The Hero of Kendrickstone

This is a complicated one for me, I love Paul Wang as a writer and despite this being one of his earlier works its still very well-written and engaging to play. I would recommend this if you're interested in simple adventure fantasy roleplaying stuff. I kinda look at this like a worse version of the Sorcery! game series with a lot more choice as to what your character is like but much less choice overall.

Despite this the inexperience of the author at the time shows since there's not a ton of character development and the biggest crux of all is the game design. If you play a mage you'll always use magic, a fighter always fights, bard always talks, rogue always sneaks, there's virtually no middle ground and it shows. Still for a game that can be completed in less than 4 hours its a very simple and well-written pulpy story even if the choice is quite simple. Paul Wang has improved significantly since this and his other books show a great deal of talent and thought put into them.

Another example of an interactive novel of low quality. The story is entirely railroaded, and there’s no way to avoid many scenes. For example, choosing not to pay their protection fee will always result in you trying to help a bunch of criminals break into a house to steal something. The closest you can get to saying no is failing to actually break in, in which case, the mark will still comply for some reason and do whatever the criminals want anyway.

The background you choose and who you give your loyalty to will provide you with some flavor text and little else. Worse, if you pick “eloquence” as your skill of choice, you will have no way to handle many situations, making it suitable for nothing but earning some gold. Oh, and getting your character beat up, of course, and that’s if you’re lucky.

I played through as a mage first and a bard second, and very little changed. I’m tempted to say nothing changed, but that’s not entirely true, as who I served under and how I was able to handle the unavoidable situations altered slightly. Not to mention, how injured my character got changed quite a lot. As such, I’ll give the game a (2/10) and consider myself generous.

Finally, it needs to be stated that I actually enjoyed my first playthrough, to an extent, since the flaws were reasonably well hidden then, so if you only intend to play through it once, it may be worth it. Maybe. Just do yourself a favor and pick warrior, mage, or thief.

The Hero of Kendrickstone is a text-based, choose-your-own-adventure developed and published by Choice of Games. You take on the role of a character where you can choose their gender and name, and you wish to strike out on your own, away from the village where you grew up. From the beginning, you can choose to be a warrior, magic wielder, bard, or rogue. After venturing off on your own, heading towards the city of Kendrickstone, as that is where you plan to make it as a freelance adventurer, you run into some trouble from some thieves on the road until a mysterious knight comes to your aid. As I would be revealing some major story spoilers from here, I'll end my story synopsis.

As for the gameplay, The Hero of Kendrickstone is entirely text-based, so there are no sounds, music, or graphics, only text. However, there are plenty of choices presented throughout the story, which determine the personality and type of your character. Choices made can raise particular stats of your character, such as will or prowess. Also, you can choose to be compassionate or cruel as well as favor order or freedom. In addition, there are plenty of Steam/in-game achievements.

Now that I've gone over the story and gameplay, I'll move onto my critique. I enjoy a good CYOA on occasion, and this one is no exception. To my surprise, after finishing this story, I found out that the writer is the same one as Sabres of Infinity and Guns of Infinity, both of which I highly enjoyed. First, I'll critique the story. I like the fantasy, adventure genre, and this one starts off on a strong promise, taking on the role of a would-be adventurer. After a brief dream sequence, you find yourself ready to start an adventure, and it doesn't take long before you find yourself surrounded by thieves. The story doesn't waste too much time getting into the action, which I like. As for the choices, I like how they determine the character's personality (like whether they want to help people or being mercenary) as well as that character's career path. If your character chooses to have a mentor, that mentor can help them improve particular stats, which makes taking on certain missions easier. I like the cast of characters, and there's plenty of variety. Also, there are plenty of events, which are balanced along with everyday happenings.

As for the writing, I felt it fairly well-paced. I never found myself feeling like the story dragged on or anything. There were one or two typos that I noticed on certain paths, but other than that, the writing felt very smooth. Choices felt like they mattered, and I was able to obtain all of the achievements.

Overall, would I recommend The Hero of Kendrickstone? If you like a fantasy, adventure story and enjoy one with plenty of choices, I'd say that this is worth taking a look. The story length didn't feel too long, and I enjoyed going through multiple playthroughs. For the asking price, I'd say it's worth getting although you can always wait to get it on a sale. ^^

[quote]Flying free and writing reviews solely for The Introverted Gamer.[/quote]

Short enjoyable romp. Not overly complex but good fun. Did not actually take 3 hours to complete as the game was left loaded while I did other stuff.

Update:

Original Review:

It has been a bit since I last played/read this. I will try to keep anything too close to a spoiler from the review.

It's one of those CYOA novels where the personality stats are more for flavoring the text, some things your character thinks/says will be different depending on their personality. It was actually done fairly well, with your characters view of those around them being fairly interesting to read and to set you up for thinking through justification for their thoughts. This goes along well with good (not great) scene writing.

While their are different paths to explore, there are not many and certain parts of them simply do not seem to change. You can basically be a warrior, a thief, a wizard, and a bard. These can have different story paths that can be fun, but the big events of the game seem largely unchanged other than how your character will skill check something. The description can be a good read, but the choice aspect of it doesn't seem as strong as others in the CYOA genre (such as Mecha Ace, one of my favorite and first CYOA by the same author).

The main problem with the novel, is that it lacks a lot of character development. Your character is essentially the A list, and there are a few B list. All of the others are basically extras. This might not be so bad if the B listers had more character development. Two of them have a decent bit, but even they are more of a few paragraphs of backstory and a few lines of personality driven action than anything that really makes you care about them. They do not seem as their own people who have value other than telling your character some things to do and a few encouraging words. They are nothing outside of that. Your own character has some good development, though some of the studying and skill building seem to be more for a bigger world than what this CYOA provides.

This CYOA novel is okay, though the time and money might be better spent on others. It feels like the beginning of the building of a world, almost like a demo. A sequal seems hinted at by the way the CYOA is written, but I can't remember it ever being deliberately said. Currently, the novel provides some good reading but the feeling of being cramped and rushed, especially when you decide to stop and try to get a feel of what's around you. It's not the worst, but a sequal or a big rewrite is the only way I can recommend it.

One of the... less good choice of games titles. Choices aren't very interesting nor do they branch the story off in any significant way. Also kinda badly balanced between paths (Fighter Wizard Rogue Bard). Play life of a wizard instead.

I'm a huge fan of Choice of Games, but this story was a huge disappointment for me. I can somewhat forgive the generic medieval/fantasy setting, but I can't get over how brief the experience was. What I had figured was the end of the 1st act turned out to be the end of the game.

Hero of Kendrickstone isn't truly *bad* in and of itself, but it is priced way too high relative to the amount of content. For 5 dollars you can buy some incredible works of fiction that will keep you engrossed for tens of hours. This barely engaged me for three.

I actually really enjoyed this story. It's one of those "pick your own adventure" type tales. You're the good guy or bad guy and your choices fully dictate what will happen throughout the story. As for anyone looking for a fun text-based story, I'd easily give this a 10/10.

Unimpressed. I expected more, much more. I played the game a few times, and found a shocking lack of consequences and evil alternative endings. I'm sure there's some out there, but with an 8% compassion rate, there should be some special options to side with the evil wizard or kill the duke.

Far too short, and frankly it's an embarrassing piece of work when compared to Choice of Robots. Hardly any customization, cliche's left & right, a few errors here and there. Nothing groundbreaking.

Wana ignore my rant? Skip to the bottom! :D

***Spoilers***



It also bothered be a lot that the main antagonist is mindlessly evil, with evil brainwashed drone bandits. I thought that he would actually take over the city - be interesting - and you'd have an epic, character-defining, individualized story that a few other choose-your own-adventure games out there offer. Instead, you get a quest from every main character (Which are hardly interesting, and you can'teven have a romance with any of them either) fight the bad guy, and Epilogue. Way too short!

It really hurts to see how basic this is, and how unnatural a lot of it feels. Why the living f*** would a knight implore the help of a wizards apprentice - that totally snubbed her by the by - to kill a vicious bear-wolvirene-badge-snake thing?

The game assumes I want to be an adventurer, and make a name for myself, which in a lot of cases, isn't true! It's very restrictive.

The world is something new-ish, I'll give them that, though riddled with cliches and hardly explored. You won't go more than a few miles away from the main city place, so if you're looking for an epic Dany from ASoIaF/GoT moving across the lands of Essos, building an army and reclaiming her throne, or a Frodo Baggins moving across Middle Earth, you best go somewhere else.


***************

For 5 f***ing dollars, this game is not worth the buy. If it were 2 dollars, or maybe even 3, I would be alright, BUT 5?! I could probably buy a DVD of Lord of the Rings if I'm lucky. Choice of games really botched it here, and just jumped on the medieval bandwagon that blew up after Game of Thrones.

I did learn what a retinue was, I was always curious about what that meant, but never looked it up.

Final verdict WITH full price: 3/10 not worth it
Final verdict with reduced price: 4/10 below average, but if you got time to kill, might as well, but don't plan to walk away feeling like you've gained something.

I CRIED after Choice of Robots, okay? CRIED. And I'm not even a big fan of science fiction! You want to know WHY I cried? I felt attached to the character! I felt like it really was me, and I felt like I was really growing and making mistakes! You won't get anything like that out of this, no building a company then seeing it crumble and selling it because you're an idiot, or becoming a tyrant because you can, or even feeling the existential from dying as you hold the hand of your loved one. None of that here; I felt like I was controlling a drone.

Go out and play D&D with some frineds, at least then you might get something out of it.

It's a great game... for a single play through. You get everything right and win the boss fight and boom! game over. You try and play again as someone new and guess what, 90% of the game is the exact same as before. The only difference is certain options which were greyed out the first time through are open now, and your initial back story is different.

I was excited for this story, thinking there were be branching story arcs and various routes to the various ends, but its basically a nice little rail that you cruise along till you beat the bag guy. You just alter the appearance of the cart your riding in.

A little more variety would have left me replaying this story many times and trying all the various heroes and back stories.. but as it is, *yawn* once was enough.

TL;DR at the bottom of review.

I really enjoy the games produced over at Choice of Games. Choice of Robots was in fact one of my favourite games of last year. However, I can't recomend The Hero of Kendrickstone beacuse it lacks a fundamental feature of games like these:

Choice and Consenquence

It seems that no matter which path I go down I will always end up in the same spot. Do you chose to save the nobel knight or the innocent family from an onslaught of bandits? Really doesn't matter, as they will only show up again at the end of the game and nothing else will change (except you might get a bit more gold, depending on who your mentor is).

The only choice that affects your experience in any really big way is wether you're a Mage, Warrior, Rouge or Bard, and even then those only serve to lock you to a particular set of choices. In combat for example, a Warrior will never atempt to fight using magic, sneaky backstabs or talking the enemy to death. Instead, you'll have to opt for the melee option, as your character would get their arse kicked if you were to go with any other option.

For example, at the end of the game there is a choice that involves you going with a particular plan of action to stop a large threat. I was first excited for this and was curious to see the different effects it would have on the last portion of the game. But you know what the choices depended on? Whether you were Mage, Warrior, Rouge or Bard. They didn't even attempt to mask this, as the Royal Mage proposes the Mage plan, the Warrior the plan involving an all-out assault and ect. In fact, if you aren't a mage, one of the options is locked entirely away from you!

Now, the solution might seem obvious: Multiclass! Pick two main stats to focus on (each class has its own stat) and become a Battlemage, or an Assasin Bard! Sadly, however, if you try to raise two stats at the same time, you will find you are lacking in your skills and that you aren't specialised, making it harder to pull off some of the skill checks later in the game.

This same problem was experienced in Choice of The Deathless, another Choice of Game, but that game had witty writing and good humor, good characters and a world I was interested to explore. With The Hero of Kendrickstone, the character development is almost non-existent. All the characters seem to be one thing, and one thing only, with no flaws to creat deeper, more believable characters.

In the end, I canno't recomend The Hero of Kendrickstone for these very reasons. The game lacks consenquence and your choices are, ironically, seeverly limited by the one big choice in the game, not to mention that the world in which you will be making these desicions (and its inhabitants) are all flat and boring. I tried for a long time to turn my opinion around on The Hero of Kendrickstone since I really, REALLY want to see more Chose Your Own Adventure games on Steam. But alas, I can't.

The Hero of Kendrickstone is simply not worth your purchase. If you're looking for a good CYOA, have a go at Choice of Robots, Choice of The Deathless, The Hero Rise Trilogy (particulary the last two games in the trilogy) or even some of the Hosted (not directly sponsored) games on Choice of Games website. I'd strongly sugest you check out Life of a Mobster and Life of a Wizard if you want to look into the latter.

TL;DR : Restricting Choices, Lack of Consenquences, Poor World and Characters, Don't Buy

The first playthrough is amazing, it's just a straight up choose your own adventure book with added RPG elements to make it all the more enjoyable.
If you play through it more than once, however you'll see how little your decisions matter. Whether you're a powerful mage or just a simple tavern bard your experience will be exactly the same.

But who plays through games more than once, eh? Game is a little short though.

Get it while it's on sale.

The Hero Of Kendrickstone is a tale where you're the one that decides almost everything that happens with you,the Hero,during your journey to become the most famous adventurer in history,the richest person in the city of Kendrickstone or the most righteous and merciful Knight in the realm.

A good and involving narrative that makes you wonder what will happen next and is even capable of making you like some characters that you will pass most of the time with,like your mentors.

The Hero Of Kendrickstone is a must buy for anyone who loves a good reading and it will give nearly 4 hours of entertaining for a very cheap price.


9.5/10 "Stop Right There Criminal Scum"

The paths are very inflexible - you basically have to go 100% with a certain skillset in order to win - and the endings are not very different from each other.

EDIT - I should also clarify, I much preferred other Choice of Games games where you could win with only going 80% into a path. Also, the author's other game, Mecha Ace, seemed like it was actually pretty hard to die before the ending.

To put my experience of The Hero of Kendrickstone into a nutshell, (taking into account the price) it is a deceptively well-written, engaging, fantasy/rpg book with decent characters and branching story line, but to which can be harsh at times if you make 'wrong moves' ( I say wrong moves, as they may not be bad decisions- as fantasy/rpg book readers know all too well, haha).

Not having played The Hero of Kendrickstone for very long ( only having completed one and a half playthroughs) , I think its enough to say that this game.... no, book?.. is a great buy for anyone who enjoys/ would enjoy a fairly casual book where you can carve your own path/ create your own story( and with significant diversity), with each different decision you make in your playthroughs (and there are are a pretty good amount of those to be made).

Though there are some minor things to mention such as;
- no way to re-read a page or change decisions made, save for restarting
-some spelling errors
-slightly short (though you can save your adventure at the end to maybe continue in the next possible book)

Taking all things into consideration, I would definately recommend it.

8.9/10 :D

Great concept, great story. That said, I felt a little let down when I was able to beat the game within 3 hours. I enjoyed my time, I just felt like I wanted more from it. I felt like I just got into defining and enjoying who my character was when I reached the last chapter.

Definitely worth $3 on sale, but not sure I woud pay full price for it. There is some replayability, but the general idea stays the same so the subsequent playthoughs are quicker since you don't have to read as much.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game, (book?). The story was fun and engaging, and it felt like there were plenty of choices to be made. If you are a fan of Fantasy/Adventure I highly recommend you give it a try.

There were a couple of complaints I had though. One is that there were a number of typos and errors. Not game breaking, but annoying none the less. Another is that the choices you were given did not always match up well with what was in the text. Again, not huge, but annoying.

My final complaint is not so much with this game in particular, but with Choice of games in general. There is no way to easily go back a page or remake a choice, You have to restart the entire story in order to reread anything or change any choice. It does not take too long to quickly remake your choices and catch up to where you left off, but doing so can be very tedious. A simple back button or save option would go a long way to making these games (Books?) more enjoyable for those of us who like to quickly explore different options and paths.

I'm a big fan of Choice of Games, and this might be my favorite game yet!
It's a bit more unforgiving than the others (in the tradition of Fighting Fantasy) & doesn't have the usual romance elements, but I much enjoyed the story and the writing is top-notch.
A word of advice: pick a strength & commit to it - it's not an adventure where you'll get far as a warrior with no weapons or a mage with no spells!

I really enjoyed this, though it was a tad shorter than I would have liked. That being said, there is an option to save your progress at the end of this, so I'm guessing another chapter to this will be released eventually.

A well-written choose-your-own-adventure story set in a colorful high-fantasy medieval land. As a brand-new adventurer, you'll have many interesting choices to make towards your destiny and meet some great characters along the way.

The writing style is succinct yet descriptive - just enough of a basis for you to flesh out everyone (including yourself) with your own imagination.

A playthrough will probably last about an hour and half to two hours (depending on your reading and decision-making speed) and I suggest you take your time because your choices do seem meaningful. There is some room for a couple replays (choosing different paths or professions).

I recommend the experience. It's a good, light read over a cup of coffee for winding down after a workday.