You're drifting in limbo above the surface of a dead world decimated by decades of war. Will you regain enough hope to survive, or fall into oblivion? 

This is my first Storygame on here. Originally I wrote it for a different game engine before changing it and was part of a much bigger story, but I've cut it down into this. Just my first foray into Storygames. 

There are five endings: two bad, one neutral and two good. Kudos to you if you get Ending 4 on your first try.

You can't remember when the world first started shaking, but then one day everything started crashing down. It's not a case of fixing it, or even surviving the aftermath. You can only rebuild and start again.

This is my entry for the March 2017 Chaos Contest.

Endings

There are 18 endings in total. A few of them may be very similar to each other. Bear in mind also that some endings cannot achieved without saving a particular character (or not saving them).

Features

- The objective of this game is to survive the effects of the chaos on the world around you and reach a location of appropriate stability which will bring you contentment. There is an exploration aspect to this. You will not learn everything about the world around you in just one playthrough.

- Most of the "chaos" taking place in the game world is not immediately visible to the protagonist (aside from some special endings), but it is primarily responsible for the effects on the surrounding environment and therefore remains the central theme.

- I started writing this 7 days before the deadline, so it isn't quite as long and detailed as I wanted it to be. Examples of this are the fleshing out of particular character backgrounds, implementing multiple foreign languages, cultures, technologies and fantasy races. Some aspects are deliberately left up to the reader's imagination.

- Many characters will appear to speak to you in a foreign, cryptic language (referred to as "Common Tongue" by themselves). Readers may or may not recognise this to be a form of substitution cipher which is easily decipherable if you know how, but it is not essential to know what they are saying.

EDIT: I'm so glad someone decided to poke the mutant with a stick and uncover another previously unseen scenario. It wasn't until later that I realised the majority of people would probably never ever see that part of the story.

"You can prevent that your best friend's wife has an out-of-body experience."

That's the first quote I've been given. Thanks for the non-sensical, grammatically incorrect bot, Seto.

Is that your first page, or just a rough plan of what your first page will be?

.hack/Sign

Congrats to AzBaz and Ogre! This was a really close one. And well done to everyone else who participated, I really enjoyed reading everyone's stories.

I agree this would be Fantasy.

Although I have to say that the description doesn't fill me with much enthusiasm. Animals conquering the world and taking over from humans? What, so the animals all have superpowers? Are all the humans dead following the war? Or is it some kind of dystopian future where humans have been enslaved by humans (which would make some sense, but the imagery is really weird - it'd be like Planet of the Apes except that all animals are in charge...insects, birds, pigs, whatever).

I can imagine some kind of fantasy world where humans simply don't exist, or maybe they drove themselves to extinction, where the animals survived and gained powers of their own to control the new world. What if you want to play as a slug or a sloth? Or a flea? If the smaller animals mutated and grew gigantic then that would be a world that would be quite fantastic and slightly terrifying (giant bees, giant spiders, etc.)

I don't know, maybe I'm just looking too much into this. I'm just trying to imagine how animals would create their own civilisation, make their own cities (which would certainly be different from human cities), research, build, use tools, communicate with each other...I mean, sure they have superpowers, but there should still be some common ground. 

I've always disliked ChoiceScript, mainly because the layout reminds me uncomfortably of those proficiency questionnaires that companies give you on job interviews. Given a choice, I would certainly prefer Twine.

Sometimes I imagine that too. The part with Seiken Densetsu 3, that is, not the the part with the Asian guys.

CYS casino: you commit or you lose.

We had a surprising number of newbies enter the contest, and absolutely all of them got shamed.

Just saying, you can see a story's word count by hovering over the "story length" when you view it.

I can't look at my specific story stats without unpublishing it, but I had something in the region of 240-250 pages. My final product is also not how my story was supposed to go; I wasted about a week writing about mass child murder and mental trauma before cutting everything out and reducing it to what it is now. Hell, I didn't even plan any of this, I just kept writing because I was afraid of losing motivation. I also wanted to put in 7 extra endings, which would probably really help the story, but by that time it was 6 hours before the deadline and it just wasn't worth it.

Oh, and you know how lots of people somehow thought the deadline was day later than they thought it was (due it being at midnight)? I was the opposite. I misread my own time zone, and thought I had to finish 10 hours earlier than I really did. That might have played in my favour though since I had more time to proof-read the whole thing. (Not enough time, though.)

All in all I do not consider this one of my best works, but I did have fun writing it. I am also glad to finally write something for Modern Adventure, since I find it hard to write for that genre for some reason.