Totem Force

I have a soft spot for interactive fiction that commits fully to its premise, and Totem Force commits hard. Written by Tom Rayner and published under the Hosted Games label, this is a purely text-driven adventure, no graphics, no sound effects, just prose and choices carrying you through a sentai-flavored superhero story about a high schooler who stumbles into extraordinary powers after freeing a mysterious captive from a military facility. If you grew up watching color-coded teenagers punch kaiju every Saturday morning, this was written with you specifically in mind. The stat system is lighter than you might expect from an RPG tag. Three core attributes, Will, Empathy, and Intellect, shape how your character approaches problems rather than gating content behind heavy skill checks. You can lean into brute determination, talk your way through confrontations with heart and charm, or puzzle things out with your head. It keeps the experience feeling like a story rather than a spreadsheet, which suits the tone beautifully. Combat against giant robots and godlike threats is handled narratively, your choices reflecting personality more than build optimization, and that is exactly the right call for this kind of fiction. Where Totem Force genuinely shines is the romance web. The cast is varied and the relationship routes are written with real care: the prickly rival who is harder to crack than any boss, the mysterious blonde who carries obvious secrets, the childhood friend whose familiarity masks something deeper. Gender and orientation are fully flexible from the start, and the game never makes inclusivity feel like a checkbox. The community around this title has been quietly devoted for years, which tells you something real about how these characters land. The criticisms worth knowing about before you sit down with it: the pacing in the early chapters is uneven, some readers find the opening slow to commit to its bigger plot threads, and a handful of subplots accumulate without fully resolving. Some choices read more as flavor than consequence, which will frustrate players who want branching that visibly reshapes the world. At roughly 260,000 words this is a substantial read, but it moves at the pace of a Saturday morning cartoon rather than a prestige drama, light and quick more than intricate and weighty. If you came for deeply branching consequence trees, you may finish feeling slightly undernourished. For everyone else, especially anyone who wanted to be the one in the colored costume making the calls instead of watching, Totem Force is a warm, self-aware, anime-inflected good time that knows exactly what it is trying to be.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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