Runt of the Litter

This is not a good game, an ok one maybe. You have no real background, you are just a Thrall that just all. If you have a love intrest all other character that are your "friends" you will only see them three times. And in the end, if you satisfy the council, than you are allowed to make the "big" choice, which leads immidietly to the epilogue, no war, no rebellion against the council, that was it and the narrator tells you how it looks now and then it's over. There is simply no weight behind the choices, there is one really short surprise, which confused me more than intrigued me, because it was poorly explained and then it was over. You don't shape your destiny, you are just simply allowed to do it, or you fail. That's how I felt when I played the game

Quick breakdown is: Super interesting world and gryphons, but not really any choices that seem to matter. The stats that build up don't seem to do anything, not like Choice of Robots or others like that. It was short and anticlimactic, and could have done with more expansion. On to my main problem. I was enjoying this game (because gryphons), but I got really thrown off when they started using "ze" and "zir" instead of actual pronouns. Why is there tumblrisms in this game? I would have really preferred to stick to real genders unless there was a game/alternate reality reason as to why there is a third gender instead of it just being thrown in. It was a bit immersion breaking, and I found myself quickly skimming each of those sections because it was just so strange to see in a real game. I really question why that was decided on.

I guess I'm going to write a review about this game. First off, the marketing arrowed me in the heart like a professional Robin Hood. They posted a link and blurb on IFDB.tads.org: "Steal and raise a baby war gryphon!" That was all I needed to read. I couldn't hit "BUY" fast enough. I was that Fry meme, incarnate. SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. But unlike CoG's "SLAMMED!", which sucked me into the story to the point where I *lived through it, mannnn!* (and you should really buy SLAMMED! immediately), I just couldn't get my head into this game (and I really wanted to, see para. 2). I had a really hard time keeping track of who was who and what everybody's different griffin looked like (which is, I think, kind of important when visualizing the story). tl;dr The writing just didn't generate strong enough mental pictures for me and I couldn't stay engaged. Then I died before (I think) any real adventure started. So I hung it up, meaning to try another day and...I just haven't. So it is with heavy heart I say that I can't recommend this game even though you get to raise a baby griffin. But ifever I give it another try and it turns out better for me, I will update this review.

As with so many other games on Steam, i wish there was a neutral 'maybe' option between 'do' and 'do not' recommend. nevertheless, i will recommend it, but only at its current sale price of $2.99. Let's begin: I enjoyed the concept of a Gryphon Riders' beast keeper having the option to either prove their loyalty to his or her (don't worry about the gender-neutral nonsense: i'll tear into that silliness momentarily) masters, or rebel, and lead the other thralls to found an independent society. The choices, for the most part, actually have significant impact on the story, and for that, i applaude the author. Too many CYOA games from the COG site rely too heavily on the illusion of choice, either for the convenience of the author, or due to the author giving him or herself more room to focus on the setting, characters, etc. This approach is not a bad thing in of itself, but the problem i personally have with it is the fact that that it is so prevelant among the new wave of CYOA novels. The format is called CHOOSE your own adventure for a reason. Story length was a bit too short for my liking. I couldn't help but feel that the author compacted some parts of the story to make it shorter for some reason. None of the characters feel very fleshed out, for example, but rather you are given a quick 'this person holds this position, or is someone you have known for a long time', and not much more. Maybe she (the author) simply didn't have enough time to put more detail into her story, but it ends somewhat abruptly (not a bad ending at all, but it just sort of shows up like that creepy Uncle your mom and dad want you to stay away from) Character development, as i indicated above, is not very prevelant in this CYOA. It's not absent, but it's just not there 'enough'. Your character, and your Gryphon, at least, feel like they have matured when you return to the Aerie (not going to spoil the story), but the side characters, for the most part, remain static. Even your love interest fails to undergo any sort of character evolution, and to an amateur writer such as myself, that is something of a sin. And now to the pièce de résistance: Gender -neutral pronouns...............in a medieval fantasy setting................... ....................................... Okay: I'm not going to bother with the cliched 'not a bigot' speech, as it has been sleep-inducingly repeated a million times by a million others. Instead, i will (attempt to) stick to the meat of the matter, and that is that such modern terms do NOT belong in a medieval fantasy setting anymore than words such as 'airplane' and 'car' do. It is no less immersion-breaking for a sentence in such a story-setting to read ''With a wave of dismissal, the Grand-Inquisitor boarded his Jet, followed closely by his Inquisitorial retinue'', than it is for a similar sentence to read ''With a wave of dismissal, the Grand-Inquisitor entered 'hir' carriage, followed closely by 'zir' Inquisitorial retinue''. If you are going to engage in this ridiculous bastardization of the English language, at least have the decency to use it in a modern setting, where it actually fits. Overall, i would give this story a 7.5/10. It is not a bad story at all, and, for the most part, i found it enjoyable. But the minimal character development, somewhat rushed overarching storyline, and unnecessary use of modern, gender-neutral pronouns in a setting where hermaphroditic people would be considered unnatural and worthy of the stake were somewhat off-putting for me. Buy it on sale, if you will (or if you won't). P.S If there are any typos or whatnot, please don't hesitate to point them out.

[b]TL; DR - It's a neat little choose your own adventure but not worth the price. Catch it when it's half-off![/b] [url=https://draconicrosegaming.wixsite.com/website/single-post/2018/07/20/Runt-of-the-Litter---Draconicrose-Reviews]Read the polished review.[/url] [h1]Story[/h1] You are some sort of serf/slave called a thrall in a place that raises Griffins for the war effort. Your people (it's heavily implied to be a caste divide) have no prospects in life except being poor and serving as manual labor for others. Then, one day, you go take care of a roosting griffon and she tosses out an egg that you can steal. For some reason this is a crime that could be punished with death. You can romance one of your four friends but it's shallow. [h1]Graphics[/h1] This is a text game but you do have some options, such as disabling the transition animations, changing the background color and text size. You'll appreciate these when you replay. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] As a text game, all you get to do is pick out of several presented choices. Picking certain choices will increase or decrease your stats or relationship values. You'll have to constantly shift back and forth between the statistics pane and the story if you care to see the progression of your stats. Stats do affect the outcome of certain scenes. Unfortunately, just as much as the game doesn't give any indication of stat changes, it also fails to adequately warn you if you're headed into an insta-kill situation. Yes, there are a few of these! I personally had to play up to a certain chapter multiple times because I kept dying no matter what I chose. Since the game has no way to save at any point, this quickly became tedious. [h1]Sound[/h1] This game has no sound. [h1]Other[/h1] While the game itself is a bit meh, the world and story left me wishing there were more opportunities for the player character to affect things. Yes, you can either join the upper caste or make it so that other thralls start slowly being accepted as potential griffon riders, but I think there should have been a way to overthrow the entire system or even to betray the country to the enemy side. [h1]Score[/h1] [b]3/5 - Mediocre[/b]

I've only had Littleclaw for a day and a half, but if anything happened to him I would kill everyone in this game and then myself

I love Choice of Games, but this one really fell flat for me in comparison to several others that I've played and loved. This, I feel, is due to three major reasons: failure to invest the player in the setting and characters, failure to pay off the plot, and slapdash gendering. I'll start with the good stuff. The main group of friends your character meets are distinct in personality and memorable. Their group dynamics are believable, and it's nice to know your character was the one who brought them all together. Your gryphon is going to be adorable, and you're going to want to play with it all the time even if you're supposed to be training it, which is what happened with me. :P Now for the rest. The ending to the plot was deeply unsatisfying, as if the author cut off the draft in the middle. There was little to no sense of closure, and some of that seems to be due to overall weak writing and a failure to establish strong motivations for the protagonist. It's hard to declare that a goal has been accomplished or forever lost if the goal was hazy in the first place. The game starts out promising in terms of world building, but quickly loses steam past establishing the class struggles between thralls and fledglings/riders, and that the theme was wyrms vs gryphons. The whole game could have benefitted from much more showing and less telling, and higher stakes. I was left feeling quitte uninvested and uninformed in the trials an tribulations of th kingdom, despite supposedly being a patriotic character. Lastly, the gendering. This will be the longest portion, as it is the biggest, but most necessary, thing to fix in order to improve the experience. The following is going to sound quite harsh, but I feel it will be valuable feedback to the author should he/she/ze/they etc wish to advocate for non-binary genders through writing. While I applaud the attempt at inclusivity by using non-binary gender pronouns, it was overall poorly handled in terms of both story and code logic. Firstly, the author makes the mistake of slapping in the ze/zir pronouns without establishing anything about the role of gender in this setting, nor describing the characters to which they are referring. This is a failure on three different levels. Level one, alienating a large portion of the audience. A vast majority of readers will not understand this social justice jargon (yes, JARGON), which means the author has chosen wording that will imediately catapault many readers right out of immersion. The modern world, at the time of this review, doesn't even understand where non-binary people fit into society in a non-fictional setting. What made the author think the story could get away with not spending time exploring this? Writing using terms that your target audience can reasonably be expected not to be familiar with isn't a death sentence, however, but when doing so, a writer has the responsibility to establish the terms within the context of the world. This leads us to level two: the author misses the chance to both worldbuild and character build. Is the non-binary gender commonplace or rare? Is it widely acknowledged and accepted? Or persecuted? Or an exotic oddity? The author spends zero time inviting the reader to understand these terms. The first character with non-binary pronouns that I ran into was a random minor character. There was little description of said character's appearance, mannerisms, or how they were treated that played into this gender identity. My player character then never ran into this person again, though ze was suddenly referred to as he later on. Why the change? A coding error? Did the other character misgender? Was it an accident or on purpose? None of this is explained or explored. And this ties to level three: because of the previous levels, it misses its mark with regard to representation and inclusivity. All of the previous levels culminates in a bevy of missed opportunities to build empathy for non-binary people, to build full-bodied and human characters. It fails to represent the people behind the pronoun, and to invite the reader to understand why these pronouns exist. So, overall, I don't recommend buying this game. Other games puublished by Choice do much better with regard to strong protagonist motivations, sense of closure and choice impact, and non-binary representation. The Heroes trilogy, in particular, does well in establishing a major genderqueer character and grounding queerness in the fictional setting. This game could have been much improved if the author could have sat down, and followed the many gaps in the setting and followed them to their logical conclusion, then circled back to explore the impact on the characters in the setting, and showed these effects happening around the main character.

Not bad. Very short compared to other Choice of Games' stories. Feels like it ends half way through rather than a proper ending. Good enough for the current sale price of 3 USDs but 4 might be pushing it. Honestly I expect more exspansive stories from the people that make the actual engine and used to give much better stories. There's simply other Choice of Games to start with than this one.