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Basic Premise: Create a robot and watch in fascination or horror as it influences the next thirty years.
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Positives
- The story has the most branches of any self-contained official Choice of Games title I’ve tried.
- Different societal and ethical ramifications of creating and depending upon sentient machines are examined, but none of them beat you about the head with one particular view point.
- The interactions between you and your initial robot are funny without forcing a specific personality on the player. Try having it read the Stoics at least once. I’m pleased to find Kevin Gold, the author, is already working on another title.
- One of the situations I stumbled upon during my fourth game made me profoundly uncomfortable and nervous because the writing made me care about all four of those particular characters. I’ve been less interested in the major plot threads of novels than I was in those two chapters focused on small family interactions. Major win.
- If you make poor choices or fail certain stat checks, your character dies. Those moments never felt unfair though.
- The grammar and editing are professionally executed.
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Negatives
- Excepting the baby’s name, every time I typed a character’s name it immediately reverted to the default. Choose one of the provided selections until that’s rectified or prepare to experience jarring sentences such as “my robot shakes your hand.”
- You cannot argue that Hamlet‘s “To Be or Not to Be” speech is about action vs inaction rather than existence vs nonexistence.
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Everything Else
- This is a longer story compared to other Choice of Games titles. Make sure you have a chunk of time before starting.
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Bottom Line: Recommended. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to start a new robot cult. 🙂
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Choice of Games’ Choice of Robots is available on iOS, Android, Kindle, and Steam. It’s discounted until January 2, 2015.
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Impressions and review based on a provided code.
myladylydia 