Me Smart Orc
Me Smart Orc is a short Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) text game, set in the world of Panos. It is totally free, so complaints about length will be filed under the ‘innuendo’ section. But the game is deceptively re-playable. Options, text, and combat results are influenced by the intelligence of the orc that your character is shepherding around! And your decisions, even the seemingly harmless ones, just might change the ending. So in may take a couple of hours (or more) to get all of the results.
You are Lizzy, the flying lizard. You live in the swampy orc village of Jeywafa; specifically in a small, leaky tent that smells like old socks. You normally laze about all day soaking up the sun, and occasionally serve as an animal companion for your master and best buddy, Shaman.
Shaman is not only the tribe’s healer, but he also trains the ‘smart orcs’. Which means he’s in charge of the apprentice mages who have to feed the tribe’s Voodoo Engine by casting spells nearby. The chief thinks that these novice mages are only being taught ‘Enhance Intelligence’ to stave off the curse that makes all orc mages dumber when they cast spells. But Shaman has started a secret school, with the intention of making these orcs much smarter than they should be, so they can use all kinds of cool spells!
Normally, none of this would be your problem. But today, Shaman is going off on a trading mission, and he’s leaving YOU in charge of Dunwart. Dunwart is the most promising apprentice of the Jeywafa tribe since that fool Sorch ran away to become an adventurer. Somehow the fate of all of Panos is wrapped up in this stupid task, you’re SURE of it. Otherwise, why would Shaman send someone so important to get the job done?
Me Smart orc is 100 percent free, with no DLC. If you enjoy the setting and you’d like to reward the author, consider picking up the Bill Ricardi’s books: ‘Another Stupid Spell’, ‘Another Stupid Demon’, and ‘Another Stupid Apocalypse’. Warning: These books contain themes of fantasy violence, abuse, stupidity, androgynous were-cat love, greed, goody-goody minotaurs, bisexuality, foolhardy adventure, demonic armies, and rocks. If any of the above would offend you grievously, stick to the gamebook.
Special thanks to Ian Lee and Tim Vecchiarelli for playtesting, and Ash Stone for tweaking and packaging the code.
Game Discussion
Steam User 3
I found this to be charming and fun. If you like dragons and CYOA then this is one you'll like.
Steam User 1
Very short Choose Your Own Adventure. Don't expect much from this, it's a very short read that should take you less than half an hour to complete. But maybe if you try it again you'll find a different adventure...?
To be honest, if this game had been $1.00 I probably would've felt ripped off. But it was free, and it gives you a taste of maybe what do have expected from his other books. Just don't expect to encounter a compelling story, or characters, or dialogue, or gameplay. It's just a short time waster.
Steam User 1
An interesting little short story CYOA set in the game maker's own fantasy Universe (in which they've written a few books on Kindle/Amazon).
The deaths and game overs are a little sudden and arbitrary ("Who do you fight, the skeleton or the zombie?" has one correct answer and one game over, for instance) but it's designed to be started over and re-ran quickly.
You can create a save game from the menu system, but it's literally going to make a .sav file in your My Documents folder for you to load, the engine itself is basically just a HTML browser . It's using the public domain "Quest" engine available online at textadventures.co.uk which I found interesting - I'd researched this one in the past while reading up on CYOA and Interactive Fiction but never seen anything implemented in it. That was actually what lead me to try this.
There's a few clever variables and mechanics working behind the scenes as well and I was pleasantly surprised to find earlier decisions were called back to in the ending.
Worth a look if you're interested in a new Fantasy property or a CYOA implementation.
Steam User 1
It is a free chose your own adventure with a few forks. Not bad.
Steam User 0
gamesense
Steam User 0
This is a well-written and engaging choose your own adventure book, and for me at least, it made me interested in the author's other work in the world of Panos.
Pay no mind to the negative review by "Obey the Fist". That guy is trying to make a name for himself by being as negative as possible. Thousands and thousands of negative reviews and the only positive one I could find from him was for War Thunder.
He claims that Visual Novels and CYOA novels "aren't games". Sure they are. There's input from the player, and victory and defeat conditions.