Player Comments on Stories of Adventure; Heads or Tales?

The initial screen (this one) is a little short – I look at these pages as the back covers of books. This is an opportunity for the author to really convince the reader to get in there and read their story. There’s not a lot here, and that’s a great opportunity missed to draw in more readers and describe the story a little more.

The first page lists three options – but they’re not even attempts at actual choices! One of the options actually just tells you that you’ve gone the wrong way and then forces you back to the main story. One of the biggest reasons people like and read CYOA stories is so that they can make choices that make a difference and have a little control over the story. There’s not actually any of that in this story at all. It can be difficult to add effective options, but that is what makes a good CYOA story.

It’s not to say that you can’t have any options that lead to dead ends. In fact, having options that lead to dead ends or death would actually be preferable to these options that force you back to the main story. You could easily change some of those options into dead ends and let the user end the story. It would be even better if they led to alternative endings, but some death choices aren’t horrible.

As Will mentioned, if you’d rather just have a story that tells about an event like this, it would be much easier to do as a quiz so people can expect to have to pick the right answer only. But instead, I’d love to see this developed a whole lot more in other directions with alternative endings – what would happen if each of those protagonists in this story actually changed their minds and didn’t follow their fate? How would things turn out for them? How would they turn out for others? That could be a lot more fun. Thanks for sharing with the site!

Ok good points:
1) The pictures were great and really complimented the story.
2) The writing was lucid, error-free and to the point.
3) The material you picked was pretty fun, as Gods go the Greek ones were pretty fun.
Bad Stuff:
The main thing here is this wasn't a CYOA because every time we tried to break off the main trail we got told to go right back to it just like those annoying National Park people who tell us to keep to the paths. This felt a bit more like an interesting mythology lesson than a real choice thing.
There are a couple of ways you could get around this: you could turn the story into a Quiz of the "what would Hercules do now" variety or you could make it more CYOA by exploring the other possible outcomes or by giving us a choice of different storylines.
A final idea is you could introduce the crazy antics of other Gods into this story, I think the Norse ones were a funny bunch as well and you could have a lot of fun playing God and seeing how your decisions affect the world (is it just me or did he have a real beef about Job? No one else in particularly, just Job... maybe it was the name? Maybe he just made bad stuff happen to him so he could say stuff like "Bad Job“ or “That's a really good job Job". But I'm blaspheming :) )
Overall pretty good and hoping you write more :)

I really did enjoy the story and the mythology presented. However there was only one path to take. It would have worked excellently as a short story or small novel but as a CYOA game it sadly falls very flat. As much as I wish I could give this game a higher score I really can't give it more than a 4/8.

No choices!

I would have absolutely adored this storygame if you had only written more than one path for it. There's only path. That's it. Just expand on this, please, and make it a great storygame about Greek mythology. "Wander alone and die" should not be the "right" choice in any storygame which isn't a parody.

Well written edutainment! I very much enjoyed answering everything wrong. :D
Good work, and thanks for sharing it. ^___^

I actually really enjoyed this one. Well done! It's was educational and fun to play! But it is linear, so probably won't be highly rated as a storygame. Maybe you should it into a quiz? I still liked it, though. :)

For a quiz, it's an interesting and slightly more interactive way of playing. That being said, it would have been even better to have the different options actually lead to different results and have a 'correct answers' page at the end.

I really enjoyed this because I'm a huge fan of Greek myths, and this storygame essentially retells those myths. The writing was solid and the pictures were both consistent in style and perfectly matched to the events in the story.

That being said, it was very linear and would have worked better as a quiz than a storygame.

its really fun!

This was actually pretty entertaining, as well as lacking grammatical and spelling errors--so good story on that count. If it's all mythology I'd say it fits better in Edutainment than Fantasy Adventure.

The one thing that detracted a little from the story was the illusion of choice--I lol'd whenever I picked the "wrong" option and the game shuttled me back onto the correct path. Other than that this was good though