A Blade for the Emperor

I love it. One of the best stories and COG games that I have played.

It's written incredibly well, the atmosphere of a dark fantasy was captured perfectly and honestly I would kill for another story set in this world (please author, I'll sacriface my Quintessence for it TwT)
The characters were great, every single one of them reagardless how small has a proper name, personality, convictions and clear purpose in the story. The protagonist was actually my favourite, I have never seen such perfect combination of a protagonist that has their own history, background and personality and yet you can so effortlessly shape their choices. The romance was also really tasteful despite the genre and story (after all, you are an assassin doing his best during a really hard times).

Unfortunetaly it has one glaring issue, which is partially a feature and partially a bother. The stats and their corresponding stat checks. Simply said, you won't succeed every stat check. While some stats are incredibly easy raise like Bladework or Agility, where the highest neccesery check is like 80 and you can easily get 80-90 on all of them if you minmax.
But some stats go half and half like Charisma/Intimidation. Raising one lowers the other. And very often you'll find yourself in a situation where you'll craft a certain personality to your chracter like Charisma, Enforcer, Surgeon and find out that in certain choices you can't succeed.
That IS part of the experience, you are an assassin on an extremely dangerous mission and not everything goes perfectly which is why when you eventually succeed, it feels that much better. Also failures do open unique paths that often allow preffred paths. But it is a bother, I won't lie. Theoretically it might be possible to find a way to switch from one personality to anohter to succeed most checks but that does require minmaxing and checking the code (and downloading mod that allows saves).

Personally I recommend plaiyng for the first time blindly and try to reach your preffered ending. Another great thing is that the game has incredible amount of endings and variables to make every playthrough unique.
After that i reccomend reading throught the script to enjoy the full experience.

Did not like it. I am so tired of choice of stories that confuse personality traits with combat or physical skill. One trait like "ruthlessness vs merciful" or "artist vs surgeon" should not force me to make choices I don't like just because I have a high stat in some made up personality trait like "artist." Maybe I have layers...Anyway, stop telling me who I am and just let me be free to choose what I want in each scene and rely on my actual skills that you've given me like "bladework" or "mimicry" or "sleight of hand" to determine the outcome. This game already has 6 skills to get things done. It doesn't need 4 tendencies on top of that to resolve purely physical situations. 10 characteristics just dilutes things. A sword does not care if you are nice or not and I shouldn't be penalized in a physical fight because of my personality. I didn't even finish this story. It had a good setup with opposing factions that had to be manipulated and I liked being an assassin who had to navigate relationships, politics, subterfuge and magic. The lore was interesting but the writing felt detached. Sometimes I just skipped over paragraphs because I could see they were just focusing on boring details that didn't matter. Sometimes these were minor characters involved in a scene that I knew was just going to be resolved with a weird stat check in the end anyway. It just didn't get me personally invested in the characters. Not surprising since it makes you an assassin and implies that in the end you can kill everyone. But more importantly, don't punish me for picking outcomes that don't follow the "type of person" that would do that. Stop trying to profile me and just give me real choices. That's what choice of games are supposed to do. I wish I could refund this.

I've been playing COG since Choice of the Dragon came out. This is by far the best one I've ever played, and I'm including all of the hosted games as well.

It's in-depth, has excellent prose and dialogue, a compelling and well-executed plot, interesting main and secondary characters, balanced difficulty, long satisfying endings, and I've never felt railroaded or like something was incomplete. I was surprised by how easily it left me change my path in a way most IFs wouldn't, and happy with the balanced difficulty of doing so.

The only thing I could complain about is (Ending Spoilers) that it's impossible to fully wipe out the bloodline if that's something you want to do. But that's not your mission. A "truly" cold blooded assassin wouldn't care enough to end monarchy purely for other's potential wellbeing.
Meanwhile, most softhearted types would dislike having to murder those who've probably already surrendered/agreed to help you. So it's a relatively minor issue for a very specific roleplay imho, but still worth noting.

The best compliment I can give it is that it feels like it's been written for grown adults that genuinely like to read actual literature, but I don't think there's anything too complex in there for ESL readers either. It's very well balanced in my opinion, not too flowery at all.

This is one of the better Choice of Games novels I've ever played through. It's a very unique setting, which is part of what Choice of Games excels at - putting together games about kinds of stories you'd never see anywhere else and that fit no genre conventions. My only complaint is that the story can sometimes leap in ways that are slightly jarring without a lot of setup. But it is a very long story with a lot to fit in as it is, so I sort of get why.
Edit: I'm mostly keeping my review positive because I have a very high standard for choosing to give small creator games published by COG negative ones, but that was perhaps the worst ending in the history of COG. The story prompt near the very end literally ended with "No matter what, I know this will change nothing." (COG code for "this is a flavor choice") and it quite literally ruined my entire story path and changed everything. That is a misuse of how COG dialogue conventions work and was an awful design decision.

I would like to recommend this game without reservation. It has an engaging premise, impressive world building and the characters are well developed, if not always internally consistent they do adhere to their assigned tropes. The many choices for character building are as advertised. The pages with a wall of text tend to read like an AI went on adjective overload binge, but that is just how some authors write so its a personal choice to count it a pro or con. The author does give the player freedom to experience an immersive narrative story.

I felt compelled to share my reservations and give the simple warning: the choice of multiple paths to 'success' is an illusion. The PC is forced to min-max to pass the brutal, rigid gatekeeping stat(s) to have any hope of achieving a desired ending. Yes, there are multiple possible endings, and at the most generous reading any ending is 'good' if it is the intended one. Over time the disconnect between the visible skills and mechanism governing the gatekeeping "Subtlety" stat (a stat that only ever goes down) makes even meta-gaming a challenge.

Blade for the Emperor commits not one but two cardinal sins of CYOA games: 1. Invisible stats gatekeeping inconsistent with visible stats, and 2. it forces an exacting specific build and choices to get the objectively single 'good' ending for the empire and the player <spoiler> Unless the player wants an ending with the empire in ruins and the protagonist dead </spoiler>.

Stat failures accumulate exponentially and to such an extent that by the end of Act 3 the roleplaying PC with the wrong build not only has been locked out of many choices, but there is no way possible to achieve a 'good' ending - either 'the' good ending or an intended ending. Failing at skill checks that should be well within one's capabilities is its own type of frustration that only grows with each subsequent failure. And there is no mistaking when the 'fail' state happens narratively and mechanically with the negative impact on skills.

The Player has to make a conscious choice very early on to either go a narrative player's roleplaying choice route (which to the author's credit is entirely possible) and all frustrations that brings if it is not the author's intended route; or resign themselves to the the task of building the perfect stats to 'beat' the brutal invisible stats and force 'gaming' the story rather than playing it.

Is the forced min-maxing intentional? Only the Author knows. But the 'mechanics' turn what is a game with a well-crafted world worth exploring with an interesting premise and some engaging characters into a frustrating skill checking slog.