Dawn of Heroes

I like the premise, as I do with a lot of stories of this genre, as well as the detail that was put into background machinations such as statistics, karma, and personality/morality specifications. Worldbuilding is one of the most important parts of linear stories to me, so this was huge. I also appreciate the effort that I presume this author applied in making distinct choice options; most notable is the fact that you can choose your employment out of three options, and since the subsequent chapters were tailored around that job it appears that different scenes were made accordingly. That said, it made some decisions I disagreed with in other categories that were big enough for me to say that I ultimately don't like this game. The writing style is comprised largely of short/choppy sentences. While grammatically correct on their own, they don't flow well into each other and I often found myself having to slow down to process the abrupt changes. It's a bit hard to describe; if you want elaboration I'd demo the game, it's a bit obvious when it shows up in every paragraph. Moreover, it felt a lot more like telling than showing. These sentences, aside from just being short, were also often bland. Take, for instance, one of the sentences in the sample images: "I rise from the desk understanding how these things are to be done." It conveys the point fine, but it doesn't do anything to make the story more engaging. This ultimately wasn't the worst problem, as I got around it by skimming a couple sentences a paragraph, getting enough of the main idea to understand context but not having to actually read it. That was a bit bothersome, and I didn't like the feeling of rushing myself like that. Something that became more obvious as I went in but wasn't immediately apparent like the sentence structure is just how the plot is constructed. Note that I lost engagement around chapter five, and judging from the achievement list this is still considered early in, so this criticism has to be taken with a grain of salt assuming that the story gets more developed the further in you go. What I noticed is that there is a lot of action sequences, but not much character building. The timestamps at the beginning of each chapter indicate that they happen a few days to weeks apart, meaning that you basically fast forwarded to the interesting bits, but that just creates a story thats a mashup of superhero cliche moments. It was very hard to connect to a story or to characters who functioned and talked and were presented as cardboard cutouts more than actual people. I'm not sure if any of this makes it a "bad" game though, despite the not-recommendation; it's definitely one that I can as appealing to a different audience.

Right off the bat, the game's narration is quite clunky, and characters seem to speak at, rather than to, each other. Either english isn't the author's first language or LLMs are involved. The story is intriguing, but the text is annoying enough to ruin it, since this is essentially a text-based RPG. Edit: Following the response by Hosted Games, I take back what I said about LLMs, since I trust their review process to sort the wheat from the chaff. I guess the writing simply didn't speak to me.

Это какая-то очень скучная игра. Один из тех, кто написал отзыв в стиме, не то пошутил, не то на серьезных щах сказал, что это сгенерировано ии. Может это шутка, но если это правда, то это объяснило бы очень многое. Я редко вижу настолько бездушный, унылый текст, при том, что его много - в игре вечно что-то происходит, какие-то персонажи ведут свои душные разговоры, но как же это неинтересно! Я уже на первой трети игры устала и потеряла нить повествования. Просто для контекста, у меня есть все, все игры от этого разработчика и я еще читала текстовые квесты/интерактивную литературу от других издателей. Мне есть с чем сравнить и это хуже, чем почеркушки начинающих фикрайтеров. Это выглядит как сгенегированый ии шлак потому что автору самому было не интересно. Я могу на многое закрыть глаза. на дыры в сюжете, на дисбаланс в ролевой системе, даже на местами кривой язык. Но простить тотальную скуку невозможно.

its alright, story is well written with likable unique characters, however the story takes perspective away from the main character way too much which feels disorienting, and I feel it would work much better if mostly from the MC's POV as they figure out the story with the reader, rather than puppeting someone who cant act on information the reader knows, hesitant recommend

I'm honestly really surprised by how much I enjoyed this game. I've never played one of these interaction fiction games, but after finishing it I'm definitely interested in trying out more. I'll go over some of my personal positives and negatives for the people on the fence. [h2] Positives [/h2] [list] [*]Surprisingly in-depth character customization, both with your physical appearance as well as you powers and backgrounds. You start off with a selection of story origins pretty similar to Cyberpunk, like CEO or a factory worker. Unlike Cyberpunk, these stories aren't just isolated to a prologue, they run in parallel to the main plot. For example, my character worked at an IT company as their "normal" life. After superhero shenanigans in the night, my character spent their day dealing with their work and the stress that comes with living two different lives, with characters from that storyline becoming a part of the supporting cast for the player. I've only finished one playthrough so far (which was somewhere in the 20-30 chapters range) so I can't say how different the other origins are, but mine felt natural enough that I'm sure the other storylines are as substantial. There's also quite a few options for customizing your hero persona, from your name to your costume, even down to its materials. These are mostly cosmetic and just serve to give yourself a mental image on what your character looks like. As for the powers, the list wasn't as extensive as I was hoping, but provided [i] a lot [/i] of opportunities for those powers to shine. For example, my character had the ability to read minds, and that came into play pretty much the entire story. It was so damn cool to find out pieces of info a character might've been keeping a secret, and my character actually being able to use it to their advantage. Speaking of... [*]The role-play aspect is strong. Between skill checks and the karma system, certain choices might be locked off or outright fail, but you can either hide those checks or turn them off completely, letting you shape the story you want. It gave me the feeling of playing with action figures and coming up with different stories and scenarios in my head, which I think is helped by the fact that there's literally no visuals, just your imagination. So being able to make a conscious choice for who I want my character to be, and seeing that choice actually come into play, was pretty exciting. [*]A superhero story that doesn't stray away from darker themes or violence. Besides getting to decide if your character is against killing criminals (I didn't expect to even be given the option), the story touches on the aspects of superhero life that you don't really want to think about. The snowballing guilt of a hero being unable to save others or directly dooming them with their actions, a hero's personal life crumbling apart as a consequence of saving the lives of strangers, a hero having to choose the lesser of two evils and doubting their morals. All stuff covered in the best comics, and I'm glad nothing really felt toned down here. My character followed the traditional "Hero's Journey" archetype (my personal favorite) and I enjoyed it. [/list] Those are the aspects I enjoyed the most, but there's a few gripes I have that don't hinder the experience a whole lot, but take me out of it at some points. [h2] Negatives [/h2] [list] [*]Spelling and grammatical errors. With a 450k wordcount I expect some to slip through the cracks, but they become more noticeable and more frequent the further into the story you get, which I'm guessing is due to the length. [*]Awkward and/or overly formal prose. This one took a lot of getting used to. You expect a casual and laid back character to say "don't worry about it," instead they say "do not worry about it". This is inconsistent though, as sometimes words are combined and sometimes they're not, which leads to everyone sounding the same apart from one character that has a distinctly Irish accent that is displayed in their dialogue. [*]For some reason, character names are just completely inconsistent in how they're revealed and how they're used. Let's say a character is named John, but the player doesn't know this yet. The player sees the man approach, and after he speaks the game addresses him with "John says", even though we have no clue who John is. Several times I had to reread certain lines before I realize this isn't a character we've already met. And if a character has multiple nicknames, or a first and last name, the game will flip-flop between them needlessly, to the point of becoming annoying. [*]Another annoying thing is how inconsistent the story is with character descriptions. Some times a character will be given a description of their hair, skin, voice, eye color, etc. but another character is only described as tall with a certain hairstyle. Even worse, after I built my mental image from a lacking description, the story randomly throws out a detail that it omitted before, like a character having blue eyes. Thanks, I spent all this time imagining them with brown eyes. I wish every character's appearance was given the same level of focus, cause it's harder to use my imagination when I'm forced to make a conscious effort to correct it. [/list] Despite those gripes, it didn't take me out of the experience too much, and I still really enjoyed my time with it, and I highly recommend it. I'll probably start another playthrough soon to see how much different the story is with other powers/storylines.

This sounds a bit like it was AI-generated, which is fine! I’d just prefer it to be labeled in the tags if it is

与其说是传统COG文字游戏不如说感觉更像是纯trpg. 非常优秀的角色自定化+糟糕的故事。作为小说是非常无聊的流水账, 没有任何起伏，语气一成不变。Scene之间也没有任何联系，碎片化故事

So-so

I'll be honest: this would be a neutral vote if it were possible, but I don't think it deserves a negative review, so it's a recommend—albeit with some issues. My main issue was that it changes POVs a lot, and sometimes when it gives you choices, they're for other characters instead of your own. That feels weird because you don't even have the context of what those characters are thinking to make a choice for them. Those constant POV changes, combined with your character living a double life as a hero and a civilian, made me feel like I didn't really get to properly meet him at times, or that I was building any significant relationships with other heroes, coworkers, or people from his life until very late in the story. I think this kind of stories from Choice of Games tend to work better when you get to build your own character and you get to actually make the choices for him from time to time. So overall, while the premise was very interesting and had some good ideas, the overall execution could have been better,

I thought this would be an easy recommend as nearly every game in this genre from CoG or Hosted Games I have loved; while it has the bones to be an amazing game it gets tripped up by frequent and jarring point of view switches from the MC to characters that sometimes haven't even been introduced yet. The MCs POV is first person and then suddenly a few pages later we're in third person with someone else's point of view only to switch back to the MC and have them state an opinion we have no control over. This constant switch away from the MC completely lost immersion for me and at one point made me not care about the MC anymore. There are also a lot of characters--great when done well, cumbersome when not. Unfortunately as another reviewer mentioned, a lot of characters aren't described well and aside from names and motives are hard to keep track of. Then there are the grammatical errors; usually I don't care but they were so frequent I could tell the writer may not have a full grasp on when it sounds natural to use and when not to use a contraction (specifically "I'm") in dialogue. I give this a very hesitant and tentative recommend because it pains me to otherwise thumbs this game down with all the time and effort I know must have gone into writing it. Maybe play the demo first?