Choice of Alexandria
Choice of Games · 2016 · Adventure, Indie, RPG, Choose Your Own Adventure, Text-Based
PC
Very Positive95% · 76
Compare prices in Official Stores
Screenshots
About Choice of Alexandria
Can your steam-powered inventions save the ancient Library of Alexandria? Will you sacrifice the library to protect the city? Or will you protect the future king Ptolemy IV instead?
"Choice of Alexandria" is an interactive novella by Kevin Gold, author of "Choice of Robots." Your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based--90,000 words, without graphics or sound effects--and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
The year is 245 BCE; you’re a heroic polymath librarian, invited to Alexandria to tutor prince Ptolemy IV. Coach the prince in the Olympics--or help him ditch the Olympics to show his art and poetry there instead.
Or disregard your tutelage to focus on inventions instead! With the help of Archimedes and Euclid, you can discover the steam engine, the germ theory of disease, or even robotic automata, thousands of years ahead of schedule.
Will you deplete the libraries of other cities to enrich your own? Achieve popularity for your scientific inventions, or protect the legacy of the empire? Will Ptolemy IV grow up hedonistic and selfish, or wise and just? Will you be ransomed by the pirate queen Nefertari, or can you win her over with your silver tongue?
Change the course of history in "Choice of Alexandria!"
"Choice of Alexandria" is an interactive novella by Kevin Gold, author of "Choice of Robots." Your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based--90,000 words, without graphics or sound effects--and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
The year is 245 BCE; you’re a heroic polymath librarian, invited to Alexandria to tutor prince Ptolemy IV. Coach the prince in the Olympics--or help him ditch the Olympics to show his art and poetry there instead.
Or disregard your tutelage to focus on inventions instead! With the help of Archimedes and Euclid, you can discover the steam engine, the germ theory of disease, or even robotic automata, thousands of years ahead of schedule.
Will you deplete the libraries of other cities to enrich your own? Achieve popularity for your scientific inventions, or protect the legacy of the empire? Will Ptolemy IV grow up hedonistic and selfish, or wise and just? Will you be ransomed by the pirate queen Nefertari, or can you win her over with your silver tongue?
Change the course of history in "Choice of Alexandria!"
- Play as a brilliant inventor, a gifted speaker, or a life-saving doctor
- Make great discoveries while protecting Prince Ptolemy IV from manipulators at court
- Save famed mathematicians Archimedes and Euclid from untimely deaths
- Based on the real life of Eratosthenes, ancient genius who calculated the size of the Earth
- Save the Great Library and invent the steam engine two thousand years early!
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
Reviewing (mostly) every game (or DLC) in my library, part 524: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆☆ (8/10) [i]Choice of Alexandria[/i] is basically the butterfly effect in a short, 90,000 word text-based game. While one of the shortest I've ever played, this game is deeply interested in consequences: the slow, compounding kind that only become fully visible years or generations later. Unlike many choice-based games that lean into fantasy or power fantasies,[i] Choice of Alexandria[/i] takes a more unusual route: alternate history with a speculative edge. It asks genuinely compelling “what if?” questions. What if the Library of Alexandria had survived? What if ancient scientific and philosophical knowledge hadn’t been lost? What if Egypt, rather than Rome, had become the long-standing dominant power? [b][h2]Pros:[/h2][/b] ✅ [b] Concept.[/b] You play as librarian who comes to Alexandria to advance your own studies while serving as a tutor to the heir of the Ptolemaic dynasty. This setup creates one of the game’s strongest tensions: do you prioritize your own intellectual growth, or do you slow your personal ambitions to focus on shaping the young prince Ptolemy IV? Do you want to focus on seizing…5 found this helpful
Even for a work written in the genre of alternate history the factual inaccuracy of this game is close to unbearable. There were some good attempts at immersion, but the horrible pacing of the narrative and the horrendous portrayal of characters broke all that could be good in the title. What's worse, many of the choices seemed to be superfluous and led to nothing, the story overriding the player's agency in the most blatant of ways. Perhaps I was expecting a slice of life and not a chain of naive scenes and chunks of anachronistic rhetoric. A clever device was employed in the final chapter, but my version of it quickly dissolved into stale banality.
A bit too simple - takes 5 hours to get all achievements. Still, a great game, And very cheap
This is a short one, and rather for a specific group of people. But the latter is one of reasons I appreciate the Choice of games, and it gave me Hypatia going into space, so the only logical result is a thumbs up.
It's middling. Light and able to finish in under an hour.
A well written and interesting story.
Community reviews
—
0 reviews
Sign in to write a review.
No reviews yet. Be the first to review this game.
