You are a Californian inmate firefighter, flying out to stop a wildfire in the sierras. You are also a native of this land, descendent of a proud line of firewalker shamans, but the blaze you're facing now is unlike anything you've ever seen. As you stand before it with your high-powered chainsaw, you'll will have to face the demons of your past. Depending on your choices, you may emerge tempered, reforged, or burned to a crisp. The choice is yours, Chief.

This is a game for adults. It has a fair bit of gore, violence, sexual elements, and touches on offensive topics. If that's not for you, turn around now, this site has plenty of other content that you will like better.

Despite the word count this is a short game: Typical time for one playthrough is 25min.

This game was an entry to Sherbet's "Summer's End Synnergy Contest". (I wanted it to be Quentin Tarantino, but it turned out David Lynch.)

It's 1942 and you are Karl Petersen—In another life, you'd still be studying for your doctorate in English Literature, but this isn't another life, and you've been assigned as second officer of the submarine U-156, patrolling the South Atlantic. So come on now, the Third Reich is at war and the Kriegsmarine needs you!

The game was made as an entry to END MASTER'S PROMPT CONTEST 4, with the prompt “A story about naval warfare.”

Content Warning: I thought this one would turn out on the lighter side, but the usual sex, violence, occasional torture and optional suicide crept back in (It also has language!). In cinematic terms think of Hemmingway and the Reservoir Dogs re-enacting the Omen on a submarine.

Regardless of word count, this is a short game: Playtime is only 20-30 min.

There are several storylines but only ONE TRUE ENDING.

In this near-future hard sci-fi noir story you are Patricia 'Mace' Angelside, an ex-cop who has a hard time adjusting to her role as a bodyguard for the heir of a business empire. Can you keep him save during his trip on a luxury space liner? And, do you actually want to? Depending on your answers, this might turn dark pretty quickly.

This is a game for adults: if you are under 18 please give this one a pass, there are many other stories on this side you can enjoy.

This is a relatively short game: Much of the word count comes from the breadth of choices you have. You'll likely reach an ending within 20 minutes of reading, but there are quite a number of major storylines to explore.

This game was started as contribution to Sherbet's Summer's End Synergy contest. The theme of the contest was a character coping with a bad event in the immediate past. I thought that would go well with a noir detective story. An important inspiration was William Hjortsberg's noir novel "Falling Angel," but I wanted to escape some outdated cliches of the noir genre. You might say I wanted to show another side of the Angel, hence the name of the story. Specifically I wanted a female protagonist and a sci-fi setting. To accommodate the noir theme near-future hard sci-fi capitalist world, ala "The Expanse" was an obvious choice. In the writing, the story got a bit out of hand, and eventually I had to quickly write another game (Rainbow-1) to have something to show by the contest deadline.

Everything looks calm right now: The usual mists are wafting in from the Red River at nightfall. They bring the same old smugglers sneaking into port, the same old harlots, making their rounds on the piers, and the same old bards, spinning their tales in the taverns. But, the good citizens are huddling in their warm little houses, speaking their prayers to Sol. They pray for order, stability and the holy law to protect them. Let's hope they pray really hard, because strange things are starting to happen on Rador's day, a burglary goes unreported, a work of art is destroyed, an ancient demon walks the street and there are whispers of snow.

In this story you step into the boots of Nyvella Begat, a young lass trying to find her way in a city filled with intrigue and adventure. But when a startling discovery disrupts your comfortable life, you must decide who you want to be, lest others seal your fate for you.

Fabrikant's note: This is the second version of Goldbird. The original game by Northwind was intended as a metaphor on fate. While there were quite a number of endings, fate would try to push you towards one of them. To see some of the rarer endings you had to assert your will through a series of decisions. The result was a puzzle where choices had delayed consequences, and branches were unlocked by combinations of choices. Mostly, this subtlety was mostly lost on the audience. With Northwind's permission I have rewritten the storygame in a form that is easier to navigate (though there are still some delayed choices and well-hidden branches to discover). The game still tells the same story, containing essentially the same branches, but I have added some small bits of my own, rearanged others, and told some events which were only hinted at in the original.

I knew I should have chosen "historical" for Laconia.

Edit: I still think that featuring the Fish was a good decision. Not sure what exactly it replaced and I have mostly steered around the family friendly category. But it's not a bad story for someone who comes to this site to click on.

For the record: I have since discovered that of Dreams and Daemons has more branching than I was aware of when I wrote the review, there is quite a bit that is very well hidden behind a choice that I thought would lead to death.

I did give the folkflore fish a quick 8 when I had only read a little bit, because at the time it had only one other rating, which was a three and that needed compensating. I have hence read a bit more and it got a bit boring, so it went down a bit. I am not done reading it though and it might go up again when I have time to properly explore it. (Not sure anybody really cares about my opinion though, as Mizal pointed out ratings seems to hinge on specific people)

I am not sure that they are necessarily of better quality as these things are very hard to compare, especially between genres. However, those three I mentoned are stories that I enjoyed more. Arguably they all have better pacing and are free from obvious flaws. I am still pretty new here, but it seems safe to say that it wouldn't raise many eyebrows if one of those stories were commended, and any of those would change the warden ranking.

My point is rather that commendations are nice because they show somebody cared---bit like birthday cards. You wouldn't walk up to somebody and say, see I got more cards then you.

Ideally we acknowledge that commendations will always be personal opinions of the admins. Receiving once shows that a contribution has been appreciated by someone, but not receiving one does not automatically mean the contribution was less valuable.

Really interesting how much importance we attribute to numbers---particularly when they often depend on so little. I mean, 5 seconds of successful lobbying might get a story featured in a not so competitive category, and for a new player that might be, say 86% of their commendations, or so.

At the same time other stories don't get commended are of comparable if not better quality. TechNOIR, Dreams and Daemons and Bright Days come to mind immediately. How different could the numbers look if it were not for some isolated decisions ... and how quick these decisions are made compared to the hours of writing that it takes to produce good stories.

Once one becomes obsessed with numbers, one loses sight of the true goal.