Coteries of New York is not a great visual novel if you're looking for a deep, branching story and choices that fully affect your path. It has only one ending and tons of dead ends, meaning your path only affects whether you fail miserably or reach the intended (and pretty abrupt) finale. It also lacks some of the modern quality-of-life features like skipping previously read text or multiple save slots. However, if you can accept all that, you get a quite interesting short story that really catches the climate and basic structure of the World of Darkness setting, and build an interesting jumping point for the other two games in this series. It also does a fine job of inroducing potencial newbies to Vampire the Masquerade without boring the veterans to death with lore dumps. And it makes you FEEL like a flegdling vampire, powerful and extremely vulnerable at the same time, having to navigate the political schemes and dangers you only have a very limited understanding of. It falls short of 5 stars due to the pacing problems and the fact it never takes the time to explore any of the subplots or relationships with real depth... But if you're just looking for a nice, relatively short read in the VtM universe, it's worth checking out and finishing at least two runs, to see all coterie candidates and experiment with side quests a bit. It does a lot more right than it does wrong, if you set your expectations right.
I missed out of King's Bounty in its primetime, but exploring it after all these years proved quite fun. The game offers a pretty unique, very open-ended variation on the strategy game and RPG hybrid. It's very close to Heroes of Might and Magic in its core mechanics, but instead of shorter missions or scenarios it's a massive campaign where you explore the world and build alliances, sourcing your army and resources from friendly and neutral strongholds and shops, while leveling up and upgrading your only hero. This pushes the game more in the RPG spectrum, while also forcing you to manage you resources carefully and adapt your strategies to minimize losses, as troops both cost money and (beyond most basic ones) are a finite resource in the NPC towns. If you can suffer through some grinding and repetetive battles within specific regions, there's quite a lot of depth and fun min-maxing to the found here, along with a decent story and an eye-pleasing world.
