Regency Love Review
Price: $2.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPhone 4S
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Regency Love is a choose-your-own adventure game set in Regency-era England (think Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice). Players assume the role of a young lady in the rural town of Darlington as she interacts with other residents. Most of the gameplay revolves around player choice - specifically when it comes to the courtly advances of suitors - and the writing is so polished, detailed, and appropriately ambiguous that navigating this simpler time actually feels extremely complex and challenging in a very satisfying way.
While that may sound a bit boring by comparison, Regency Love shines in its writing by striking an excellent balance of language, choice, and mystery. Like a Jane Austen novel, it captures a period in time where propriety and decorum ruled the way people interacted with one another and made determining one's true intentions rather hazy. Unlike an Austen novel though, it offers a more digestible sentence structure while also keeping every choice meaningful (note: this is undermined a little by the ability for players to rewind conversations, but not so much as to trivialize the whole experience).
The worst thing I can say about Regency Love is that the parts of the game that are particularly "gamey" seem a little tacked-on. In particular, the way players level up their character's ability by playing trivia and hangman to earn "motivation" to increase levels creates some artificial "grindy-ness" to the experience that didn't seem necessary.
Overall though, I really enjoyed my time with Regency Love and was satisfied despite not quite getting the ending I was hoping for. Sure, its not really a "game" in the traditional sense, but that works in its favor more often than it doesn't.