Mini-Review: ‘To The City Of The Clouds’

In the latest ChoiceScript game, To The City Of The Clouds , players take on the role of a young archaeologist who hears of the lost Incan city known as La Ciudad de las Nubes .

. Like the other Choice Of … adventures, this text-based game can be downloaded to play on iOS and Android devices, or just played in a browser.

Like in Choice of Games ’ previous title Heroes Rise: The Prodigy , and Choice of the Vampire as well, if I recall correctly, players can choose their gender and their orientation. After playing so many lovely games in which the player character is always a straight man, it’s nice to see ChoiceScript opening up game narrative to other experiences. A storyline beyond boy-meets-girl could be extremely effective in such a narrative-driven play experience, but unfortunately, the romantic plotlines in To The City In The Clouds felt flat to me.  A very early question, right up there with my name and haircolor, asked if my character suffered from sex addiction, and this lack of nuance hurt all the romantic sub-plots I encounters. Should I bang the grad student I’d just met OR should I retreat to my office and never speak to him again? Since real romance is rarely this black-and-white, most of my romantic encounters seemed forced, awkward, or just un-sexy.

There’s still plenty to love in this academic and archaeological romp, even while avoiding awkward come-ons. Your character can embrace the dirt and adventure of trekking through the wilderness, or be more comfortable at home in the ivory tower, and there’s a lot of replay value in running through the game a second time with different priorities. Academic barbs and departmental backstabbing are delivered with much more delicacy than the romantic subplots, and random encounters while traveling have tension and excitement. There are also some giggles for players with an archaeological background, or who just know that spending the summer on a dig is secret code for spending the summer drinking local brew.

I am, admittedly, always delighted by good flavor-text, but I was thoroughly impressed with the imagery and level of detail here. While I was teaching in Beijing, a colleague had recently come from teaching in Peru, and he raved about Inka Cola, a popular South American soda. I literally laughed aloud when my character stopped off for some.  I know very little about Columbia, but I thoroughly enjoyed the travel encounters, and I assume writer Catherine Bailey has put as much accuracy into the travel details as she has to end-of-semester deadlines, grant funding, and unscrupulous departmental politics.

So every time I write about a Choice Of … game, I re-realize that there’s no way to save in the middle of the story.  This is a little frustrating, because with hours of gameplay, a player might well want to save a game to go out, or go to bed. I played in a browser, and awkwardly left the half-finished game up in the next window when I needed to save. Also, To The City In The Clouds presents so many good choices, it would be great if players could save and then come back and try both ways.

The choices not taken are often hilarious and intriguing, too, begging players to slow down and read carefully instead of hitting OK to progress as fast as possible. If, as Sid Meier has posited, a good game is a series of interesting choices, then To The City In The Clouds is truly a very good game.