Gilded Rails

Choice of Games LLC

Contains adsIn-app purchases

About this game

It's speed dating for the railway-tycoon monopolist robber baron! To obliterate your competition, you must marry a suitable partner before time runs out.

"Gilded Rails" is a 340,000-word interactive dating-management novel by Anaea Lay, where your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Some kids get a model train set from their parents—your daddy gave you his railroad line. Find a spouse and you’ll win control of the family business, but fail to marry and you could lose it all! Can you lead the company to greatness and get hitched before time runs out?

Blaze through an epic tale of business expansion, family life, and love in a time when everyone wants more and many wind up with less. How will you choose to run your business? Will you honor contracts and commitments, or betray your enemies and your principles? Are you a natural-born leader, or will your workers laugh at you behind your back? Blow the whistle on corruption in your industry, or unleash your hidden tycoon and rule the railroads!

Just make sure you find a marriage partner along the way, or Daddy might push you out of the company!

• Play as male, female, or non-binary, pursuing men, women, or both.
• Triumph over strikes, sabotage, and social scandal.
• Sharpen your business acumen and connections.
• Choose from eleven romance options! Court everyone from your childhood best friend to the villainous head of a rival company.
• Become the poster child for modern reform, or the bootheel that needs reforming.
• Discover your father's checkered past.
• Embrace your inner robber baron—or Robin Hood.
• Choose between romance and business partnership.
• Pet your kitty.

Ratings and reviews

Gilded rails is pretty sub-par. I can never really tell what kind of impact my choices are and honestly the only interesting part of the game was your cat. Also for a over 300k word CoG title it felt shorter than some 100k word games. The stats seem to have hardly any impact on your choices and can be easily ignored. Romance was really boring with no real attachment to any of the options. Overall it was kinda disappointing all the way through to the end.

there was almost no options to socialize and to accomplish the goal set by the MCs father in a realistic way. The management options seemed to have little to no effect on the running of the business. Portions of the code were broken, paragraphs right next to one another would say opposing things. There was little to no immersion, I didnt care about any of the characters, it just felt like going through the motions. I'm pretty disappointed.

I can't wait for the rest of this piece to get published...Oh that's all of it? LAME!! You know how there are those great interactive fiction books where a big part is resource management? Usually, there's a little bit of intro and character development, then a finite amount of time to build up or create something? Then you get to use that something? "See it in action," as it may be. That not this one. This one is 5 resource decision that seem to not affect anything and then... nothing. You don't get any form of evaluation or look forward or even a pass/fail. All the effort spent managing the important sounding budget nets you zero story. It feels like there's ½ of a story that didn't make deadline here.

What’s new

You can now choose a font in the Settings menu. Switch to Helvetica for crisp sans-serif text, or try the OpenDyslexic font, designed against some common symptoms of dyslexia. If you enjoy "Gilded Rails", please leave us a written review. It really helps!