Player Comments on Lost in the jungle

I know Bill mentioned something about plagiarism, but for the sake of this review I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

This game feels kind of unfinished. It was a nice first effort, but it definitely needs a little more work. Out of all the pages, the description probably has the most detail, and that isn't saying much. I'd recommend going back and adding more description and dialogue between the characters. Make us care about them instead of simply using them as plot devices. A decent storygame can take a few weeks at the very least to pull off, (usually a couple of months, if we're being honest), so don't be afraid to spend extra time doctoring up some of your scenes.

I didn't go through every page, but from what I can tell, you only had one real ending that wasn't a death, and it was a cliffhanger. It would be wise to add a few different branches and non-death endings to your game to make it replayable. Try drawing a map of your game on paper before you start writing, to help yourself think in a non-linear fashion. It really helps if you can see your plan while you write the game.

I do think this is a good start. You could make this into something really cool if you put in the effort. You've already got some pretty cool pictures to go with the finished product.

This was an interesting story. The pictures definitely added a more realistic quality to the writing but I have a few issues. First, there were some unnecessary loops rather than true branches and when you die you just get sent back to the beginning, which is fine for some people but personally I feel it's nice to have the choice. Some of the paragraphs were structured in a strange way that made reading a bit of a pain and the story seemed to end suddenly with a "what will happen next" kind of ending. That seems a bit unnecessary (Lost in the Jungle part 2?) as there were no time constrains with writing this story (it isn't a competition story) and no pressure to get it published quickly; a cliff-hanger is ok but I'd prefer some more definite closure. Finally, Bill identifies some plagiarism issues which suggests this story might be better suited for the fan fiction category.
On the plus side the writing was short and interesting with good picture work and I was quite getting into the story by the point it suddenly ended.

Creative.

It was fun, a little bit short, but an entertained story.
lots of different possibilities.
and different scenarios.

This was a really great game in order to make decisions about how to survive in the jungle.

Well it's a story with very little text, that
1) contains very little actual writing
2) does that utterly annoying forced looping thing
3) might be plagiarized. At the very least it's fanfic that doesn't acknowledge the source.

At least some effort went in in selecting the pictures and such, but I think readers would have appreciated more actual story to this storygame, and real branching instead of infinite loops. Deciding whether to get a haircut or not is not exactly a riveting opening either, but there are other issues here that bed to be addressed before worrying about plot obviously.

I'm unpublishing this for low ratings. If it's in Sneak Peek (in Storygame Settings, and it would've been on there by default when you created it) you can still share the URL with teachers or whatever, if this was for a class.

I'm pretty sure snippets of this storygame were plagiarized from some kind of study guide for Yossi Ghinsberg's "Lost on the Jungle" (a real book by a real person about real events). The formatting of some of the passages here strongly smelled of copying and pasting out of a PDF or from the internet. I did searches of random sentences and did indeed find multiple exact matches, though no single source from which the entire storygame might have been copied. The rafting scene, for instance, seems to be adapted from this source, or something very much like it:

https://www.brejestovski.com/single-post/2016/1/8/Lesson-5-Challenge

Certain sentences are identical, others were paraphrased, but either way I didn't get the sense there was much original writing here.

Basically, if I wanted to invest myself in this story, I'd be better off reading Ghinsberg's own book, or seeing the movie in which Daniel Radcliffe plays the author.

As for this storygame, at least it pointed me toward some good potential reading. (The storygame itself, not so much.)