Player Comments on Supernatural Horror

General Recommendation: A light diversion filled with references and themes that fans of the horror genre will recognize. More of a dip than a full game.
Preview: Can you survive your encounter with the supernatural?

=SPOILERS BELOW=

General notes:
As a game constructed as a party gift for a friend, this is a very well-made and thoughtfully-done game. It’s clear that a lot of care went into making this to appeal to your friend’s tastes and create a fun event for her at her graduation party. Personal gifts like these really mean more to people, especially when they have this kind of effort put into them. I hope your friend appreciated the gift.
As a stand-alone game, obviously this isn’t quite as impressive. It was obviously designed for a specific individual, and as such, won’t appeal to a broader audience. The short and fast nature of the game that makes it a fun party activity makes it feel underdeveloped and brief for a genuine read.
In a lot of ways, this game felt like a theme park ride, a la disney haunted house. There’s a lot of focus on location and scenery change, and the game’s pace is lightning-fast, sweeping the reader on before they have a chance to orient themselves.
This game doesn’t have much unity of theme. Each branch is completely disconnected from the others, and there’s no explanation for the cause of the supernatural events. When the game ends, it just kind of ends, with no questions answered or resolution reached. Though the variety of horror elements is nice, there’s nothing connecting them logically together.
I don’t have any major specific complaints about this game, it’s just not long enough or detailed enough for me to have any strong opinions in its favor either. It’s well built for its intended purpose.

Grammar:
There were a couple typos in places.
Mastery of Language:
The pace is too quick for any language skill to be apparent. There’s no major issues, though.

Branching:
This game has quite a bit of branching, and there’s an enormous amount of different horror options the player can explore. Some branches are much more developed than others. It’s impressive how much variety and horror references were fit into this game.

Player Options/fair choice:
Pretty good. It’s a horror game, so some choices will aloways be “lol u ded”, but for the most part consequences were logical and actions were foreshadowed.

WRITING ADVICE:
The pace of this game is lightning quick. There’s almost no description or dialogue or character development. If you were trying to make a serious storygame, I’d recommend slowing down your writing by a lot, and giving attention and care to all the story’s elements. For the party game that it is, however, this pace works fine.
I’d also suggest limiting the rebranching in this game. The doll path in particular had a lot of rebranching.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: I got the ending where you’re asked to bet on the outcome of a fight, but escape and survive.

CONCLUSION: A good party game for a friend, but a mediocre stand-alone storygame.

Synopsis:
Play as an unnamed protagonist as you try to escape an house full of references to the horror genre. Experience a variety of endings, from finally finding freedom to being choked to death by a beast in the basement.

Positives:
-You made this game as a gift. This is very sweet, so you get points for that.
-For the length this game is, it has a surprising amount of actually meaningful choices. What I actually did genuinely seemed to matter and there were a plethora of paths to explore, in addition to this there were a variety of different ways to die. These ‘bad’ endings were almost more interesting to read than the ‘good’ survival endings.
-There is a lack of description in this story, but this actually plays into the strengths of the genre. What my imagination can conjure up is almost certainly more terrifying than any words anyone could write.

Things to improve:
-There are a lot of spelling errors. I cannot help but think this CYOA could’ve done with another draft or so. Here are a few I found:
1) On the very first page ‘beacons to you’ should be ‘beckons to you’ or ‘is like a beacon to you’.
2) On the doll page ‘back on your flood’ makes no sense, I’m pretty sure it should be ‘back on the floor’.
3) Again on the doll page: ‘malevolent presents’ should be ‘malevolent presence’. These are not evil gifts.
I’m not going to go through every small mistake like this, but I feel you should if you want to improve your writing.
-There are a lot of logical errors. For example, on the ‘Flickering Tv’ page how can I tell the sofa was once ‘green’ when it it’s impossible to tell its ‘original colour’.
-While there is a fair bit of branching, as others have said, some of the endings happen far too soon. The tv death ending at the start is going to put off a lot of people, which is a shame because they’ll never see the effort you put into the rest of the paths.
-This game has a complete collection of the components of a horror game, but completely failed to freak me out. I think this is because there is little to no tension, with deaths happening directly after you choose the wrong choice. The most tense scene is the one with a ghost child rolling a ball towards you, because you’re not instantly killed. I’d have liked a bit more description here to build up the tension already created.
-The transitions here feel weak, it very much felt the game was written with no planning other than ‘I would like to write something scary for my friend’. Sometimes we’re suddenly in a different setting with no reason to be so, others items act oddly with each other with no explanation. This ‘Gardner’ writing approach also means things are added at the last moment, like the demon that’s doing all this. Imagine how much more satisfying the death of the demon could have been if they were an antagonist built up from the beginning!

Overall this is a cool gift I’d be grateful to get, as it’s clearly been tailored to the recipient, but for anybody else it is a standard storygame.

This is pretty fun, a bit trippy at times which I like. There's a lot more content than you'd expect from a game made as a gift, or for a party. Just omit the TV path, and I think you'd be set.

There are quite a few errors but it's still totally readable. Funnily enough, sometimes the absence of description and just being aggressively straightforward can make something scarier. Not all the time, but sometimes. One of the scariest parts of this to me was the ending where you get dragged down the stairs and offed by something unknown.

You could definitely benefit from spacing out your writing with paragraphs, just to give people's eyes a break. It can help a lot in building tension in a horror story as well, just knowing when to let someone take a quick breath.

If someone made this for me as a fun thing to do at a party, I'd think it was pretty sweet. As a standalone storygame? It's a 4.

short and sweet

This wasn't terrible and there was a fair bit of branching, I think it actually does make for good evidence that a passable storygame can be made quickly and without a huge amount of effort--contest entrants take note.

I agree with others though that the TV ending that just took from The Ring was the weakest. AND its placement as the first means its going to encourage people to just take their free point with one click and not see the rest.

There is a lot of replay in this game. I got a few endings of various sorts and decided to randomly start clicking to see how far the rabbit hole goes. I doubt I made it to half of the choices.

Overall, it reminded me of Cabin in the Woods, as it has a "choose your horror story" aspect. I would say that transitions would be key. One moment, I'm at a train statation, make a choice, and all of a sudden I'm in a hospital. It would be nice for the added effect of describing how the surrounding change instead of plopping the reader there. Something like, "you fall back onto the floor of the train station. Instead of hitting the floor, your body continues to fall backwards until you are standing up in a hospital". Weird transistion, but works better than no transition at all. It has potential, if you decide to revist it. Also, proofread.

I made literally one choice and got the endgame screen. I know all the others have paths but if I'm being honest, the tv path is kinda lame. It'd be better not to include it.

Reading through this a second time, I found myself rating it higher. This story does a great job in setting a chilling atmosphere. A very good story-game for anyone that wants to play something with some rather haunting scenes. My favorite paths are the ones in which you yourself can lose your humanity and become like the very frightening monsters yourself in the story.

Although this falls on the short side of things, there are various different conclusions that give this replay value. However if this story-game had more content, it definitely would make for a stronger entry on this site.

Pretty fun to walk through all of the death scenes. My favorite is the one when cannibalism turns you into a wendigo! Grammar looks good, though I didn't feel that it was that scary. Perhaps with a little more visceral imagery and description would heighten the experience.

I also missed a few characters to latch myself onto. The choice to betray the villagers was something I didn't bat an eye to. They are not that friendly anyways, quite apparent when you played through it a couple of times, so why should I try to save them haha.

Still, I like that there are plenty of branches to pick from and the deaths are also pretty creative at times.

Nice work for a first story!