His life was a giant train wreck. He had lost his job, his wife, his ability to fly. Everything.
Then (soon enough) he gets thrown in prison. Then you get the roll credits scene.
Jokes aside, the way the opening is structured is pretty good. Getting our hero to their lowest point is a classic. The opening pages all have a good pacing to them too, which is pretty important, or maybe I'm just deceived by the blank space (i.e. paragraph breaks). Regardless, I like the way the story is set up, with things happening AND information being delivered, which I find preferable to text walls in which nothing happens other than the world exposition.
The tone is interesting too, since there is obviously humour, but then also some more serious scenes. Making sure the humour doesn't disarm the threat or whatever present elsewhere is pretty important, so it is interesting to see how that plays out. As an early example, the hostage situation doesn't feel undercut by the humour, and the threat is only made more real when our hero ends up hurt.
The meta jab when the protagonist's name is introduced also didn't make my eyes roll into the back of my head, so I consider it successfully implemented. I can't say the same for calling out a pun with: (AHA! Did you see what I did there?!).
The writing itself does boast some mistakes, but it is still decipherable. However, polishing it up a bit more wouldn't be a bad idea, as it would help readers engage with the story to a greater extent.
I think this article would be worth reading. Dialogue Punctuation!
Mixing up their/there/they're tends to stick out to me, and I feel spending some time to figure out how to quickly tell them apart is worthwhile.
I definitely think the story is still worth reading, as the positives outweigh the negatives.
I will say that it is rather linear, which is somewhat expected when there are only two real endings.
This being a contest entry does explain this, but it doesn't mean I am not sad about outright being told: 'Unfortuantely, this story can't go like that. Sorry. So Reggie's choices are...'
I suppose having choices restricted in this manner isn't the worst thing ever, as there can be meaning to not having a choice, but the storygame having stretches of linearity does make this not feel that impactful (it feels like more of the same, I suppose), but maybe that's just me.
Skipping over the golem fight is fine, but just one paragraph still felt a little too short to me. Maybe just one description of the team working together to quickly crack the head of a golem? I don't know. In fact, that page in general felt like it might've moved a little too fast, or maybe I just had different expectations for a page titled 'the bitter-sweet conclusion'.
Cannon Ending #1 is... interesting.
I didn't read everything, but did click around, and I can say that it seems that the linearity will be effected by the path you end up taking. This is a good thing, as it means overall the story is not as linear as I may have been expecting.
It's good.
