The Hero of Kendrickstone

Not bad, but not all that interesting, honestly. A fantasy text-based RPG with stats and a linear barely-branching story. The reason I don't recommend comes directly off one key factor; it's an RPG with about 4 main stats, and many times through the story you'll be given multiple choices to approach situations, all of which have obvious stats related to them. You don't get a lot of points to spread around, in fact I'd go so far as to say you really only have 1 path to take per run unless you want to gimp yourself in the final encounter by trying to spread out across multiple stats. So when these multiple-choice sections come up, they always read to me like "Would you like to pick the option that will actually succeed based on your stats, or would you like to fail in a specific way?" The game may as well just ask you which Stat you want to focus on at the start and at that point there's little "Choice" to be had. I'll admit I enjoyed my first run-through and could see there being more stuff I missed that may be interesting, but the simple fact is that the GAMEPLAY of this GAME is poor, and thus not worth checking out. I'd rather just read a Hero of Kendrickstone Choose Your Own Adventure Book over playing this.

The story was short and interesting. I liked it but it had many features that seemed to never go anywhere and it doesnt branch at all in story except for a 2 selection side-tangent. I am very sorry to say that this particular choice of games does not have ay replay value, but was still fun to pkay the first few times, but not worth 5 bucks.

I actually really enjoyed this story. It's one of those "pick your own adventure" type tales. You're the good guy or bad guy and your choices fully dictate what will happen throughout the story. As for anyone looking for a fun text-based story, I'd easily give this a 10/10.

[h1]Update:[/h1] Sadly CoG has decided to take away our ability to mod and bugfix our games for no apparent reason. This had been happening to some players of some games already but I, running Linux Mint, hadn't been affected immediately. Now though, after a recent round of updates for all CoG games attempting to fix a blank screen bug that some linux players had, I too no longer have access to the scene files that I had used to fix and/or mod my games. For reference, here's the discussion where we realized what was happening: https://web.archive.org/web/20230720234059/https://steamcommunity.com/app/1290270/discussions/0/3199240675527224092/ And here's a couple instances where the ability to see and modify the scene files helped fix, or would have helped fix, game-breaking bugs: https://web.archive.org/web/20230519122839/https://steamcommunity.com/app/1290270/discussions/0/5350815203295610478/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230720234237/https://steamcommunity.com/app/1290270/discussions/0/3199245116724505358/ To reiterate, CoG has removed our ability to improve our game experience or to fix the games we own ourselves if they break. While I'm not switching any of my reviews to 'not recommend', unless CoG reverses this anti-consumer practice I can't fully endorse any of their games either. [h1]Original Review:[/h1] Much more thorough reviews already exist covering pretty much anything I can think to say about The Hero of Kendrickstone, so I'll be brief. This game has a good deal of replayability, an interesting fantasy world, logical consequences, and I enjoyed playing it.

The first playthrough is amazing, it's just a straight up choose your own adventure book with added RPG elements to make it all the more enjoyable. If you play through it more than once, however you'll see how little your decisions matter. Whether you're a powerful mage or just a simple tavern bard your experience will be exactly the same. But who plays through games more than once, eh? Game is a little short though. Get it while it's on sale.

"The Hero of Kendrickstone" is a prime example of an interactive novel of low quality. The story is entirely railroaded, and there’s no way to avoid many scenes. For example, [spoiler]choosing not to pay their protection fee will always result in you trying to help a bunch of criminals break into a house to steal something. The closest you can get to saying no is failing to actually break in, in which case, the mark will still comply for some reason and do whatever the criminals want anyway.[/spoiler] The background you choose and who you give your loyalty to will provide you with some flavor text and little else. Worse, if you pick “eloquence” as your skill of choice, you will have no way to handle many situations, making it suitable for nothing but earning some gold. Oh, and getting your character beat up, of course, and that’s if you’re lucky. I played through as a mage first and a bard second, and very little changed. I’m tempted to say nothing changed, but that’s not entirely true, as who I served under and how I was able to handle the unavoidable situations altered slightly. Not to mention, how injured my character got changed quite a lot. As such, I’ll give the game a (2/10) and consider myself generous. Finally, it needs to be stated that I actually enjoyed my first playthrough, to an extent, since the flaws were reasonably well hidden then, so if you only intend to play through it once, it may be worth it. Maybe. Just do yourself a favor and pick warrior, mage, or thief.

I'm a huge fan of Choice of Games, but this story was a huge disappointment for me. I can somewhat forgive the generic medieval/fantasy setting, but I can't get over how brief the experience was. What I had figured was the end of the 1st act turned out to be the end of the game. Hero of Kendrickstone isn't truly *bad* in and of itself, but it is priced way too high relative to the amount of content. For 5 dollars you can buy some incredible works of fiction that will keep you engrossed for tens of hours. This barely engaged me for three.

No saves in this game, so if you accidentaly die you have to start all over again. And I've finished it after 90 minutes, so I'ts not worth the price.

It has been a bit since I last played/read this. I will try to keep anything too close to a spoiler from the review. It's one of those CYOA novels where the personality stats are more for flavoring the text, some things your character thinks/says will be different depending on their personality. It was actually done fairly well, with your characters view of those around them being fairly interesting to read and to set you up for thinking through justification for their thoughts. This goes along well with good (not great) scene writing. While their are different paths to explore, there are not many and certain parts of them simply do not seem to change. You can basically be a warrior, a thief, a wizard, and a bard. These can have different story paths that can be fun, but the big events of the game seem largely unchanged other than how your character will skill check something. The description can be a good read, but the choice aspect of it doesn't seem as strong as others in the CYOA genre (such as Mecha Ace, one of my favorite and first CYOA by the same author). The main problem with the novel, is that it lacks a lot of character development. Your character is essentially the A list, and there are a few B list. All of the others are basically extras. This might not be so bad if the B listers had more character development. Two of them have a decent bit, but even they are more of a few paragraphs of backstory and a few lines of personality driven action than anything that really makes you care about them. They do not seem as their own people who have value other than telling your character some things to do and a few encouraging words. They are nothing outside of that. Your own character has some good development, though some of the studying and skill building seem to be more for a bigger world than what this CYOA provides. This CYOA novel is okay, though the time and money might be better spent on others. It feels like the beginning of the building of a world, almost like a demo. A sequal seems hinted at by the way the CYOA is written, but I can't remember it ever being deliberately said. Currently, the novel provides some good reading but the feeling of being cramped and rushed, especially when you decide to stop and try to get a feel of what's around you. It's not the worst, but a sequal or a big rewrite is the only way I can recommend it.

This game had a great story! I indeed enjoyed this one, but at some points the choices were really wierd. Sometimes I couldn't really figure out what each choice does, but taht's a personal matter I guess. Another thing that I didn't really like is that if you missclick or do a choice you want to change, you have to entirely restart the game, you can't just scroll back. It makes the game more "hard" or something i guess, but it's kinda annoying. Also I didn't find a romance/marriage option/ending in this game, maybe there is one, but I couldn't figure it out. Overally, its a really good story thou! I really enjoyed it! ^^