Life of a Wizard

Life of a Wizard is an interactive fiction RPG set in a medieval fantasy kingdom, where players guide a master magician through an 80-year career from gifted youngster to retired sage, experiencing wizardry school, adventuring, royal intrigue, dragon showdowns, interdimensional invasions, and personal relationships shaped by choices that determine a virtuous or sinister path, while managing stats in various magic schools, party members, and equipment.

Life of a Wizard: Review

Introduction

Imagine charting the full arc of a wizard’s life—not a fleeting quest, but an 80-year odyssey from wide-eyed apprentice to wizened sage, where every spell cast, ally forged, and moral crossroads shapes kingdoms or crumbles them. Life of a Wizard, released in 2013 by Hosted Games, distills this epic fantasy into a 130,000-word interactive fiction masterpiece powered by ChoiceScript. Drawing from the tradition of choose-your-own-adventure tales like Choice of the Dragon, it offers players unparalleled agency in a text-based RPG. As a historian of gaming’s textual underbelly, I argue this unassuming gem exemplifies the power of constrained mediums: through razor-sharp choice architecture and hidden stat-driven progression, it crafts a deeply personal saga of power, morality, and mortality that rivals graphical behemoths in emotional depth and replayability.

Development History & Context

Hosted Games LLC, a boutique publisher specializing in user-submitted ChoiceScript titles, shepherded Life of a Wizard from its browser debut on February 27, 2013, to ports across iOS, Android, iPad, and later Steam-enabled PC, Mac, and Linux versions in 2017. Writer Mike Walter, credited on 11 similar projects like Life of a Mobster, penned the sprawling narrative, infusing it with a vision of longitudinal character simulation rare in gaming. Artist Vincent Cowley provided minimalist visuals, while ChoiceScript creator Dan Fabulich—boasting 374 credits across the engine’s ecosystem—ensured seamless branching reactivity.

The early 2010s marked a renaissance for interactive fiction (IF), fueled by mobile accessibility and the Choice of Games/Hosted Games model’s democratization of CYOA design. Technological constraints were paradoxically liberating: browser Flash/HTML5 limitations forced pure textual elegance, eschewing graphics-heavy bloat amid the rise of free-to-play MMOs like Wizard101 (unrelated but contemporaneous). The gaming landscape brimmed with fantasy RPGs—Skyrim dominated consoles, mobile saw Infinity Blade—yet Life of a Wizard carved a niche in “hosted” games, emphasizing narrative branching over polygons. Walter’s ambition to simulate an entire career mirrored sim/RPG hybrids like The Sims Medieval, but in text, it thrived on low overhead, allowing intricate stats without AAA budgets. This era’s indie surge validated ChoiceScript as a tool for ambitious solos, influencing a wave of text-RPGs that prioritized player imagination.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

At its core, Life of a Wizard chronicles an archmage’s autobiography, a choose-your-own-path epic spanning youth to retirement. Players awaken as a “gifted youngster” entering wizardry school, mastering arcane academies amid rivalries and mentorships. Early chapters evoke Harry Potter-esque wonder, but maturity ushers darker stakes: adventuring parties delve into perilous dungeons, diplomatic missions to rival nations test cunning, and royal court intrigue demands balancing flattery with felony.

Pivotal arcs include a climactic dragon showdown, where amassed power decides annihilation or alliance; an interdimensional invasion by “brutal primitives from an unmagical dimension,” probing themes of cultural clash and magical supremacy; and intimate vignettes of parenthood, lovers, and familiars, humanizing the sorcerer. Dialogue crackles with moral ambiguity—seduce a noble for secrets or smite them?—while characters like steadfast friends, hireling mercenaries, or spectral undead evolve via player investment, their fates hinging on loyalty stats.

Thematically, it’s a profound meditation on power’s double edge. Virtuous paths yield alliances and legacy; sinister ones corrupt into world-domination bids, echoing Dungeons & Dragons‘ alignment system but internalized. Recurring motifs—necromancy’s temptation, economics’ grind versus warcraft’s glory—interrogate life’s trade-offs: Does healing mend or manipulate? Parenthood humanizes or distracts? Culminating in sagehood, endings reflect cultivated abilities, underscoring agency: your wizard’s tale is autobiography, inked by choices. Walter’s prose masterfully layers foreshadowing—early schoolboy hubris blooms into tyrannical downfall—creating a tapestry richer than many graphical narratives, where themes of mortality resonate across decades simulated in hours.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

Life of a Wizard is RPG alchemy in text form: interactive fiction with granular systems lurking “beneath the hood.” Core loops revolve around choice junctions—lists of 4-8 options at narrative beats—where decisions ripple via tracked statistics. Magic schools (evocation, illusion, etc.), adjuncts like healing/necromancy, and mundane skills (warcraft, economics) level organically, unlocking potent actions: high necromancy revives fallen comrades; economics funds opulent gear.

Combat emerges organically—no menus, but descriptive clashes resolved by stats, e.g., “Blast the orc with fire or mind-control it?” Success probabilities display transparently, fostering strategy. Party management shines: recruit friends/mercenaries, outfit with steeds/enchanted arms, their prowess mirroring your leadership. Progression feels earned—school exams build baselines, adventures compound multipliers—yet flaws lurk: opaque stat interactions occasionally frustrate, and UI (simple dropdowns) suits browser origins but lacks modern polish on Steam.

Innovations abound: lifespan simulation gates content by “age,” forcing prioritization (youthful derring-do vs. elder scheming); familiars bond via mini-arcs, granting buffs. Replayability soars—good/evil axes, gender fluidity, stat optimization yield divergent sagas. Flaws? Branching density risks repetition in failures, and no save-scumming mid-run heightens tension but punishes experimentation. Overall, it’s a deconstructed CRPG: choices as dice rolls, stats as character sheets, delivering depth rivaling Baldur’s Gate in kilobytes.

World-Building, Art & Sound

The realm—a medieval fantasy kingdom akin to Choice of the Dragon‘s—pulses with lived-in detail, evoked through Walter’s evocative prose. Schools bustle with arcane theory; courts seethe with plots; wilds teem with dragons and dimensional horrors. Atmosphere builds via sensory text—”the dragon’s sulfurous breath singes your robes”—immersing via imagination, where unmagical invaders evoke grimdark contrasts.

Visuals, by Cowley, are sparse: evocative static art (portraits, icons) punctuates text, fitting ChoiceScript’s ascetic aesthetic. No bombast, but functional elegance enhances fantasy without distraction. Sound design? Minimalist—subtle browser chimes or Steam ports’ ambient loops (if any)—prioritizing narrative flow. These elements synergize: textual purity amplifies world-building, art as sparse poetry, sound as unobtrusive canvas. The result? A theater of the mind, where player visualization outshines graphics, contributing to timeless intimacy.

Reception & Legacy

Launch reception was muted: MobyGames logs a tepid 3.0/5 from three player ratings (zero reviews), unranked due to sparsity. Metacritic lacks critic scores, underscoring IF’s niche status. Steam redemption arrived in 2017, yielding “Very Positive” 81/100 from 67 reviews—praise for depth, replayability; gripes on pacing, stat opacity. Players hail its “epic scope in text,” influencing ChoiceScript peers like Choice of the Dragon sequels.

Legacy endures in interactive fiction’s resurgence: it popularized lifespan RPGs, inspiring stats-driven CYOAs (Wayhaven Chronicles) and text-MMOs. Amid graphical excess, it reminds of IF’s potency—low-barrier entry birthed cult hits. No industry-shakers, but in Hosted Games’ canon, it’s a cornerstone, preserving text adventures’ soul while porting to modern platforms. Evolving rep: from overlooked browser curio to Steam sleeper, affirming ChoiceScript’s viability.

Conclusion

Life of a Wizard transcends its textual confines, forging an exhaustive wizardly epic where player choices etch history. From schoolyard sparks to sage reflections, its mechanics, narrative, and themes coalesce into a profound simulation of power’s price. Flaws—stat opacity, minimalism—notwithstanding, it’s a triumph of form following fantasy. In video game history, it claims a vital niche: the definitive ChoiceScript RPG, an underrated beacon proving words wield wands mightier than polygons. Score: 9/10—essential for narrative enthusiasts, a timeless spellbook.