I am not typically big into gamebooks. I love the concept and appreciate how influential physical gamebooks have been over the decades in shaping video games. I also really appreciate just how well the gamebook experience translates digitally to touchscreen devices, making it easy to carry around dozens if not hundreds of books in your pocket with niceties like animations, auto-bookmarking, and lots more. Arguably, due to their ability to be even more interactive than a physical book, digital gamebooks have just about spun out into their own distinctive type of game. I love and appreciate all of these things, but I just don’t personally get sucked into gamebooks all that often.
However, Knights of San Francisco, a passion project from solo developer Filip Hracek that launched on iOS and Android this week, has well and truly sucked me in. It has you playing as an amateur necromancer exploring a far future version of San Francisco, in a world that is filled with Orcs, Goblins, and other fantasy-based creatures. You’re in search of your brother but, seeing as this version of the world has pretty much gone to hell, you’ll encounter all manner of strange characters and engage in combat with deadly enemies on your journey. The game utilizes a dynamic combat system and Natural Language Generation software to give the game unique and unexpected behavior, as shown in the very clever trailer below.
It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to “...