The main story is moved forward by a series of quests that are broken up into chapters. Each quest starts out with some dialogue, which is actually fairly well-written and true to the style of the books, and then you have the opportunity to reply and unlock various ways to tackle the problem. Each option will give your character points in a different character trait such as realm, family, old ways, and other "Game of Thrones"-type things. If you want to be a nice guy and help everyone out, you can do that. If you want to be a jerk like a Lannister, you can do that too.

Main quests take time to complete, but while that is happening you can have other characters do side quests too. Buildings also create goods in real time, but after playing for a while, you'll have more than one building. This means you'll have a lot of counters counting down -- and there are enough different ones that, usually, you'll have something that requires your attention that you can work toward doing. I could usually open it up and play for a solid half hour before I was hit with a point where I was forced to wait, and even then, it would only be for a few minutes.

The plan is for the story to progress as future content updates arrive, meaning that over time, events in Ascent will catch up to the plot from the books and TV show. The parts I were playing were set just before the first book starts -- so nothing too exciting was going on -- but it does stick closely to the lore of George R.R. Martin.

If you love Game of Thrones, you enjoy casual games, or you want something to kill some time while you have a browser open, you might want to check this one out. It's just a Facebook game, but I was surprised a little bit by the quality of the writing and the slight breakaway from the common cookie-cutter form frequently used for casual games.