Guided by the hand I made my way here,
The Shortcut Home
Firstly, I have two comments. The older of the two should be deleted. I made a shameful mistake and I could not any longer bare it. Secondly, my second comment is somewhat improved from the first.
Maybe just throw this one away?
The comment by
Future is the best on this story which has no featured comments.
"Comment: This game is extremely difficult for me to rate. The opening seems promising, we will be fighting for our life in trying to understand riddles from a poem. The items have stylish pictures and the poem sounds nice, but the problem is that no real hints are offered as to where we should even start with coming up with an answer. At one point I felt ‘jadfoijuprhnheuwqefhob jqfebldfwhjfehdfw’ could have been the poem and it would not make much difference.
I think for a game to be decent, it has to be playable, and this is basically nothing more than a set of riddles, and one which offers no obvious direction as to how to approach it. Maybe if the author had some backstory so that, when the reader reached the story, the past events linked to the actual solution, this would be a more feasible story. It was nice that the author included a walkthrough so I could understand how he came up with the solution, although I still have no idea how the answer to Question 1 makes sense, which puts me off this game a fair bit as it’s the first impression a reader has.
I think this game falls into the trap of making riddles too ‘clever’ for their own good, although the author deserves some credit for making the pattern somewhat similar for each riddle, to the point where I actually managed to get the last riddle correct on my own. I’m going to rate this 3/8 on the basis that the riddles actually got more feasible as they went on, with the last two striking a good balance of being tough without making you despair too much."
Elvis Cock
This featured story has no featured comments.
I recommend the comments by
Will,
jster02, and
Myself
Finally,
Virtual Reality Game
Perhaps feature this comment,
"This story suffers from the common problem of lacking detail. At most there is a paragraph on each page. While thus is more acceptable when used in interactive fiction, so that the reader can quickly advance the game, you still need to find a balance. Describe what the levels look like. Describe the fear. Explain things. Create dialogue. What you have here is a summary: "You did that, then you did that." Go into the actions in detail.
Another annoying thing were the choices. Oftentimes they were random. Sometimes you would do something, and would be sent directly to the End Game and Leave Comments page without explanation as to how you died. Besides that, the interactive part was mostly done well with consequences and such (despite the fact that nearly every other choice lead to death.)
It also felt a bit pointless to have the random choices at the start which had no effect on the virtual reality and just rambled on. What does a gingerbread house evil lady have to do with a sci-Fi virtual reality game? It felt meaningless to have that and that section was prone to change genres quickly. Cut to the arcade!
Also, the friend disappeared so many times, coming in and out of the story at random.
Despite these faults, though, this story has some nice potential. You understand punctuation, spelling, grammar, and capitalization. You understand how to make a story interactive. And I enjoyed the game even with its drawbacks. Keep on writing :D" -
SixtySnakes
