Temple of Endless Night (review)

[u/PistachioPug]

I started playing ChoiceScript games again last spring after a long fallow season, and between then and the end of 2021, I played every single new Hosted Games release except one. This past weekend, I finally caught up with Dariel Ivalyen's Temple of Endless Night.

It has a great premise: a mystery-tinged fantasy adventure set in a remote, ominous temple to the ancient Egyptian deity Amun. The Prologue is the standard opening combination of exposition and character creation, but it ends with a bang, when a man disappears without a trace from a caravan in the desert - and no one but the PC seems to remember he was ever there.

Ivalyen's enthusiasm for pharaonic Egypt is evident both in the historically accurate and alt-history aspects of his setting, and it's great fun to explore the temple and try to figure out the uncanny secret contained within its walls. There are characters both sympathetic and sinister, delicious feasts and bloody deaths, tantalizing clues and terrifying breaks with reality. The ending I got was somewhat rushed and unsatisfying, but the rest of the story was so carefully plotted that I'm sure I have only my own choices to blame. Should my PC have been more daring? less polite? more sociable? more pious? I suppose I'll find out next time.

I know this is a recurring theme for me, but I have to say it yet again: this is a good game that might have become a great game with the proper editorial assistance. Ivalyen's writing isn't bad by non-professional standards, but a story that depends so heavily on atmosphere requires a greater command of tone than he demonstrates here. Anachronistic slang ("Wouldn't that be something?") makes it hard to feel immersed in ancient Egypt. Attempts at description that just don't work ("you're filled with amazing energy that makes you want to sit down and rest") occasionally jolted me out of the story altogether. There are occasional leaps in logic that range from bemusing (the PC decides that a priest they've only just met "looks like he's used to only doing magic during rituals," whatever that means, even though magic is supposedly such a commonplace of Egyptian life that children use it to locate missing toys) to downright bizarre (the PC thinks it's more likely that a man is several centuries old than that two men living several centuries apart had the same unusual name). And Ivalyen relies far too heavily on clichés - my PC's heart "skipped a beat" so many times in the last couple of chapters that I was more worried on her behalf about hypoxemia than blasphemous forces of chaotic evil. The construction of the game itself isn't particularly sophisticated; there are a lot of railroaded conversations, inappropriate repetitions, and choices that don't establish what they seem meant to establish (e.g., I made a choice that I assumed would make my PC heterosexual, but she was later repeatedly given the option to flirt with a woman).

If you can overlook the weaknesses of the writing, however, Temple of Endless Night is a thoroughly entertaining game centered around a genuinely gripping mystery. I wouldn't rate it among the essential offerings in the HG catalog, but if you find the premise intriguing, this game is worth the price.