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Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Join The Archangels on their bloody campaign against the Chicago Mafia, to take them down by any means necessary. Play as criminal vigilante alongside them, or play as an informant and secretly work against them. Roll the dice, and survive the deadly consequences of your actions.It’s 30% off until November 21st!

Breach: The Archangel Job is an 822,000-word thrilling interactive crime novel by Michael Maxwell and Ben Luigi, where your choices control the story.

Explore the rich background and personalities of your motley crew of international criminals as you wage a war against the mafia throughout the game. With the randomized dice system, no gameplay will ever be the same, and your skills are half of what you need. To survive in this world, you’re also going to need luck. Good luck!

Your randomized fate and destiny awaits you!

• Play as male, female, trans, or non-binary; gay, straight, bisexual, or asexual.
• Romance more than 10 characters with their own different backgrounds and personalities.
• Plan and execute 2 critical and meticulous heists.
• Scale down the side of a high riser after a daring kidnapping.
• Explore the underground black market hidden under a church.
• Customize your player’s appearance, gear, and weaponry.
• Survive a deadly FBI raid.
• Become Chicago’s most wanted criminal, vigilante hero, or betray your crew as an informant.

Michael and Ben 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 Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel, 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 Omnibus app. It’s 40% off until November 14th!

Congratulations! We are delighted to welcome you back to the Grand Academy for Future Villains, the world’s finest evil preparatory school. It’s sophomore year, and everyone’s back for a deliciously meta sequel.

Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel is a hilarious 215,000-word interactive novel and sequel to Grand Academy for Future Villains, by Katherine Nehring, 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 the space between worlds, between stories, beyond time and space itself, the Grand Academy for Future Villains trains the bad guys that every epic saga needs. Behold our dormitories, each befitting their narrative genre: horror, fantasy, sci-fi, or thriller.

This year holds terrifying new challenges: a roommate, a pet, and the ominous Board of Visitors and Overlords, who have come to review the Academy’s accreditation. Under the Board’s steely gaze, you may be eligible to receive a destiny, which every true villain craves. They have also set each genre against one another in the house tournament. Will you lead your house to victory, betray your comrades, or perhaps both?

And of course your “friends” are back, too. Aurion, Kinistra, Phil. Why, even your maleficent mother, Maedryn the Terror of Three Worlds, is here. Or shall I call her…Professor Maedryn?

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary (or unhuman), gay, straight, bi, or ace.

• Play the game as a standalone, or import a saved character from Grand Academy for Future Villains.

• As Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Thriller battle each other, use your genre-savvy to lead your genre to victory–or to seize a destiny for yourself. • Raise an illicit monstrous pet in your dorm room!

• Support your mother’s plans for school domination–or break free and steal her clone army.

• As a TA, help your favorite professor get tenure–or sabotage their chances, and as the RA of Sci-Fi, Horror, Thriller, or Fantasy, figure out what’s best for your evil little charges.

• Discover the Academy’s fatal weakness!

• Acquire the metafictional tools you’ll need to win the game of genre against genre! What can you do with a plot-hole digger or a flashback gun?

• Defeat your nemesis! Or save them! Or smooch them!

And when things look bleak just remember: it’s a trap! But you should know. You set it.

We hope you enjoy playing Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel. 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.

Congratulations! We are delighted to welcome you back to the Grand Academy for Future Villains, the world’s finest evil preparatory school. It’s sophomore year, and everyone’s back for a deliciously meta sequel, Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel. This year holds terrifying new challenges: a roommate, a pet, and the ominous Board of Visitors and Overlords, who have come to review the Academy’s accreditation. Under the Board’s steely gaze, you may be eligible to receive a destiny, which every true villain craves. I sat down with Katherine Nehring on Halloween to talk about this long anticipated sequel, and what kind of villain she is. 

This has been an amazing year for sequels at Choice of Games, and though no editor can love one project more than any other (it’s like children), I do have a special fond affection for Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel. Tell me about how it was to dive back into this world?

I’m glad this world has an enduring appeal for you – it does for me too. When I was a kid I would tell stories set in a version of the Grand Academy to entertain my siblings, and coming back to that concept so many years later to develop into a full-fledged game was a lot of fun. Because the Academy is a place that’s explicitly set outside the borders of genre, it’s a place where anything can happen. Hordes of mindless replicas swarming the school? The school computer system taking a romantic interest in you? The mailroom being full of–well, I should save that for the game! Of course, that sort of freedom comes with its own restrictions–one wild event after another can lead to a loss of forward momentum, improbably good or bad events can lose the reader’s interest unless they have consequences. So maybe I should say it’s a place where anything can happen–so long as it can be narratively justified.

And like a lot of games written without a sequel in mind, Grand Academy for Future Villains was not an easy game to pick up a number of disparate endings from for people who want to import a character into this sequel.

This was a challenge! The first game featured three very different states for the Academy at the end of the game, including one where the Academy was destroyed. At first I thought I’d design the sequel only for the first two endings, but I realized that people would want to port their characters and experiences over no matter what they did in the first game. So then the challenge was to bring every narrative possibility back together without making it seem like the choices made in the previous game were simply being erased. I’m quite pleased with the solution I eventually came up with. As the title suggests, we’re having some fun with the very idea of sequels.

Grand Academy II sees the return of many of our old friends, we have some wonderful new characters in the form of the Board of Visitors and Overlords. Tell me a little about the inspiration there.

In the last game, the player determined what kind of institution the Academy was going to be (or if it even survived at all). This game asks the next questions: What keeps the Academy going? What underpins it? And who could it possibly answer to?

The names of the governing boards of institutions of higher education have always struck me as a little peculiar. “Board of Visitors,” “Board of Regents,” “Honorable and Reverend Board of Overseers.” From there, the name and role of the Board of Visitors and Overlords was clear.

Why do institutions of education make such wonderful settings for entertaining literary pastiche?

Schools famously straddle the line between reality and unreality. “Wait till you get out in the real world,” students are warned darkly, as if studying a thing were less real than practicing it. Certainly study affords a degree of distance, and I think that’s part of the fun of fictional (and metafictional) educational institutions. You the student are not yet a full-fledged villain (or hero, or wizard, or what have you) so you can look at your field of study from the outside. But you’re not just waiting for your story to begin, you’re having adventures and intrigues within the school setting. Add to that the attempts of teachers and administration to restrain and direct student activities, and you’ve got an entertaining contrast between the world-as-studied and the world-as-experienced.

We’re conducting this interview on Halloween, so I would ask: is Halloween the national holiday of villains? If so, what sort of villain are you?

Dressing up as anything is fun, but Halloween certainly has a particular affinity for the monstrous and the frightening. You can try on the role of a creature of unbridled appetite, of chaos and hedonism, and suffer consequences no worse than indigestion. As for what sort of villain I’d be– my most successful scary costume was dressing as a praying mantis as a kid, with a posterboard mask and large paper plates for eyes. Suddenly swivelling this head produced gratifying reactions in the onlookers.

And finally, if you taught at the Grand Academy for Future Villains, what subject would you teach?

I’ve asked myself this several times! I have a particular fondness for Professor Ulik and the whole Evil Design department–the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating an effective villainous setting deserves attention! And I’ve put more of myself than I care to admit into Maedryn, the player’s mother, who’s arrogant and high-handed but who constantly overextends herself. But I think if I had to pick a subject, I’d pick something metafictional. Tropes To Watch Out For, perhaps, or Developing a Tragic Backstory.

We’re proud to announce that The Fog Knows Your Name, 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 Omnibus app. It’s 33% off until October 31!

Step into the fog to confront your terror: the evil that hides within.

The Fog Knows Your Name is a 300,000 word interactive teen horror novel by Clio Yun-su Davis, 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 senior year of high school. Your classmate Rex Keller was found dead six months ago, and you were the last person to see him alive. Half the town thinks you murdered him, including his sister, Ennis. The other half believes it was the fog.

In your town, ever since anyone can remember, people die when the fog rolls in. No one knows exactly how or why. Some say the land didn’t want the colonizers, so it sends the fog as an agent of vengeance. Some say the Devil himself lurks in the fog, collecting souls. Others believe the fog simply drives people mad, causing them to enact violence onto each other and onto themselves.

There is one element of the tale that remains the same in every telling: those who perish in the fog are guilty of wronging another without confessing to it. Those who admit to causing harm can walk in the fog untouched. The liars die.

Their ghosts haunt the town. They’re haunting you, they’re haunting Ennis Keller, and they’re haunting your friends at school. If you and your friends can’t unravel the fog’s mysteries in time, those ghosts are going to kill you, one way or another.

• Play as female, male, or non-binary; gay, straight, bi, ace, aromantic, or poly.
• Stop the thing in the fog and exorcise the ghosts who haunt your town.
• Enter the fog and die.
• Solve murders. The clues are just waiting in the fog.
• Entangle yourself in romances with your friends and enemies.
• Protect the town that despises you or take vengeance against them.

When the dead speak, will you give them what they want or put an end to them? Clear the past, clear your name, clear the fog.

We hope you enjoy playing The Fog Knows Your Name. 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.

Step into the fog to confront your terror: the evil that hides within.

It’s senior year of high school. Your classmate Rex Keller was found dead six months ago, and you were the last person to see him alive. Half the town thinks you murdered him, including his sister, Ennis. The other half believes it was the fog.

The Fog Knows Your Name is a 300,000 word interactive teen horror novel by Clio Yun-su Davis. I sat down with Clio to talk about horror and why Maine is so horrifying. The Fog Knows Your Name releases this Thursday, Oct 24th. You can play the first three chapters now for free.

Fog is one of the few true horror stories in the Choice of Games catalogue–and it’s also a great teen drama. Why do teens and horror go so well together? 

I think it’s because being a teenager is already terrifying. You’re simultaneously coming into unprecedented power and responsibility while also realizing just how limited and trapped you are by your circumstances. Friendships that were simple in childhood can grow into complicated messes, and suddenly your relationships with everyone around you are so much more complex because they’re all going through the same thing. It’s a lot of uncertainty as well as a lot of agency since you’re an almost-adult, and those are both two key components of horror. It’s pretty scary to not understand why something is happening but to know that maybe you should try to do something about it!

It’s also a time in life when people are prone to feeling especially isolated, another ingredient that works well with horror. Adults often don’t believe you when you try to open up to them, people judge you based on rumors alone, and friends can turn on you in an instant because they’re testing the extent of their social power. You really have to learn to become self-reliant, and that skill is extremely important both when it comes to surviving horror stories and life in general. There are a lot of life lessons to be learned from the genre.

What drew you to this story in particular? I’m curious too if you’ve spent time in Maine, where Fog is set and where I recently relocated.

That’s very cool that you’re in Maine now! It does seem to be a hub for the horror genre, doesn’t it? I came up with the initial idea for Fog when I was in Stonington, Maine with family. Originally it was supposed to be a short story, but when it came time to pitch ideas to Choice of Games I realized it was a good fit. Many of my games explore grief in some way, and horror makes for an excellent vehicle specifically for that. With Fog, I was particularly interested in setting up a story in which players are confronted with the monstrosities created by overwhelming grief.

Fog itself, of course, plays an important role in the game. It was frequently foggy out while I was in Stonington, and there was one morning in particular when I was standing out by the water and couldn’t see anything around me at all. I immediately fell in love with that eerie feeling and went running around in the fog like the weird goblin I am, then did a photoshoot with my siblings where they pretended to be ghosts. There’s a certain fishing shack that appears in the game that is very much based on a fishing shack that’s in many of those photos. I also got inspiration from standing out on a dock as the sun went down while listening to the It Follows soundtrack. I scared myself so badly I had trouble walking back to the house. I ended up regretting that particular decision.

Arbor Isle, the town in the game, is very different from Stonington, though there are a few shared traits.

This is hardly your first game design rodeo, though it is your first time writing in ChoiceScript, I think? Tell me a little about your work in tabletop and LARP because I think those experiences can be uniquely informative of our game design. 

This is my first time writing in ChoiceScript! I mainly write for tabletop RPGs and LARPs, so it was interesting juggling those projects and this one at the same time. I sometimes found I was accidentally writing in ChoiceScript when I didn’t mean to!

On the tabletop side of things, I’ve contributed to Kids on Bikes, FlipTales, We Are All Monsters, Teens in Space, and Mutants and Masterminds. No Such Place as Koreatown, my adventure setting for Kids on Bikes, is the most similar to Fog out of all of those. My work on that definitely helped me with writing Fog, and vice versa, as it made me examine closely what actions a player can take in a horror or horror-adjacent game that feel the scariest. Also, both involve young people running around small towns and facing off against forces beyond their immediate understanding.

On the LARP side, I’ve written The Long Drive Back from Busan, a freeform game about a struggling k-pop group that won a Golden Cobra award in 2017, But Not Tonight, a game about high schoolers trapped in a fallout shelter in the 80s, and The Truth About Eternity, a scenario about a future of ancestor worship where ancestors are uploaded to digital tombs, to name a few. My experience writing and running But Not Tonight helped me a lot with Fog because it’s another game in which teenagers are struggling with two sets of fears – their everyday existential dread and interpersonal problems as well as fear of the world possibly ending outside. Watching players balance supposedly mundane worries and big, earth-shattering worries inspired me when writing the various characters in Fog and how they tackle their problems.

Additionally, both in LARP and tabletop games, players often have a lot of freedom to react to in-game situations in extreme ways. I wanted to incorporate that into Fog as well, the options to just totally lean into drama and lash out at people because you’re freaking out. I spent a lot of time thinking about how players might want to react to events if they had total freedom, and chose the options that I personally found to be the most interesting without completely derailing the story.

And back to Fog, the characters in this game are so finely wrought. I’m wondering which NPC you enjoyed spending time with the most. 

I think about my NPCs a lot! I actually ended up really liking the scenes with Barry Michaels, which I did not expect. I enjoy it when characters surprise me with their complexity. Out of the main crew, I’m very fond of Addy even though they can be such a jerk. I see a lot of myself in them. Hopefully that doesn’t mean I’m also a jerk! Addy is restless, doesn’t have time to deal with other people’s bullshit, and is ready for life to really get started. I think many people can identify with that, especially if they grew up or are currently in a small town that feels a bit stifling.

I also have a soft spot for Ennis. She does some terrible things, but I think a lot of people will want to understand her better and help her. She’s a strong person who has been utterly destroyed by grief and is handling it in probably the least healthy way possible. I tried to have scenes with her feel like you’re standing on the edge of a raging storm. Maybe that storm will calm down, or maybe you’ll be hit by lightning. In the meantime, you’re just watching in awe as it wrecks everything it comes into contact with. We so often are forced to put on a stoic face when coping with grief, and I wanted to write someone who just doesn’t. She’s in pain and she is not hiding it.

If you had it to do over, what do you wish you’d have known before writing this game? 

Oh my god. That’s a very good question. Probably that these games have a tendency to grow in scope in ways you’re not even noticing until it’s over three times the length you originally anticipated! Also that some of the stats I originally had (but then got rid of) would be difficult to incorporate into the game.

And what are you working on next? 

Currently, I’m working on another horror game called Home with my friend Doug Levandowski in which you explore an unsettling house that has relics of your childhood home within it. The Kickstarter campaign for a card game I worked on called Battle of the Boy Bands is also launching soon, and that game will be published by Game and a Curry. In addition to that, I’m contributing to Magical Kitties Save the Day and Hearts of Wulin, creating short RPGs for my Patreon, and recording two actual play podcasts, Red Death and the upcoming Dark Wings, Dark Waves, both on the Roll to Play network!

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

You’ve been bitten into a brand new supernatural underground. Congratulations! It’s terrifying and heartwarming all at once. In a game made by a queer woman and for queer women and femme nonbinary folk, this supernatural celebration of queer femininity takes you into the darkness and lets you own it. Use your compassion and sense of responsibility to make connections and fall in love. Or use your newfound fangs and claws to rip, shred, and tear through your problems. Is this the start of a satisfying, shape-shifting life full of romance, or the blood-soaked birth of a new deity of the forest? You decide!

It’s 50% off until October 24th!

Moonrise is a 49,000-word urban fantasy interactive novel by Natalie Cannon, 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 a trans woman, cis woman, or nonbinary person; lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, or asexual.
• Date your nonbinary best friend, the ruthless Rogue leader, or the lycanthropic goddess amongst werewolves.
• Build up your Empathy, Bloodthirst, Snark, Responsibility, Uncanny Valley, and Defense to survive lethal encounters and protect those you hold dear.
• Pledge allegiance to the tradition of the Masquerade or the desperate, volatile Rogues.
• Expose the supernatural underground to the blistering light or keep their secrets in the deep dark.
• Embrace the feral monster within or hold fast to your humanity.

Natalie Cannon 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!

Fight the god of death on your way to godhood! Choose your path with six different characters: warrior, assassin, mage, thief, storm rider, and beastmaster. Destroy the death god’s minions by sword, magic, storms, or beasts. Rise in power to eventually destroy the death god himself. Seize your own path toward godhood.

It’s free to play.

War of the Gods is a 85,000-word interactive novel by Barbara Elzey, 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 a Solarian, a creature who is invulnerable by day and weak at night.
• Play the human assassin who must fight his way free from bondage.
• Play a Storm Rider, an ancient race that harnesses the power of the storm.
• Play a thief known as the Silver Fox, who must save her people from the death cultists who killed her family.
• Play a Deodrin mage, a creature from an ancient race, who hurls spells to save a family from the despotic king.
• Play a human beastmaster, who is the true heir to the throne, and who gathers allies for war, both human and beasts.
• Choose your gender; romance as gay, straight or asexual, and select your physical traits.
• Find romance with different fantastical species and characters.
• Defeat the minions of death.
• Gain power toward your own rise to godhood.

Barbara Elzey 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!

Time for a break from your uneventful life. Ancient knowledge that is too risky to keep in your memory calls for you once again. Will you be able to learn the things you knew in the past and chose to forget all the while not losing yourself to madness? No matter what, your will must be strong.

It’s free to play.

The Oldest Dream is a 34,000 word interactive horror novel by Onurhan T, 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, female, or other; straight, gay, or other.
• Delve into the past that you chose to forget before.
• Try to stay sane on a path no one came back from.
• Watch reality distort in front of your eyes.
• Don’t give your trust freely, it is not easy to know who deserves it.
• Learn as much as you can, your primary intent is seeking knowledge.
• Meet a creature stronger than god and live to tell it.

Onurhan T 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!

This is a story where you do something more terrifying than entering a haunted house, more dangerous than assaulting an alien horde, and more important than ruling a fantasy kingdom. You, and you alone, must turn your newborn baby into a functional adult. Will you be a tiger mom or a helicopter dad? Can you raise a child through eighteen years of humor and heartache with nothing on your side except a little patience and a lot of love? It’s a fun and unique experience designed for potential parents of all ages!

It’s 25% off until October 7th!

The Parenting Simulator is a lighthearted 189,000 word interactive slice-of-life novel by Matt Simpson, 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.

• Experience over 60 scenes designed to touch on events both major and minor in your digital offspring’s life.
• Overcome potty training, bullies, and the dreaded driving test!
• Live the wild emotional rollercoaster of raising a child as you go from birth to high school graduation.
• Be the main role model in their life, as every little thing you do can have consequences that reverberate through the years.
• Maintain relationships with friends and family or burn your bridges to spare you and your little one further heartache.
• Watch your child grow and change from the choices you make.
• Find out who they become through numerous possible endings!

Matt Simpson 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!

You’re enjoying a writing retreat held in an Australian small town, when one of your fellow writers is killed, and all the rest are suspects—including you. The ancient rectory grants you curious supernatural powers, and it’s not clear if the magic is benign or malevolent. Can you figure out who the killer is before they take another victim? Is the rectory the real killer? Or is this the ultimate chance to find out for yourself what it feels like to murder another person—and get away with it?

It’s 33% off until October 7th!

Death at the Rectory is an 87,000 word interactive magical murder mystery by Felicity Banks, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fuelled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Are you attracted to the vivacious Muslim woman or the charming American man? Do you dare to fall in love when the object of your affection might be a murderer? Will your word count survive the stress of being a murder suspect? Will you ever get a turn in the shower?

• Choose from three genders, and whatever sexuality suits your mood.
• Pay attention to the clues, as the murderer is not the same in every play-through.
• Who do you suspect, and who do you trust?
• Pick a genre, hero, and ending for your own novel outline.
• Gather clues to make your case to your fellow writers.
•   Can you get away with murder?

Felicity Banks 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.