This ask is from about 4 years ago, so 2017 or thereabouts.
Long Live the Queen: a weird, ultra-difficult, Ren’py stat-builder from Hanako Games. Monarchy, court intrigue, magical dynasty, magical destruction, diplomacy, the importance of “soft skills”, multiple routes for solving the same problems, lots of gruesome deaths, and just a smidgen of romance. I spent probably hundreds of hours on this game, although admittedly, I have not replayed it in. Hmm. A while. It does still hold a special place in my heart, even if I couldn’t beat it without a peek at the wiki, no matter how many times I’ve done so before.
Sunless Sea. I backed Failbetter Games’ first desktop game on Patreon, back in the day, so I’d been playing it since the super-early versions, back when combat was awful and you could barely make enough cash to stay afloat. Being a ship’s captain in a chthonic, cavernous sea taught me valuable lessons about things like “being afraid all the time”. It’s also the most agender-friendly game I’ve ever personally played.
Choice of Rebels: Uprising: the mega-ambitious first installment of a giga-ambitious epic fantasy series of five (?) text games. Out of all the COG games I’ve played, the one with the most phenomenal scope. The range of options is enormous. The depth of consequences is staggering. There’s one (1) dysfunctional romance that I am ultra-invested in, the more so the more treacherous and life-ruining it may yet prove to be.
Skyrim. Sometimes, I am boring. The first big RPG I played was DAO, which I have not touched in about five years. Skyrim, by contrast, is a game I can slip into and out of. Like the previous three, I’ve spent hundreds of hours deeply embedded in this game and the lore around it. Unlike the others, difficulty had (almost) nothing to do with it. I’m invested in the lore, even though it’s a quarter-century shambling Frankenstein’s monster of senselessness. To this game I have given the greatest gift that I, as a fan, know how to create: a 100+K word lore-breaking fanfic ‘verse with too many original characters.
Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem. You knew this answer, surely, because you were the one who turned me onto this game. Hilariously, it turns out that the earliest versions of 7KPP were written in ChoiceScript. Now, I am well out of the ho9neymoon phase with this game, and will never recapture the starry-eyed adoration of circa 2015-16, but the zip files full of hundreds of savegames and screencaps don’t fucking lie, and neither does the mood board of OCs. Or the obvious inspirations in my original fiction. Or, as above, the 100+K word sprawling epic that has less to do with the original canon with every installment I write.
