The Hostage

[b]the hostage[/b] is a text-based choose your own adventure kinda thing, or in this case a [i]choose somebody else's adventure[/i]. you get a message from a guy who turns out to be a former hostage in africa, communicating with a bracelet of some kind he got from the rescuing soliders who turned into minced meat shortly after, and now he's surrounded by a bunch of dead bodies and just wants to get out of dodge. the whole game is [b]one long conversation interrupted by opportunities to make decisions[/b] and save the guy from dying. if he does, the game goes back to the last checkpoint, which is convenient, [b]no need to start over[/b]. his heart rate in the the top right is just for show, doesn't affect anything, and obviously not every decision will matter. he can ask where to go, you tell him to go left, he says that's not a good idea and go right anyway. [b]some of the choices are on a timer[/b] to make things more tense, I'd prefer a toggle for this, not a fan of quick-time events, but it wasn't too bad here. separate volume settings and a very useful message pause slider are available while playing as well, plus in-game achievements in the main menu. the game starts in a window, but in 1080p I could barely make out the settings button at the bottom. and while [b]it can be made full screen with alt+enter[/b] and there are a few resolution options too, nothing will make it proper full screen, as it's a vertical phone-like thing. a normal-size window with a widescreen image in the background would go a long way in these kinda games. [b]there's no exit button[/b], but since it's supposed to be played in a window, you can close it easily, don't have to resort to the brutality of alt+f4. not much else to it, the presentation is functional, there are some typos here and there, you can mute sound effects if they bother you (the constant heartbeat or new messages appearing might), but the music works well with the african jungle setting. [b]a playthrough takes about an hour and a half[/b] and you can do multiple to check alternate choices and get the achievements you missed. [b]I found the story interesting enough[/b] but didn't bother replaying, as usual, though with message pause turned all the way down good luck reading anything, so [b]the speed setting can make short work of repetition[/b]. I'd say the asking price is a bit much for a single playthrough, but if you're going to exhaust all the options and get every achievements, it's a better deal.

The Hostage is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as a cash grab. It's barely counts as a game, more of a Choose Your Own Adventure e-book as you tap your iPhone screen to progress the weak plot presented by the e-book. To add a gamelike element to the e-book, you must sometimes make your Choose Your Own Adventure decisions as quickly as possible. What fun. This is arguably one of the laziest mobile apps ever made, and an even lazier PC port. Most e-books dumped on Steam masquerading as games at least have some artwork or something so people can pretend they're playing a game while they read a badly written e-book. They didn't bother here, it's just text. The whole thing could be done in DOS. The developer also didn't bother with full screen support, or even customisable resolution, the game displays in a tiny, mobile phone 9:16 ultra portrait aspect ratio. Lazy, and unacceptable for a PC game. Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $1 USD, on app stores, it's free. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay a premium for a free mobile game just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers.

At first i was really interested in this game as it is very similar to Lifeline series which is available on android devieces. Unfortunately it is not as good as Lifeline, because of a lot of choices results in dead ends - killing protagonist and breaking immersion, creating the ilussion (or showing the true nature of the game, to be sure i would need to play it at least a second time, which I am not going to do, beacuse it dissapointed me) of linear progression. But the most immersion breaking thing are bugs. In what I think is half of the game, suddenly protagonist started talking about things that didn't happend through my playthrough, meeting people that didn't appeard before and behaving like he knows them. It is probably because game mismatched my story path with some alternative one. Generally I tend to be forgiving of bugs in games but not in games where the only thing that they offer is story and such bug destroys any investment that I had in it. If the developers fix this bug I will change my recommendation. As of now go and play some of the Lifeline games as they are way better.

I enjoyed my first look at The Hostage. It is a simple choose your adventure, companion game. Responses are witty and story is intriguing. Check out my first look here: https://youtu.be/29gAB4Lglvg