The game, while mechanically sound and strangely engaging, is one of the most uninspired pieces of literature I have read in a while. The game presents you with moral "conundrums" which almost *obviously* will have an intended "right" answer. For example, part of the lore is that the game's world is split into three Lots: the commoners who are, I kid you not, supposed to "suffer" (their words); the priests who are supposed to guide the commoners (and maybe the nobles? I don't really remember), and the nobles who are supposed to lead and be cool. So the game constantly insists the commoners should "suffer" and literally incorporates whipping them as part of the in-game religion. Then it asks you whether you would stick with the "old faith" or "new faith"....golly me, I have no idea what most people would choose. In fairness, there are like 4 different ways of rejecting the old faith so at least there's some variety there. As someone who has tried to write CHYOA stories before, I do respect the branching paths the game introduces. A large struggle with a CHYOA game is that every new branch is essentially a whole new story you need to write. That being said, the game has a toggle (which they recommend to turn on) that tells you what the stat impact of each action is. In my opinion this should be a red flag against the game's writing and it breaks immersion often, leading to a stat-optimization playstyle instead of one where I would choose what's in character/what I actually think. As a final critique, and this is a SPOILER (of a romance subplot), so skip ahead to avoid it, is, briefly: Why the hell did Jeanne fall in love with me and why did I fall in love back, I basically opposed her at every turn, I mean c'mon. In conclusion: this might be a good way to get into interactive fiction as it's fairly polished with decent drawings, music, and is essentially a VN with a lot more text. Afterward you can look into better games on IFDB.
