Sylicon Lipstic

*HEDGEHOG NOISES*

This is a good story, I can tell. However, I can’t really see it. I know the author has been working quite a bit on learning English and I know how confusing it can be (I’m not going to attempt to learn another language now that I’m an adult and my brain doesn’t work much), but the word choice errors really do take the reader out of the story. The errors aren’t huge, but they are really distracting. After reading a sentence a couple times, I can piece together what the meaning is – which is why I know there’s a good story here. But I have to stop reading and repeat reading too many place to determine those meanings. I’d suggest an editor that knows English as their first language and knows word choices, but I can see that’s going to be asking quite a lot from someone. It might be worth the effort, though.

For people’s names, it can be confusing when switching back and forth. Iana appears to be introduced as Iana, but when she speaks, the text indicates Lopez. I figured it out, but I had to go back to make sure there wasn’t another person there that I had missed. And sometimes it’s just too much descriptive effort (and that’s not usually a problem with authors here – most instead include too little description). I think I read “Lopez tries to introduce into the fluid dialectic diarrhoea of her boss” ten times. I’m still not quite sure what’s going on there. Is that referring to the flickering image of the hologram? In places like that I wonder if it would have been just as easy to write, “Lopez stutters.”

I was a little confused at the end of the first page when the story asked, “Which file should I see first?” I had no idea who I was! Is that me, the reader? The subject of the previous sentence was “the woman,” so it seems like Iana Lopez is now breaking the fourth wall and asking me what she should look at? Was that the intention? Is that the narrator? Is it the angry hologram guy?

I liked the other options where I could select the response of a person, those are fun options to choose from. I did like much of the story and ideas that the story was leading to. There were a few consecutive pages with no options, but that wasn’t too bad. I did like the story here, thank you for sharing with us at this little site.

This was difficult to read. While there are a lot of grammatical and spelling errors, I think those are the least of your problems.

There are a few inconsistencies in the torture scenes. Cyber eels get called cyber eagles in the next scene. The most confusing inconsistency was when the tortures were being described, at the end of the first paragraph it's described as water and electricity, after that it's acid. I had to reread a few times to understand that this wasn't a separate kind of torture. There might or might not be more and worse inconsistencies, but that leads to my next point.

Most, if not all, of this has too much description and a lot of it is described abstractly as well. I don't know if this comes from English being a second language or if it's a combination of that and your writing style. Either way, it's hard for me to understand what's happening in some spots because of this and even harder to keep myself from skimming or skipping the text.

In its current state, it's hard for me to tell if this could be better or worse with a lot of polish.

Alright, after reading through a couple of different paths, I have some mixed opinions about this one. At a first glance, this storygame doesn't look all that promising due to the number of small errors found on each page.

However, I actually found it to be one of the more enjoyable reads of the Cyberpunk Contest, not because the others are necessarily bad, but rather because I can tell how much effort went into making this story a good read. There's a lot of good descriptions, choices, and evident writing ability here, and I did get fairly invested in the plot.

But, even so, the mistakes are not easy to overlook. It might just be especially frustrating to me because I do like this storygame, but it can be a little difficult to get immersed in it when there are spelling and grammatical errors in such abundance. It can be confusing at times.
Since the ability to write well is obviously here, I think maybe if this storygame was more polished in the grammar and spelling department, then you would have a winner. But as of right now, it hits certain targets and misses others. Overall, it's an enjoyable read but there's definitely room for improvement.

*MONKEY NOISES*