Whiskey-Four

[i]Whiskey-Four[/i] is a great game. Alongside the author's other work, [i]I, the Forgotten One[/i], it's clear that the author is an excellent writer. I found the story compelling and interesting and really enjoyable. There's not any stat building in this one, although there are a few things tracked like your injury state or what items you have on you. This CYOA is on the more railroady side of the genre, but I don't think it's that bad. The narrative is linear but there is plenty of variation within that. There are meaningful choices, but their consequences sometimes come later rather than immediately. If you do a thing, then later on something might happen differently. It'll be a perfectly logical consequence, it's just that you aren't necessarily getting instant feedback about it. I don't think there anything wrong with preferring overt and immediate consequences over subtler ones like this, it just comes down to preference. I tend to find that CYOAs like [i]Whiskey-Four[/i] trade a bit of freedom for a more interesting and compelling main character. Which you prioritise is up to you. I will say that the last quarter of the game is where there's the highest density of meaningful choices, where [spoiler]how quickly your character is able to complete an objective becomes very important[/spoiler]. However, I do have one rather large issue with this game: no saving or even checkpoints. Saving is very uncommon in Choice of / Hosted Games, so it's far from a problem unique to this game, but it really does annoy me. Some CYOAs, including [i]I, the Forgotten One[/i] if I remember rightly, let you rewind back the last checkpoint, but this game doesn't even do that. The game already gives you some options that trade immersion for quality of life; personally I would've put an option to enable saves or checkpoints there too.