4/1/2023

11/21/2025 11:51 AM

452

2

1 win / 2 losses

Architect

“This is the ending all stories must eventually reach:
silence around an empty stage.”

—Unknown

Lazarus Cage

They want to keep you bound in the dark, but you won't let them. You will get out, fight and flee, fail and die, then try again and again...

Nautilus

Grudges must always be the first to die when a storm arrives.

After years away you return home to your dying father, but will you be able to get your brother to forgive you for leaving? And will you step up to the challenge to inherit your father's most prized possession?

Written as part of the 2023 Spring/Summer Contest: Gone Fishin' it is a game with a much bigger focus on story than gameplay, but still there is a decent amount of endings and variation for something this short.

Twine is a different engine for making CYOA games that's a fair bit more advanced than the CYS editor and mostly used for commercial projects.

Can't promise my gift will be high or even medium effort, but I'd hate to miss out again this year so sign me up.

Then I volunteer myself. It should annoy at least one person in that situation.

How about we instead give them to the winner if that happens? Just a thought

What is this nonsense? I always assumed CYStia is a righteus meritocracy. I will not sacrifice my hard earned points to make some good-for-nothing's feel better about their laziness.

Hello there, hope you'll have fun during your stay here.

If being older (which by the way late 20s is not old or even older you self proclaimed zoomer) was the problem half of us would've been put to the sword centuries ago. This is just RK looking out for an actual 12 year old. A bigger problem than your alleged age is something you should have been aware of even before you made this thread, and that's that this is not the time (5 minutes after creating your account) and less importantly place (a forum for readers and writers of primarily interactive fiction) for doing it. If you're looking specifically for a place to find some roleplaying buddies shoving yourself into a DND community or something similar would've been a better and less insensitive choice. Meanwhile if you actually wanted to become part of this community, though why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, doing things like actually reading storygames, participating in existing events like many various contests or smaller things done by other longstanding members, or just writing something yourself since you technically started on that anyway would've been a better idea. Setting up camp in the Lounge with a thread about roleplay is something that could get a pass from a noob showing some interest in the actual purpose of the site (Hi Avo, how you doing these days?). Not doing so makes you virtually indistinguishable from a bot, or an alt of someone who for whatever reason has nothing better to do than be a recurring annoyance. Your intentions might be pure, and even if you happen to have poor social skills if you're at an age where you got bills to pay you should know better.

It has been forever but I played the VN on my PSP (if you need a reference to how long ago that was) and enjoyed it quite a bit, but never tried the anime because of the general adaptation issues that have always existed with anime. Said issue is that most adaptations are made for the purpose of promoting the original be it manga or visual novel so they're not given the time and budget to full and properly adapt a piece of work. This is the stories often feel abridged or downright cut and rewritten at a random point in case of mangas (Manga Fuuka vs Anime Fuuka are barely the same past the premise and first few bits) and kind of squished or melted together from different routes (Clannad is like that, but Grisaia no Kajitsu and Tsukihime are probably the biggest examples of it I can immediately recall). There are exeptions to this but they usually come from adapting something that's been finished for a while (Fate/Stay Night) or something that's built in a way that allows a 1-2 cour long adaptation without altering the core story (Boku no Hero Academia, Amagami SS etc) Either way hope this small bit of info helps.

I mean getting the highest possible score should be something special. It's not really on me that we've started following the IGN school of reviewing where anything that can be called a storygame is at least a 6 or a 7 because somewhere out there in the world exist incoherent 500 word ramblings and those deserve 1-2 ratings. I am kind of hoping Eyes on a moon of blandness was just an outlier I stumbled on, but the odds of Bill getting an 8 aren't that high. Sherb is a different matter of course given the only thing that bumped As Ink down to a 7 aside from character nitpicks was the rather messy spread of content.

I feel like the main problem I had with it in terms of enjoyment is that I went in expecting something completely different. It wouldn't affect the final score if I was aware what the actual premise is, but I did need to put it aside and come back a few days later to actually complete it fully with a proper mindset. Overall I also think this shorter and more unique type of story works better with End's style than a much larger epic like Rogues.