At first I came across this on infinite story and couldn’t find this on CYOA for some reason, so I’m posting a review here. This gave me that classical CYOA type adventure vibe, in fact I think the author was inspired to make something like that after reading those type of stories. For those of you who don’t know what I’m referring to, here’s the link to the story: https://infinitestory.com/story/info.php?id=2043
Anyway, on to the review.
The plot was nice and simple.You are a wannabe adventurer who dreams to become a “legend”, where ‘you’ make the choices that affect ‘your’ story and ‘you’ are held responsible for ‘yourself’. Reason for special emphasis on this pronoun, is because the story is in second person point of view; but more importantly it succeeds in trying to put forward that point. Using a second person point of view has been the norm for a lot of CYOA’s for good reasons; but that requires a different style and way of writing in order to communicate with the reader which the story succeeded in giving. While reading the story I found it relatively easy to immerse myself and feel the environment around me. I could also form a very good bond with the protagonist; and the love interest scenes, though very brief and not majorly affecting the story, where able to bring at least a little bit of emotion. Second best thing about this was the immense variety of choices. I think through this story, you could easily make a lot of characters with completely different personalities following a huge variety of paths; giving it a lot of replayability value. More importantly though, each path felt unique in it’s own way and was extremely entertaining going through. The story also gave me the feeling of a living and thriving world before the protagonist embarked on his/her journey which is a plus point to the immersion factor. Orcs, goblins, humans and ogres, all had their own unique way of dialogue and that adds to the realism and immersion part too. I highly appreciate the effort the author put to make a fantasy world seem like it could actually exist in real life.
The mechanism this game followed was creative but a little tedious to follow. Now I know that if I had a choose your own adventure style book these would’ve been essential, but this being on a computer meant that there could’ve been ways to get around this with either scripting or variables; but then again I have absolutely no experience in this area, and well, it gets the job done at the end of the day so no complaints there. Since I had no dice with me, I was simply closing my eyes and clicking the options. Where the problem does arrive however is the fact that fighting scenes had been disregarded or omitted due to the choice. It would be like “You face a warrior in front of you, he has ‘x’ stamina and ‘y’ specialties that affect you in ‘z’ ways. Change that to your skill/stamina points. If you win click the link,” and the next moment I get a scene where I defeated the warrior. I think it would’ve been better to show how you defeat the warrior, this could be tricky because you’d have to consider in a lot of factors, like the type of protagonist chosen at the beginning, but it would’ve been worth the effort. If not that then at least an end game description when losing the battle could’ve been nice. At certain points I felt that the environmental and surroundings description was a bit lacking; but this being more of a game than story it’s acceptable. It certainly would’ve been a good addition to the story though.
In the end I enjoyed the experience and also seeing a different style of the same author who’s stories I’ve read was a good experience. This could probably be a successful CYOA style book if published in real life.
