The Hero of Kendrickstone

[i]The Hero of Kendrickstone[/i] 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, [i]The Hero of Kendrickstone[/i] 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 …

Not bad, but not all that interesting, honestly. A fantasy text-based RPG with stats and a linear barely-branching story. The reason I don't recommend comes directly off one key factor; it's an RPG with about 4 main stats, and many times through the story you'll be given multiple choices to approach situations, all of which have obvious stats related to them. You don't get a lot of points to spread around, in fact I'd go so far as to say you really only have 1 path to take per run unless you want to gimp yourself in the final encounter by trying to spread out across multiple stats. So when these multiple-choice sections come up, they always read to me like "Would you like to pick the option that will actually succeed based on your stats, or would you like to fail in a specific way?" The game may as well just ask you which Stat you want to focus on at the start and at that point there's little "Choice" to be had. I'll admit I enjoyed my first run-through and could see there being more stuff I missed that may be interesting, but the simple fact is that the GAMEPLAY of this GAME is poor, and thus not worth checking out. I'd rather just read a Hero of Kendrickstone Choose Your Own A…

"The Hero of Kendrickstone" is a prime example of an interactive novel of low quality. The story is entirely railroaded, and there’s no way to avoid many scenes. For example, [spoiler]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.[/spoiler] 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 (2/1…

I enjoyed this game, it's short and a choose your own adventure game. Recommended if you enjoyed the choose your own adventure books

A fun re playable text based adventure.

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.