Choice Of Alexandria Lands On Steam
Choice of Alexandria, an interactive novella by Kevin Gold, author of Choice of Robots, has launched on Steam. Your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based–90,000 words, without graphics or sound effects – and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. The year is 245 BCE; you’re a heroic polymath librarian, invited to Alexandria to tutor prince Ptolemy IV. Coach the prince in the Olympics – or help him ditch the Olympics to show his art and poetry there instead.
Or disregard your tutelage to focus on inventions instead! With the help of Archimedes and Euclid, you can discover the steam engine, the germ theory of disease, or even robotic automata, thousands of years ahead of schedule. Will you deplete the libraries of other cities to enrich your own? Achieve popularity for your scientific inventions, or protect the legacy of the empire? Will Ptolemy IV grow up hedonistic and selfish, or wise and just? Will you be ransomed by the pirate queen Nefertari, or can you win her over with your silver tongue?
Throughout Choice of Alexandria, players will get to:
- Play as a brilliant inventor, a gifted speaker, or a life-saving doctor
- Make great discoveries while protecting Prince Ptolemy IV from manipulators at court
- Save famed mathematicians Archimedes and Euclid from untimely deaths
- Based on the real life of Eratosthenes, ancient genius who calculated the size of the Earth
- Save the Great Library and invent the steam engine two thousand years early
So far, Choice of Alexandria has gotten positive reviews, with one player saying:
“This is probably the best example of “a thinking gamer’s” interactive novel from Choice of Games, and it bears the distinction of being just as cerebral as it is entertaining. I’ve gone on three different runs now (offline and online, explaining my short time on it) second-guessing myself on how I could get what I believed to be the “best ending”, and each time I find new pieces of the puzzle I hadn’t even considered before.”
You can find the game on Steam here.