Recommending Story-first games

[jufot]

Haven't seen this mentioned yet, I'm going to recommend Salome's Kiss. It may make it to the OP.

Just finished reading it. Thanks again for the recommendation. It was damn good, and most definitely a fit for the OP! Anyone interested in playing should jump in completely blind. Avoid spoilers at all cost. Once finished, don't forget to check the newly unlocked "notes" section on the main menu. It explains ebi-hime's motivations, thoughts, and numerous inspirations for the story. Her notes are always a fun read.

Despite my overall praise, I stand by my earlier observation about the verbosity. Letitia definitely has some sort of ADHD. In the middle of important conversations, her mind wanders and she gets lost in profoundly dull tangents. I mean, look at this - the first and last lines are part of the dialogue, and everything in between is dreary exposition:

Spoiler: No spoiler, just a quote

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Still, I can't fault the dev too much for the verbosity or the flowery prose. It's certainly fitting for the time period. I even had to look up some words. Like 'victuals', which apparently means food, so I checked

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and it looks like the word appeared around the early 18th century and all but disappeared at the turn of the 20th. That sort of accuracy is rare.

Anyway, I shall end this with some spoilery thoughts about the plot

Spoiler: Massive spoilers inside

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P.S: desmosome, having finished the story, I can see why Jaike recommended this to you. I also think you might like it, given your tastes.

 

[kotte]

Still, I can't fault the dev too much for the verbosity or the flowery prose. It's certainly fitting for the time period. I even had to look up some words. Like 'victuals', which apparently means food, so I checked

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and it looks like the word appeared around the early 18th century and all but disappeared at the turn of the 20th. That sort of accuracy is rare.

Oh, that was a tool I didn't know of! Cool!
I just finished Seer's Isle (from the recommendation a couple of posts back), and apart from being a beautiful story, I also enjoyed learning a whole bunch of new words.

And now, using the Ngram viewer, I can see that for some of the words, it is perhaps not so surprising that I didn't know them before.
Like

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for example ("pertaining to the forest"), seems to have had its glory days between 1750 and 1850...

 

[jufot]

I forgot to mention a minor annoyance about Salome's Kiss. I'm pretty sure this is unintentional, but it stands out in a game that otherwise pays a ton of attention to detail.

Genevieve can't be Arthur's biological child. Red and blond hair are both recessive alleles of the same gene, so a blond person cannot have a red-headed child, regardless of the other parent

 

[noping123]

I forgot to mention a minor annoyance about Salome's Kiss. I'm pretty sure this is unintentional, but it stands out in a game that otherwise pays a ton of attention to detail.

Genevieve can't be Arthur's biological child. Red and blond hair are both recessive alleles of the same gene, so a blond person cannot have a red-headed child, regardless of the other parent

View attachment 2384067

I will counter with:

There is no person alive with THAT color hair, naturally - thus she dyes it, and as such could very well be blonde or some other color.

 

[jufot]

There is no person alive with THAT color hair, naturally - thus she dyes it, and as such could very well be blonde or some other color.

Well, synthetic hair dyes are an early 20th century invention, so she'd have to get very creative to achieve that colour in the 1800s

 

[noping123]

Well, synthetic hair dyes are an early 20th century invention, so she'd have to get very creative to achieve that colour in the 1800s

True, but there's plenty of evidence that people dyed their hair as early as the ancient egyptians - and even some evidence of it being done as far back as the stone age!

So while that particular pigment might be a bit tricky to achieve vs say... just a bleach blonde (or even a brownish coloring), it's far from impossible, bordering on likely.

 

[Deleted member 3365639]

I forgot to mention a minor annoyance about Salome's Kiss. I'm pretty sure this is unintentional, but it stands out in a game that otherwise pays a ton of attention to detail.

Genevieve can't be Arthur's biological child. Red and blond hair are both recessive alleles of the same gene, so a blond person cannot have a red-headed child, regardless of the other parent

View attachment 2384067

Of course a blonde father can have a red headed child. I still believe you need a man AND a woman to create a child. The mother can have brown hair and the father can be blonde and the child could still be a redhead.

 

[jufot]

Of course a blonde father can have a red headed child. I still believe you need a man AND a woman to create a child. The mother can have brown hair and the father can be blonde and the child could still be a redhead.

No, it doesn't work that way. A blond man has to have two blond alleles. A brown haired woman has either two copies of brown, or (let's say) one brown and one red. Brown is dominant, red and blond are recessive. So the child has a 50/50 chance of having brown (brown+blond) or strawberry blond (red+blond) hair.

You can only be a redhead if you get a red allele from both parents, and a blond person cannot have a red allele.

 

[Deleted member 3365639]

No, it doesn't work that way. A blond man has to have two blond alleles. A brown haired woman has either two copies of brown, or (let's say) one brown and one red. Brown is dominant, red and blond are recessive. So the child has a 50/50 chance of having brown (brown+blond) or strawberry blond (red+blond) hair.

You can only have red hair if you get a red allele from both parents, and a blond person cannot have a red allele.

It is possible just research it if you really dont believe me.

 

[scholardude]

No, it doesn't work that way. A blond man has to have two blond alleles. A brown haired woman has either two copies of brown, or (let's say) one brown and one red. Brown is dominant, red and blond are recessive. So the child has a 50/50 chance of having brown (brown+blond) or strawberry blond (red+blond) hair.

You can only be a redhead if you get a red allele from both parents, and a blond person cannot have a red allele.

Hair color is not just caused by a single gene like you're implying though. In reality hair color is a complex genetic trait, and multiple genes are involved in determining a person's hair color. See the abstract here for example:

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Granted, a redheaded person is unlikely to be born to non-redheaded parents, but I don't think it's completely impossible.

(Also, I never expected to find myself linking to a scientific study on an internet porn forum )

 

[jufot]

Granted, a redheaded person is unlikely to be born to non-redheaded parents, but I don't think it's completely impossible.

It's entirely possible, and I never claimed otherwise For example, two brown or black haired people can have a 25% chance of having a red-headed child if they both have a red allele (that they might not have known about). I'm just saying one of them can't be blond specifically because blond, like red, is also recessive.

In reality hair color is a complex genetic trait, and multiple genes are involved in determining a person's hair color.

The exact tone of the hair colour depends on the relative amounts of pheomelanin and eumelanin pigments and yes, multiple genes are affecting them, but ultimately red alleles have to be present in both parents to have a red haired child.

That said, I'm sorry for derailing this thread and will stop now

 

[Deleted member 3365639]

It's entirely possible, and I never claimed otherwise For example, two brown or black haired people can have a 25% chance of having a red-headed child if they both have a red allele (that they might not have known about). I'm just saying one of them can't be blond specifically because blond, like red, is also recessive.


The exact tone of the hair colour depends on the relative amounts of pheomelanin and eumelanin pigments and yes, multiple genes are affecting them, but ultimately red alleles have to be present in both parents to have a red haired child.

That said, I'm sorry for derailing this thread and will stop now

Thanks for stopping.

 

[scholardude]

It's entirely possible, and I never claimed otherwise For example, two brown or black haired people can have a 25% chance of having a red-headed child if they both have a red allele (that they might not have known about). I'm just saying one of them can't be blond specifically because blond, like red, is also recessive.


The exact tone of the hair colour depends on the relative amounts of pheomelanin and eumelanin pigments and yes, multiple genes are affecting them, but ultimately red alleles have to be present in both parents to have a red haired child.

That said, I'm sorry for derailing this thread and will stop now

I'm also sorry for derailing this thread, and I'll make this my absolute last post on the subject.

I just want to make the point that the genes for blond hair are different from the genes for red hair, and there's nothing preventing a blond person from carrying a recessive variation of the MC1R gene that encodes for red hair. So depending on the other parent they could still end up with a child that has red hair.

But again we've derailed the thread enough so I'll stop too.

 

[bacienvu88]

I'm sure there is a game out there that is all about breeding and selecting parents with the goal of creating the perfect redheaded person.

 

[Jaike]

Anyway, I shall end this with some spoilery thoughts about the plot

Spoiler: Massive spoilers inside

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P.S: desmosome, having finished the story, I can see why Jaike recommended this to you. I also think you might like it, given your tastes.

Maybe you'll be pleased to learn I also got one culprit right and the other wrong, and I was wrong about the ending.

But yes it's certainly a long stream of words. Good for vocabulary tho.

I think the story exploits the

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really well. It was an isolated life on two ends and that isolation is absolutely an important plot element. You don't see that kind of clever use of a setting in historical popular fiction so often.

Letitia's excessive imagination is also hinted at in other ways a few times, like how she seems to like romantic writers and the Bard's tragedies.

Then a few criticisms with spoilers.

Spoiler: short critical thoughts on the plot

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Like 'victuals', which apparently means food, so I checked

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and it looks like the word appeared around the early 18th century and all but disappeared at the turn of the 20th. That sort of accuracy is rare.

"Victuals" really is older than that but Google has problems with texts that are much older than 1750. Think of challenges like analysing blackletter or handwriting. It makes their scans go bust.

It was a normal word by the late Middle Ages, that's Middle English, but it had a

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. It got a Latin spelling later. You pronounce it "vittles" btw.

I forgot to mention a minor annoyance about Salome's Kiss. I'm pretty sure this is unintentional, but it stands out in a game that otherwise pays a ton of attention to detail.

Genevieve can't be Arthur's biological child. Red and blond hair are both recessive alleles of the same gene, so a blond person cannot have a red-headed child, regardless of the other parent

View attachment 2384067

I will counter with:

There is no person alive with THAT color hair, naturally - thus she dyes it, and as such could very well be blonde or some other color.

Well, synthetic hair dyes are an early 20th century invention, so she'd have to get very creative to achieve that colour in the 1800s

I'm not going to comment about the genetics, I don't know a thing bout that. Besides, more chemical reactions generate heat than light.

But I think you can get something close to that colour with

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. I don't know if madder ever got used much for hair dye, that it was used for dying wool and leather makes me doubt if that was practical, but the 19th century was also the time when synthetic chemicals really became a thing.

Finally there's the possibility her father and later her mother got NTR'd.

I'm sure there is a game out there that is all about breeding and selecting parents with the goal of creating the perfect redheaded person.

Breeding Season ft My New Family, absolute madder lasses edition, yo!

 

[jufot]

Then a few criticisms with spoilers.

Agreed. Dinah knows that this is not a loving relationship of equals. She is more like a sex toy to Genevieve. But she should be 'safe' as long she goes along with Genevieve's every whim

"Victuals" really is older than that but Google has problems with texts that are much older than 1750. Think of challenges like analysing blackletter or handwriting. It makes their scans go bust.

It was a normal word by the late Middle Ages, that's Middle English, but it had a

You must be registered to see the links

. It got a Latin spelling later. You pronounce it "vittles" btw.

That makes sense about Google, and thanks for "vittles". It's fascinating and wouldn't have occured to me

 

[bacienvu88]

That makes sense about Google, and thanks for "vittles". It's fascinating and wouldn't have occured to me

English and its pronunciation again defies all expectations.

 

[Raife]

I think the story exploits the

You must be registered to see the links

really well. It was an isolated life on two ends and that isolation is absolutely an important plot element. You don't see that kind of clever use of a setting in historical popular fiction so often.

"Victuals" really is older than that but Google has problems with texts that are much older than 1750. Think of challenges like analysing blackletter or handwriting. It makes their scans go bust.

It was a normal word by the late Middle Ages, that's Middle English, but it had a

You must be registered to see the links

. It got a Latin spelling later. You pronounce it "vittles" btw.

Jaike is demonstrating her intellectual hinterland again... always a pleasant development, despite her excessive modesty about it.

I agree that the social standing of governesses is very interesting: that's why it was fodder for so much literature. I'd love to see more games explore that territory. But... I also share others' qualms about the excessive exposition in the game. It's a bit much for me, even though a _lot_ of 19th century novels also contained excessive verbiage. Some gothic novels, in particular, were super OTT. (Most political speeches of the era were even worse... and went on forever.)

As for jufot's foray into genetics... I'll say that it _sounds_ plausible to me, given that my knowledge of the subject matter is limited to Mendel's pea pods. But I can cite quite a few real world examples to the contrary (that is, redheads with blonde siblings). Now, there could be [cheating tag] involved... except that seems rather implausible in some instances. (Perhaps not in the case of Princes William and Harry, though!)

 

[Raife]

Her VNs with female protagonists seem to be otome, because they are like 75% otome until the denouement. And the denouement usually pulls the rug out from under the otome part and then it becomes a rather different genre.

Speaking of Otome games, it would be great to play a game with a good rendition of a close (non-sexual, non-LI) male-female friendship. There are some decent renditions of straight male-male friendships... although these tend to be of the slightly annoying 'wingman' variety... but strong female-male friendships are a rarity in games.

It so happens that my best friend (other than my wife) is a woman. She is also a crucial professional ally -- without her, her husband, and my wife, I would not be where I am today. This woman... let's call her 'Katie'... joined our company as my opposite number in a different geography, and we established an immediate, deep intellectual sympathy. It's funny, nearly a decade in retrospect, but my wife was initially slightly jealous, until she saw us together and realized that the nature of our relationship was entirely non-sexual... just rooted in deep sympathy and respect. This turned into something like an alliance... she worked for me, then I worked for her... together, we just couldn't fail. We still haven't.

It would be great to read a good depiction of a tight, non-sexual, male-female friendship in one of these games.

 

[bacienvu88]

Digging up a real old post.

One Day at a Time: With chapter 10, Zoey Raven's drug recovery epic is slowly crawling towards its conclusion. Once completed, I could see someone removing the porny bits and use the rest as an educational tool. It's really that good.

Not quite as close to its conclusion as you thought. I think chapter 12 & 13 have taken the story to a new height!

Rise of The White Flower: Chapter 8 is out! At 52000 words, it's the shortest one *ever*, which is a tad disappointing given the length of time between updates. But it makes sense storywise. This update felt like a transitory one - it winded down some big events from the previous chapters, and set the stage for even bigger things in the future. I never thought we'd meet Elara, so that was a nice surprise! For the uninitiated, Rise of The White Flower is overflowing with cheesy porn, but don't let that deter you. Such cheesy bits are entirely optional and don't interfere with the game's genuinely captivating story. You can tell that a lot of effort went into world building and lore. Why not give it a shot?

Just started playing Rise of the White Flower. So far it is a really great. I am a sucker for world building and there is tons of it here. Some of the cheesy porn bits is perhaps a bit too much. But at the same time even those have a lot of character so I don't mind it.

Recommended!