Written by William Brown and produced by Choice of Games. A pulp-style, choice-based Interactive Fiction adventure set in a retro-futuristic 1930s in which the reader controls Challenger, the world's greatest adventurer (or most vicious scoundrel) on the greatest adventure of their life.
Available here
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This game contains the following tropes:
- Action Girl: Can be this if you're a woman and your Action stat is high enough.
- Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Just because you're wearing a formal evening dress doesn't mean you can't kick some serious ass.
- Adventurer Archaeologist: Devi Naryan, you can recruit her into your group. Even though her methods of archaeology are not exactly the same as that other archaeologist, she still has run-ins with British Nazis in her adventures.
- Alternate History: In the alternate version of the 1930s where the Great War and the Great Depression never happened, the Fascists and Adolf Hitler never took over Germany, but instead another country being controlled by the Fascists, and so started the Great War of their own, similiar to World War II in our timeline.
- And the Adventure Continues: Each episode ends with a Cliffhanger like in some pulp fictions, and after the Big Bad is defeated, you get to choose what happens After the End.
- Badass Driver: Your Drive stat determines how badass you are as a driver.
- Kumiko "Mickey" Swift, a member of your group's inner circle and one of the choices of your sidekicks.
- Big Guy Fatality Syndrome: Your childhood friend, the aptly-named Samson Jones, will jump on a grenade to protect the rest of the group when your secret fortress is infiltrated.
- Boring, but Practical: Being a gadgeteer genius, a daredevil driver, or a master of the occult are definitely cool, but the game doesn't give you the option to use those to solve a problem very often. Being a good fighter, a deductive thinker (which also makes you an expert archeologist), and a persuasive talker will allow you to succeed a lot more consistently.
- Classy Cat-Burglar: Le Chat Noir, not that Chat Noir though. She can join your group.
- Cliffhanger: Appropriately, encounters constantly end on them. The game itself ends on one, with a different one depending on what you say you have planned for your next adventure.
- Evil Twin: Nemesis, the game's Big Bad, is the player's counterpart from a Mirror Universe.
- Evil vs. Evil: You certainly have the option of battling the villain while being a villain yourself.
- Gadgeteer Genius: One skill category is having a custom-made gadget for every occasion.
- Genius Bruiser: You can play a scientific genius who's also a two-fisted butt kicker if you like, just as the pulps had their share of.
- Historical Domain Character: You get to meet several famous figures from The '30s. You can play guitar with Django Reinhardt and Duke Ellington, party with Texas Guinan and the Aga Khan, drink whiskey with Al Capone, swap ideas with Hedy Lamarr, and even shoot Adolf Hitler in the face!
- Al Capone will end up as a member of your group's inner circle. You have the option to say he's been your sidekick for a while before then.
- Inconsistent Spelling: The writing can't make up its mind if your Dumb Muscle old friend's name is Samson, or Sampson. Sometimes it even appears both ways in the same paragraph!
- Lost World: One of the places you visit is a world inside the Earth's crust, full of primitive people and prehistoric creatures living among the remains of a once-advanced civilization. Which you have the opportunity to start fixing up, if you're playing a character with the know-how.
- Not Using the "Z" Word: One major group of opponents is the Nazi party, but they're only ever called "Fascists". Even though they're specifically led by Hitler.
- Only One Name: You can choose your first name and your looks, but your last name will always be Challenger.
- Parody Commercial: There's a fake ad for some product interspersed between each chapter.
- Phantom Thief: You can be this. Le Chat Noir even trained you to be this.
- Posthumous Character: The reader's old classmate Tuli. A mechanical prodigy, but they're gone by the time the story starts. A robot they built, and who the reader can befriend, shows up in their place.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: The Zeta-Ray Projector, the machine that makes all of the setting's amazing advances possible, does so by leeching energy from parallel universes, gradually killing them.
- Ragtag Band of Misfits: Your group in a nutshell.
- Token Evil Teammate: Al Capone will end up as a member of your group's inner circle. If you didn't say he was your adventuring partner already, the old friend of yours who puts the group together will explain that with the high stakes you're playing for, someone who's willing to do whatever needs to be done could come in handy.
- Two-Fisted Tales: This game embodies this trope almost to a tee.
- Villain Has a Point: The amazing generator invented by the player's mentor, which makes scientific progress speed ahead at breakneck pace, is only able to do so by using the life energies of other realities as a power source, and Nemesis declares it needs to be destroyed. Although he's become a nihilist who plans to use it to destroy world after world by the time the player finds out why Nemesis says this, to keep from asking why the reader can't side with him.
- Villain Protagonist: You can choose to be this.
