Genre(s): Simulation, puzzle
Credits: Written by Kie Brooks, programmed by ChoiceScript, 2010
What if, instead of waking up in a non-descript dungeon, you woke up in your house? With nothing more fantastic to do, then take your prescription medications and look for a job?
This is where Paranoia, a legitimate old-school-style choose-your-own-adventure, enlivens its genre with a B-movie scenario re-imagined in a thoughtful literary context.
You are simply a patient taking pills to help you with your apparent paranoia. How you, the player, got this paranoia condition is unclear. But how you choose to react to the environment and events that occur has a funny way of influencing your perception of that player-character. Thanks to dynamically-changing phrases and world descriptions, at some point you will either be convinced that your paranoia is justified or it isn't. The fancy way of saying this is that it's psychologically meta! I'm not saying it'll totally blow your mind, but will it get you to think twice, three times, or four about your preconceived paradigm through biased writing? Oh yes.
Like most choose-your-own-adventures, it'll take you a few good attempts before you discover the tips and tricks you'll need to successfully navigate through to the end. It gets a bit predictable as you go on, but until you actually "win" the game, every new turn in the path is a surprise. Refreshingly, if you reach a certain point towards the adventure's end and fail, you'll be given chances to retry the "last leg" instead of completely restarting the game—quite a user-friendly and stress-free move.
Content entirely aside, the game's design assembly intrigues me the most. The actual text adventure mechanic is provided by the host company Choice of Games, who've made their own fairly popular line of classic text-adventure satires in mobile app format. All of these are developed in a script language similar (in theory, anyway) to BASIC, keeping variables and loops clearly defined and easily understood so that, ultimately, the game's design rests entirely in the writer's hands. They provide the script and learning tutorials free on their website for anyone—yes, even people like me who love games but didn't major in fancy computer graphics—to download and create. Furthermore, there's an incentive to host your original content on their site: no fees for you. To say that Choice of Games is an indie-friendly company would be a bit of an understatement. Although I have yet to play with the technology for myself (adding it to the New Year's resolutions pile), it seems, at least at face value, like a great option for game design hobbyists who are broke on resources but have a rich deposit of creativity.
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