The Dragon and the Djinn

A readable CYOA with a setting that I really liked but incredibly narrow in its scope which is kind of surprising considering its price and wordcount. Is there any practical reason why the love interests are gender locked? Why your sister has to be your sister and not a brother? Aside from some physical description crumbs here and there, as far as I could tell (I didn't finish it), there's no reason as they all more or less act and speak the same anyway. There is only one heterosexual male love interest in the entire thing? Could be the rich guy, could be the rude warrior, who knows, neither is appealing either way. A lot of the time these games suffer from vague options but this suffers the opposite problem where the options are incredibly opaque, to the extent you can see the limited routes in your mind's eye immediately. These limited choices are made more "palatable" by the writer by making everyone equally terrible, not even particularly morally ambiguous. I assume the idea being you won't feel bad for picking B instead of A or C. All of this is made worse by how severe the stat checks are. If you are not constantly picking the same sort of skill and only that one, you will fail. So at this point you're not even playing a story pretending to be a character, you're minmaxing and being railroaded. These sorts of things are fundamental issues that good writing or setting can't carry in IF.

Я понимаю, что внимание к гендерам в наше время очень важно, но читать все эти "хонорифики" чрезвычайно утомительно. Если в визуальной новелле ты видишь персонажа, то воспринимаешь его по внешности, а в текстовой игре ты можешь опираться только на описание и все эти "they" очень размывают описания и запутывают читателя. Половина персонажей представляется аморфными пятнами, потому что про их внешность толком ничего не пишут, например "персона в красном" и пока оно не заговорило и не отозвалось о себе в женском роде, тебе и не понять что это женщина. Кем бы себя человек ни считал, визуально он в первую очередь будет выглядеть либо как мужчина, либо как женщина и хотелось бы чтобы в тексте это было лучше видно. Эта неопределенность мешает восприятию и портит впечатление от всей игры. Кроме того несмотря на утверждение компании что в их играх можно быть кем угодно и романсить кого угодно, игра буквально кричит мне в лицо "ты недостаточно гомосексуальна". Один ЛИ гей и на мою ГГ вообще не смотрит, а второго ты сперва застаешь в номере с проституткой, а потом он вообще куда-то исчезает и ты его почти не видишь. Ну и еще две ЛИ-девочки, которые меня не интересуют в принципе. Если и доползу до конца этого чтива, то исключительно на магии и интригах.

Soft recommend. There is a lot of content here, and various ways to build your hero. It’s nice to see fantasy stories based somewhere other than medieval Europe, and it gets big points for that! There were some issues with the text (events mentioned twice, like a variable had misfired), and frankly I was often confused about where my choices led. It was fun to play the game early and see those achievements unlocked with “0.1% of players have this achievement”, but sometimes I was confused about what I unlocked and what I didn’t. Things happened in my game without unlocking, while other things I never tried to do did get unlocked. The game lets you create your character with a lot of flexibility, but most of the romance options are women, and one of the 2 men implies to MC that he’s gay (which is great, but I wasn’t going to try to romance him with my female MC). If I decide to play again to explore other options (and it sounds like there are at least 3 factions you can join, so it’s worth a replay), I’ll plan for that.

I suppose the premise was entertaining but at no point did I ever encounter an interesting character and the dialogue between these uninteresting characters did very little to draw me into the story. The ending I got was very brief and anti-climactic. I am unable to find a single redeeming quality that would allow me to recommend this title to anyone.

I read way too many of these games, from hosted, choice of games, ect. But I think that at least gives some validity to a review. When it comes to these stories, I'll admit I can be a bit picky. I try not to let reviews sway me, and in fact can at least boast at the fact I don't let reviews sway me that much. The only times I check is when a game has very poor reviews, because I want to check if a game is truly bad, or if maybe those who didn't like it simply couldn't just appreciate it for what it is. I often see negative reviews for poor writing, or a game being too short, or characters being too flat. Whenever I see those review I always think in my head 'is it really like that? or maybe it was misinterpreted? Sorry to go on such a long rant, I'm just really passionate about these games and writing in general. (I suppose I would consider myself a writer) BUT! Anyways- How was the game? I think it was excellent. I had kept a close eye on this one for some time, followed it and was excited for it's release. Imagine my surprise to see it available early! Bought it, and proceeded to play for like, 4 hours straight. I've done this many times for many titles, so far I only did one play through but honestly the ending I got was just what I wanted. You don't see too many games focused on such a unique culture as this one, it was refreshing and left me wanting to know more and more. The lore and world was interesting, enough detail to get you into it but not too much to flood your head. Though I'd love to know more since I'm a sap for world lore. The characters were very nice! Well written with plenty of personality to boot, every person I met seemed like they had their own thing going on. I don't want to spoil too much of course, the romance aspect was done tastefully so, just enough of it to be whimsical, while maintaining most of the story to the world and destiny of you, the player. As for that, the amount of freedom to truly be unique was wonderful. The choices I made were ones that I found to be exactly the ones I'd make! You can truly be yourself, and it's not hard to put yourself into this world. 10/9.8 would be the score I'd give it! It had a decent length, and I imagine one could get way more out of it if you don't just read for 4 or 6 hours like I did (sleep is for the weak). If I had any wishes I could make, I suppose it would be for more epilogue perhaps? I would have loved the chance to take time off after my epic journey, but it's the things that are not said that hold the most worth. I'll certainly be replaying countless times and most likely writing my own private spinoffs and short stories in the world space hehe. So yeah! As one who plays way way wayyy too many of these games, do play it! Or at least give it a chance! :D

Poor writing, plot holes everywhere, continuity of the story is often broken between paragraphs, impossible confusing names, an imbecile protagonist who always acts the most stupidly possible, and a useless Djinni. It's a no, especially considering the price. There are cheaper better stories than this one.

Yet another disappointing entry in the increasingly underwhelming CoG stable... honestly, at this point, I'm beginning to wonder if some of the earlier games I played - such as the excellent "Heroes Rise" trilogy - weren't just some sort of fluke; as, despite trying so many different titles, I've yet to truly recapture that 'Lightning-in-a-Bottle' feeling I had when I first played so many years ago..! What makes this particular 'Nothing-burger' so disheartening is that it takes a particularly cool & unique setting - the backdrop of "Arabian Nights" - & squanders it on what I can only describe as, well, 'trivialities'... (I'll leave it to your imagination as to just what THAT means!) The issue wasn't at all helped by the fact that, once AGAIN, my data from the demo didn't carry over to the main game, meaning not only was I forced to start over from scratch, but then had to waste precious game time playing 'catch-up'... For reals - I'm not certain if this some sort of random glitch; or, worse yet, is somehow INTENTIONAL; regardless, it's becoming all too common of an occurrence for my liking... Just to be clear, I probably could've forgiven this time wasting, if only the game itself had of been able to hold my interest; alas, not even an hour in, &, quite frankly, I was just bored with the whole thing. What a letdown... Side note - while I realise the Steam staff probably rarely (if ever!) read these reviews; in light of the rather 'snooty' response I received for my last refund request; &, given that it's so difficult to to contact the staff directly; on the off chance that any relevant individual DOES see this, I felt the need just to clarify something... It is neither my desire NOR my intent to attempt to *abuse* the refunds system... HOWEVER - please understand, ultimately, I can only work with the information that is readily available... That is to say- if both the page description + the reviews paint an overly... shall we say, 'optimistic' picture of the game in question, it only stands to reason that mistakes are going to be made; indeed, I was under the impression that one of the primary reasons for the existence of refunds was precisely to try & prevent this type of "buyers remorse"..? Heck, just as an additional note; whenever a game catches my eye, I nearly ALWAYS make it a point to read the negative reviews FIRST; as, personally, I tend to find they paint a much clearer picture of what to expect from a potential purchase... hell, I've lost count of the number of potential stinkers I've probably been able to avoid by using this policy.. Alas, in this particular instance, the only other negative review at time of writing wasn't even in english; had I only taken the time to run it through google translate first, I could've saved myself a lot of headaches! (...course, if Steam were only to implement a translation function themselves, it would also probably spare a lot of other disgruntled customers - food for thought?)

Excellent story and world-building, with high replayability. There's plenty of options, so the player is able to properly flesh out their character and there are almost no points where you feel like you're without proper control over the game. Really well done.

I enjoyed this one, had a lot going on with it, it felt, though have only done one playthrough so far

This game was reasonably good! There were characters with definable motivations, several routes to complete, and the djinn were overall fun. It, perhaps, needed some work, most notably on the coding; one event seemed to trigger twice for me, and I thus read the same page of text more than once. However, it was overall enjoyable.