere or Caitiff, for free.
Experience Vampire: the Masquerade — Night Road as one of the Usurpers, vampires who have stolen the secrets of blood sorcery; or play as an Outcast, a vampire who has no clan—a condition that can be both an asset and a liability. But in the American Southwest, it’s every vampire for themselves—even a Usurper or an Outcast can make it here.
Just email your receipt—Steam, Apple, Amazon, Google, or webstore—to support@choiceofgames.com and we will grant you a key.
Kidnapped from planet Earth by the mysterious Lanista and forced to fight in the Battle of Champions, you will have to balance your training with fighting injustice in an alien world…or becoming a criminal yourself!
Hero or Villain: Battle Royale is a 253,000 word interactive novel by Adrao, where your choices control the story. The game is text-based, but includes some artwork. Your choices control the outcome of the game entirely.
Will you follow the tournament to its conclusion, and claim victory over colleagues and foes? Or will you start your own criminal empire, and accomplish the biggest heist in the history of the planet? Are you a loyal subject, or will you join the ranks of the rebels attempting to overthrow the rule of the Elders over the galaxy?
• Import your character from Book 1, Hero or Villain: Genesis, or create a new one.
• Choose from dozens of powers. You can pounce on your enemies with the power of your fists, strike them down with hellfire, take control of their minds, dodge their attacks with your super-speed, or teleport behind their backs to strike them.
• Build your own gadgets, improving the quality of your armor or the weapons mounted on it.
• You can also learn new alien technology and design even more complex projects that will decide your fate in battles.
• Manage your relationships with your colleagues to help them succeed, or strike them down.
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary, and romance many of the other characters!
• Includes several illustrations to enhance your experience.
• Enjoy a variety of different game paths, with multiple side missions and endings.
• Try several different difficulty settings. Play as a mighty invincible hero, or just somebody only slightly more powerful than an average human.
Andrao 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.
In the great war between the gods, will you wield the chains of destiny, or shatter them forever?
Exile of the Gods is a 500,000 word interactive epic fantasy novel by Jonathan Valuckas, 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.
Our story begins twenty years after the action of the first game, 2015’s Champion of the Gods. Which ending did you get? Start this game as the Champion, a warrior born to serve the gods, and follow the holy destiny the Weavers have crafted for you. Or start this game as the Exile, enemy of the gods, and forge a new life for yourself in the faraway land of Khovros–where mortals are free to choose their own fates.
Champion and Exile alike must unravel a deadly conspiracy, and confront the brewing war upon their gods. Will you vanquish this invading force, or use its power to free your realm from its ruthless creators forever? Take revenge on the gods who exiled you, or steal this chance to prove your worth to the pantheon, and seize your destiny of glory?
The gods made you what you are. Now, you will show them what you are made of.
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, or ace
• Take the role of your realm’s beloved savior, or that of a vengeful warrior living in exile
• Explore a world inspired by the myths of Ancient Greece
• Fight land and sea battles inspired by the military campaigns of antiquity
• Unravel a divine conspiracy that spans two realms, complete with shocking twists
• Use the power of Inspiration to endow your companions with unearthly prowess, or wield Rapture to stun your enemies with bliss
• Move the hearts of your foes with your sincerity, or harness the power of deception to spin a lie that suits your fancy
• Play the game in standalone mode, or import your skills and backstory from “Champion of the Gods” to unlock new storylines–and a terrifying bonus power
• Confront golems, fire-wielding mystics, and the armies of the dead
• Receive a horoscope for your character, based on their virtues and humors
Washington D.C., 2075. You are a superpowered person at an academy for augmented people like you, but mastering your powers and making friends is hard, let alone when villains are about to strike.
It’s 33% off until Sept 10th!
Balance of Superpower is a 67,000-word interactive sci-fi romance novel by Rustem Khafizov. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
You are Rio Ramirez — a non-binary person with the power of perfect balance, but do those powers extend to balancing school, love, and villain-fighting adventures? Will you date a girl whose body is made of an indestructible substance, or a guy whose powers randomize everything around him? Each route you choose leads to a different, unique adventure: will you go to the Moon, or chase a superpowered serial killer?
• Play as Rio Ramirez, a non-binary superpowered person.
• Determine their personality! Will they be extroverted and emotional or introverted and stoic?
• Raise your heroic stats. Will you be a hero who values stealth, a skilled fighter or a hero who offers support to their allies?
• Befriend or date one of the eight other students.
• Ten unique endings, including a secret one.
• A deep, carefully-crafted world of superpowered individuals with lots of lore.
Can you bring balance to the world on the brink of a civil war?
Rustem Khafizov 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.
Take control of a sorcerer in an urban fantasy adventure that adds magic to the present day. Use your magic to fight against an evil sorcerer who is breaking several treaties by using his magic in order to gain world domination. Feel the rush of magic flowing through you as you fight against armed guards and other sorcerers as you break through from your humble private life in an attempt to save the world from your evil rival.
It’s 33% off until Sept 10th!
A Sorcerer’s Story is a 54,000 word interactive novel created by Chris Viola 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.
Will you save the world, die trying, or join up with the villain to gain a share of the pie? Along the way, you will get the chance to:
Play as male, female or nonbinary.
Use a variety of spells, including illusions, fireballs, summoning a variety of creatures, transformation, mind control and knowledge related magic.
Pick a specialty and develop all forms of magic by using them.
Battle with and against those with similar spells, as well as groups of ordinary humans.
Pick a job and one of several hobbies in your personal life, gaining competencies by using physical, mental and social skills.
Control your character’s emotional response to several situations, further immersing you in the story.
Play over and over, revealing many different middle acts and endings.
Chris Viola 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 know this is a difficult time for us all. Remember that we have a library of over 130 games in our convenient Choice of Games omnibus apps on iOS and Android, and now includes 20 games that are now free to win, supported by ads. (That means you can play the whole game, for free, or support our authors by paying to turn off ads and delay breaks.) So in addition to the games in today’s announcement, make sure you check out all our free Choice of Games titles:
We’re proud to announce that Kidnapped! A Royal Birthday, 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 25% off until August 27th!
Escape your captors…and endure your rescuers, but don’t be late to the ball! When you are kidnapped, you must take charge of your rescue, and reclaim your rightful throne.
Kidnapped! A Royal Birthdayis a 158,000-word interactive comedy by Charles Battersby, 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.
Conspirators have imprisoned you in a tower, and are plotting to usurp your throne. And it’s your birthday! Take command of the inept but well-intended crew sent to rescue you from your tower–a brazen knight, a snarky amazon, a cursed enchantress, and a humble peasant. Work together to escape your captors, outwitting your foes to make it back to the castle and regain your power as royal Heir.
But first: fight the three-headed chimera, the two-eyed biclops, and a horde of insatiable gnomes! (They’re surprisingly dangerous after a few drinks.) Wield swords, magic, or fight with your wits and grace. If all else fails, pummel your enemies with a chamberpot tied to a stick.
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary, gay, straight, bisexual, or asexual
• Act like a damsel in distress (or an imperiled person) and let your rescuers do the work, or grab a sword and fight your own battles.
• Unravel the conspiracy behind your abduction and thwart your scheming siblings.
• Side with the aristocrats, or join a peasant rebellion.
• Gain stature to prove that you are the one true Heir.
• Harness fairy magic to bewilder and defeat your foes!
• Disguise yourself as an Elder Vampire, stare down a giant, and take a nap in a glass coffin!
• Find love with any of your rescuers…or marry a goblin. (You know you’re curious.)
• Bring peace to the kingdom, or revel in the chaos of civil war.
We hope you enjoy playing Kidnapped! A Royal Birthday. 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.
Steam
Twitter
Facebook
Tumblr
RSS Feed
