Forever Gold's Demo is an interesting beast that shows much promise, but fails to actually show off what it can do.

The demo begins with an extended "semi-in-universe" character creation quiz that's a little too cryptic. There are attempts to make it mysterious and inviting, but it all ends pretty obtuse. Between esoteric terminology and unclear effects, a reader might find themselves dissatisfied with the final result, but have little in the way to mend that when trying again. These are hard to pull off and Forever Gold just misses it.

After the character is created, the game moves onto a moment that happens around the middle point of the first chapter. This is a good choice for a Demo, since it allows for a display of the game's vertical slice. However, the moment picked has too much information already expected of the reader for it to work. Certain rules and relationships are left for the reader to read on lengthy Codex pages, which severely diminishes the potential this Demo has to stand on its own, somewhat.

All that being said, there is a lot of care put into the writing here. Prose flows well and dialogue fits pretty naturally. Even the way the text is presented wows, with cohesive variations and great use of visual motifs.

Forever Gold sounds like an interesting game to play, but this demo falls short of selling it to the reader. While the amount of variations is impressive, it's all hard to follow as the project as is refuses to give decent guidance and leaves players to fend for themselves in the middle of a story they haven't been told.