Choice of Alexandria

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…

A very short but well put together adventure. The heavy focus on real world history does distract a little from the story being told, in my opinion, but only at times. Worth a try if your interested.

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.