Player Comments on Song of Nothing

Where to start, where to start. Tough question if we are talking about nothing :)

So It’s time to give a review is it?
Or is it just a rating?

So let’s begin, please bear with me cause I didn’t know what the crap was happening. So we start off as a boy or a girl, no gender specificed.Im just gonna say boy.

So I only took one path so I don’t have a understanding of this. So you wake up and you see this woman and then a man comes running in(Kinda reminded me of the ‘Wake Up Baby’ cliché)

Then there’s a boy with the man, and he says i’m nothing apparently, so I start crying (Since im for some reason a crybaby) and then...

Dammit this thing was all over the place, like splatters of paint. So I’m just gonna try and figure this out, we are in medivial times, and we wake up to this family who are peasants since there poor, we know it’s medivial because the kid gets what we call ‘The plague’ with red welts.

You better than him at everything, interesting fact. You also wake up in a barn?

Guessing there farmers, since the Black Death was spread through rats which had ground fleas. They can’t seem to get a cure so you stay with him as the parents run away and then ‘fate’ comes to you. Tells you your nothing, literally.

She’s surprised that you don’t remember her or him.

You have no ‘fate’, and fate can’t do anything to you, ‘your an empty slate.’
She I’m just gonna say says your a hero and want to help people and that she can help you. So you become a hobo without shoes sitting under a tree with absolutely no idea where you are.

Almost like a child.

You go to a prostitution place and meet a woman, you like the feeling but then you stop and offer to take care of her child. You name her flamma like a flame for some odd reason.

Then a volcano erupts and then you protect her. That’s all I got

It was interesting and I can tell there’s deeper meaning that I can’t comprehend
5/8-Mistery

This was an interesting story. It gave me the impression that you wanted to create something similar to your previous ballad. There's a lot of emotion and evocative imagery conjured up within the words of your story, and the ballad format certainly sets it apart from the other entries of the contest.

However, I have to say that this is sorely lacking. I clicked through something like 15 pages, and was prompted for a decision...twice. Each time, it didn't seem to affect the ending. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seemed rather linear in that respect.

I can't help thinking that that might have been the intention however - hence being called Song of Nothing. I'm probably looking too deeply into it.

The atmosphere of the poem was absolutely beautiful, especially towards the end. Ironically, the main strength of this work - the ballad format - also acts as a weakness.

The rhyming feels very forced at times, there isn't sufficient wording to describe the kind of scenes that might be expected from a hero-themed story, and it's rather limited as to what you can do. That's not your fault, however. Rather, it's more of a feature from the writing style that you've chosen.

All in all, this was a short but memorable poem which was lacking in many areas. More choices, substantial content and branching would improve on this.

Using poetry to write this story was interesting. I cannot comment on the literary value because I have no idea how poems are supposed to work. Still, I thank you for your effort.
The story was more confusing than I would have liked it to be. Basically it’s something about fate and nothing and how you can never overcome fate and how the world is a sad place? I’m not sure, I don’t really get it.
The story was mostly linear with only two choices. However the choices did make some impact, but it would really be better if you could add more choices and more variation in paths instead of two gigantic blocks of stories.
4/8, not bad but room for improvement

I didn't like it. It made me read slow. The linearity was unfun and the font change was garbage. Should've swapped betweeen one sans-serif to another.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I really like some of the themes it explores. The idea about having the protagonist literally be "nothing" is quite an interesting one. But I'd like to see a little more about how he came to be. After all, he must've had some sort of physical presence, if he was able to interact with his family. And why did his family expect him to reiterate his name when he was only a baby/toddler?

The rhyming scheme was good, but the flow of the poem was sometimes disrupted by the lengths of the lines. I would consider also sticking to a syllabic scheme, where each line is a consistent (or alternating) number of syllables. This would help your poem to flow a lot better. The story itself was also rather linear. I only read through one route, but over the course of this route I only made two choices. (And the route itself must've been over fifteen pages long).

It did seem like your poem had a lot of emotion behind it. There was also a clever twist near the end of the route I chose, which I won't get into. I feel like this story has a lot of potential, if the comments about the poem flow and the protagonist's backstory were fixed.

OMG I CRIED

There's an inconsistency where the game tells me "I used the power I used on Helias' folks" even though I had stayed with Helios rather than gone after his folks.

I gave this story a 4/8. It's a good concept, and very experimental, which is always welcomed in my eyes. Unfortunately, I brought myself to keep re-reading pages over again because I lost the core concept (oh, yeah, there's an infinite loop stuck around in there somewhere.)

It also barely felt like a ChooseYourStory, with the lack of choices, but I could understand the time restraints. The writing was good, but the style is very hit or miss, either you like it don't.

Very interesting. Your writing is wonderful, and I really dig the poetic style you used. However, it gets tiring to read, so I feel you should have mixed it with more traditional writing. I also wish there would have been a some more choices to make.

Really loved your writing style, and this really touched my heart. It was short, sweet and simple.

I liked the general idea of writing a story using a somewhat poetic form, but I thought the execution could have been better. I for example personally would have liked it better if there was a bit more continuity in terms of the form you used, as the writing didn't always flow well.

Also [spoiler alert] one of the 'jump back in time' links just caused an infinite loop of repeating the same page for me.

All in all, I liked the story you were telling, and the non-standard way you told it in, but the flow of your writing felt a bit lacking at times.