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This is how it works:

Recommending a comment for featuring (1 point)
Recommending a tag change for a storygame (1 point)
Recommending a storygame for movement to a different category (1 point)
Recommending a storygame for a change in maturity level or difficulty level (1 point for each)
Recommending a storygame for featuring (1 point)
Recommending a storygame for unpublishing (1 point)
Recommending a comment for deletion (1 point)

To get points for recommending something, I have to agree with you and newly created storygames are not eligible point earners.  

Three Most Important Things when recommending anything:

1. Reply to THIS thread to THIS post

2. A hyperlink to the storygame

3. Number ALL your suggestions

Recommending a comment for featuring:

- The story should at least have a rating of 3.0

- The comment that you think deserves featuring (copy and paste it)
- The username of the person who wrote the comment (doesn't have to be the exact username, just enough so I understand who it is)
- If there are already 3 featured comments on the storygame, you also have to let me know whose comment you think should be replaced.
- If I agree, you will get 1 point and the person whose comment is featured will automatically get 2 points. If you are recommending your own comment, you don't get the extra point. (You’re already getting Commendation points as well!)

Recommending a comment for deletion:

- The comment that you think deserves deletion (copy and paste it)
- The username of the person who wrote the comment (doesn't have to be the exact username, just enough so I understand who it is)

Examples of what to suggest

Spammy punctuation and lettering: Nice Job!!!!!!! or NOOOOOOO!!!!! I DIIIIIIED!

Short comments that don’t address the story content directly or clearly: “Wow” “Poop” "I won!" “Hi” “:)”

If someone says something like “Nice”, "Cool", "It sucks" or “Bad” we can leave it.

Obviously long comments that don’t do this either are also up for deletion, but it’s usually easier to see since they're probably rambling on about a Nigerian Prince or something similar so there shouldn’t be too much of an issue with ambiguity.

Incomprehensible comments: “sfekrbnmdse”

Duplicate comment: Self explanatory.

Flaming the Author: Honestly, I’m actually all for flaming the author if their story was bad enough, but I understand most of you don’t thrive off pure hatred for some strange reason. So if someone is just calling the author names, it can go.

Note: Do not recommend comments on EndMaster stories for deletion or featuring. He usually monitors his stories’ comments anyway.

Recommending a tag change for a storygame

- All of the tags you believe the story should have

Recommending a category change for a storygame

- The category you believe it should be in
- A short explanation of why

Recommending a change in maturity or difficulty level for a storygame

- The change you think should be made
- A short explanation of why

Recommending a storygame for featuring

 - A short rationale for why

Recommending a forum thread for deletion

- A short rationale for why

Recommending a storygame for unpublishing

- A short explanation of why [specifically, you must describe how it fails to meet minimum site standards]

• After receiving at least 10 ratings and being published for at least 3 days, the storygame is rated 2.4 or less. (Though this is flexible if it's particularly bad and still in the 2.5-2.9 range)
• The storygame has all of the following characteristics:
  • Grammar and style poor enough that it cannot be ignored
  • A plot which is poor or nonexistent
  • Poor pacing (usually characterized by frequent and unpredictable end game links)
  • A lack of important decisions
  • Unbelievable or overly cliched dialogue (if dialogue is present in the story)
• The storygame has "dead" pages- pages with no links or way to proceed.
• The storygame's central concept is pornographic in nature
• The storygame is not a storygame and is instead intended to fulfill a goal such as communicating with another member (including all inside jokes) or advertising a product.
• The storygame is explicitly described by the author as a "troll" game, or intentionally poor quality.
• Any unfinished story.
  • What qualifies a story as "unfinished?"

1. Specifically stating in the description/text of the game that it is a "demo."

2. Ending abruptly with a notice that it will be continued later.

Games that say they are the first in a series are not automatically considered "unfinished." As long as the game itself is complete, even if the author never returned to write a sequel, it is not up for unpublishing.

If you don't follow protocol, there will be no negative repercussions, you will be ignored, or I'll take your advice and not reward you with points. Following protocol expedites the process.

To summarize: post here (for the most part) with recommendations for who I should reward / what I should change and I'll reward you with points. 

Take a second to check the posts above you and see if someone else has already made the recommendation. Remember, newly created Storygames are not eligible for tag/category/comment points.

It should be also mentioned that Mizal wanted more admin stuff to do, so she'll probably be the main one doing this now. continue doing nothing and I'll still be mostly doing this as usual.

For the story Before Midnight. 

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/before-midnight

1.  I would like to recommend this comment for deletion   "giggity giggity goo"  -- Sam

2.  This one for deletion.  "I love Reese's cups"  --1m2sw3g4u

3.  Recommendation for featuring, as he is asking the only important question here.  "what is the protagonist's gender?"  Wildfire01

4.  Deletion.  "<3" -- Alice7778

5.  Deletion.  "Yay!" -- Timeless Sakura

http://chooseyourstory.com/forums/reading-corner/message/24835 

I would like to recommend commending my review. (Now I know this may sound like begging, and it is on one of EndMaster’s stories (though off-site) even after it was mentioned to not put his ones forth for commendation; I still worked a lot on the review!)

Hm, a little different than the usual story comment commending. Don't think we've had a forum post request for a commendation before.

Meh, whatever. Done.

Cool, thanks. 

Hey, can I recommend my own game for featuring? I remember a lot of people suggested Tower of Riddles for Mystery and Puzzle when it first came out, but that got shot down by 3J... But he's not here anymore, so screw him! 

As for why... Well... Honestly... I saw that if someone has three games featured, they get their own super special shiny trophy! ... I want one! ^_^

For some reason I thought that one was featured already.

Anyway done, but as for getting your special trophy, going to have to wait on that one.

There's quite a few people that probably should have their own at this point, but someone is going to have to design those, upload them to the site, and some other shit that involves Alex handing server access over to Killa so he can start working on updating the site.

One of Ashen Snake's stories. Don't even remember what it was called, I just took down the lower rated one.

EDIT: I just took down Ashen's other story as well since he said he had it unpublished for fixing missing pages, however it looks like he published it again. Anyway, replaced it with one of Will's stories that you commended.

Seems like Ashen thought his old stories were cringy the last time he logged in here back in 2017, so I suppose we did him a favor by taking them out of the immediate public eye where everyone could see.

He last spoke on the Discord maybe three weeks ago.  

Yey! Thankyou! ^_^

I would like to recommend my comment for featuring. It's on the mortican, by orange.

Link: http://chooseyourstory.com/story/The_Mortician.aspx

"The poem based story was nicely crafted, ballad quatrains are very flexible in general to any style of topic you give them, so no complains with the context. 

There were some blank verse stanzas added abruptly, which interfered with the overall rhythm, but those I think those were added with the intention to create contrast and lay more focus on important points? If that's so, maybe a different subtle approach like changing the meter could have gotten forth that without disrupting the rhythm. Speaking of changing meter, there were a few abrupt changes in the general meter too, where there wasn't really anything major; so it felt out of place. 

The tale being told, is interesting, and the author has done a pretty good job in providing an insight into the character's mind and his motives; really forming a bond. It was interesting at kept my attention and was enjoyable. 

Overall, this is a pretty good piece of literature, but with a few inconsistencies."

There are only two comments currently featured on the storygame.

This is the best story ever -- Someone on 4/5/2019 11:35:04 AM with a score of 147160

yeety boi -- A. H. on 2/7/2018 9:49:34 AM with a score of 67670

Dat gold exploit. -- Marneptunez on 2/1/2018 4:44:40 PM with a score of 163110

The Betrayer LOL -- Ly8y on 11/7/2017 4:16:10 PM with a score of 28640

The first page already had me immersed into the story, as well as both giving valuable backstory into who I was playing as and setting the scene nicely. The “don’t be a bitch” certainly grabbed my attention. I liked a lot of the characters and think the author did a really good job with creating different and unique personalities for each one. The Prince was cheeky and defiant, and I liked how remarkably blunt he was. He also developed as the story went on, which can be seen in one of the epilogues where the events of the past have changed him, and he becomes sadder and emptier. Garrick was another favourite, I especially enjoyed reading through when he became a victim to teasing. Fighting/action scenes are a difficult thing to write, but it was done really well throughout this story. It wasn’t overly complex which made it easy to follow and allowed me to appreciate and understand the prince’s insane skill level when fighting. The battle near the end is something the author should be proud of writing. Plot was good, unique and unpredictable- everything I admire in a story. Minor things such as the Prince not revealing his status to Lady Myrr made it even better and kept me guessing and anticipating. Dialogue was witty and kept me entertained. I also thought pairing up of the dialogue and description was almost perfect throughout the story. It captivated me and added to the fast paced plot. The couple of flashbacks at the start were a nice addition to the story too, I did sort of struggle through reading ‘A History Lesson’ but thinking back on it, it’s all relevant and important information anyway. A lot of the time, I would find myself reading a page that seemed rather familiar and it would take me a second to realise that I’ve actually already read through it and made a choice at the end of it. I understand that is because you wanted the reader to go through the other path/read the other page, but why wouldn’t you have just added that link to the other path once the reader chose the other option? Personally, I found that it interrupted my reading flow and I kind of felt disengaged for a moment when this occurred. I’m unfamiliar with the branching that was carried out in this story. I think it worked well as there was still an element of choice and I still felt like I was having an impact on the events in the second half of the story, but I did start to doubt my control over the first half. The limited first half branching also meant that the replayability (is that a word??) of the story is not that great. Overall, I’m genuinely impressed. The things that stood out to me the most would be the memorable characters. I’ll definitely be reading more of anything this author publishes in the future. -- ghost11 on 4/16/2019 6:12:50 AM with a score of 0

w0w k00l $t0ry m8 -- choking on chicken on 12/31/2018 9:03:53 PM with a score of 0

;) -- zayona on 11/2/2018 7:23:04 PM with a score of 0

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/the-second-battle-of-bull-run

I'd like to recommend featuring my comment on this one; it's a fresh piece with no featured comments yet.

"Some storygames are short but sweet. This one was short and stale. Stale in the sense that there was nothing much tasty to capture my attention. It's not about what your topic is, but how you present it. 

It's competently written in the technical aspect. The main issue is with your storytelling; it's not immersing enough. It's about epic battles in the American Civil War, right? Flesh out its parts even more, especially the battles. 

It's got a few shortcomings, but it's certainly more fun than homework. I'll give you a humble 4/8, and I hope you make better ones than this. Cheers."

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/~2e~2e~2ein-love-and-war

Recommending my own comment for featuring; this work's only got 2 featured ones so far.

"Shorter than what I would normally have wanted in a love story, but, surprisingly, it gets the message across. 

Very simple too, yet it quite effectively captures the setting of a lonely woman. I appreciate how it all seems to be very realistic; trying to resist temptation in a world where you're not even sure if and when it's all going to end. 

Love stories aren't my forte, but it's pretty clear: this is a good work, no more, no less. You look like you'd have a good future here if you keep it up. Here's my token 6/8 to contribute. Cheers!"

Recommending comments for featuring

1. http://chooseyourstory.com/story/the-cliff 

**Contains spoilers** 
It seems Val has the worst luck in the world... Either that or she needs to move away from the goddamn cliff! Lol. The story moved very quickly. It took me about 12 min to get through the entire thing. I was glad it was fast-paced because it meant the reader mostly experienced the big events in Val’s life. That being said, there seemed to be a lot of gaps in the scenes that the story didn’t address. 
There were only a handful of characters: Val, Jen, Emma, Liam, and Brian (Val’s father). I liked Jen and Emma, but didn’t feel any positive emotion towards the other characters due to inconsistency and foolish action. 
Val, Brian, and, (to a lesser degree) Liam acted inconsistent or made dumb decisions which didn’t connect me to their characters. To be fair, we can say Val inherited that tendency from her Father and blame the bastard for not having rational thought processes. Someone should throw him off a cliff, oh wait... For example in Brian’s suicide note, he writes that he loves Val more than anything, but he also can’t afford to live without Val’s mother and brother. Make up your mind, dude! You’d think if he loves Val more than anything, he’d stay alive to raise her. Val had the same line of reasoning later on: “I loved her (Emma), I truly did, but what was the worst that could happen if I called Liam? I needed someone.” You have a wife, lady! You claim to love her! The worst thing that could happen is that you break her heart and run that bitch straight to the cliff. Poor genetics if you ask me. Liam just sort of killed himself out of nowhere due to “inner demons”. I can’t recall any mention to his inner struggle in the story (maybe it’s there, I don’t know), but it seems more like a lazy way to offer a sacrifice to the almighty Cliff Lord. Besides committing suicide, Liam was ok. 
Now to the superior gene pool: Jen and Emma. Jen was the first person to show kindness to the main character. It was apparent that she had a good heart and the best interest of her children in mind. The same couldn’t be said for her homophobic husband. I thought Jen might be the one who opposed Emma and Val together, but she recognized they were good together. Usually someone who homeschools their kid has a more closed-mind, dare I say conservative, worldview of the “L” word (lesbians), so that was a nice surprise. Emma is a genuine character who was more proactive than Val: a true go-getter. Or should I say, “Go get her”? Ba dum tiss. If she wanted to do something, she went for it. The ending where she finds out that Val betrayed her showed that she was the one who had actual feelings for her wife. Val claimed she loved Emma, but then slept around. When Emma found out about the betrayal, she killed herself. I think Emma’s love clearly outshined Val’s which is consistent with the character portrayal. Emma’s character was genuine and true in her actions while Val’s were inconsistent and didn’t always make the smartest choice. 
A few things that stuck out to me: 
- The opening scene mentions “holding a letter in her hand clutched with every fiber of her being” (or something like that). It’d be more effective to leave out one or the other. It’s a bit awkward since every fiber of your being isn’t in your hand. 
- The spacing started out distracting, but eventually I got used to it. 
- The line “…smell of salt water filled my mind” stuck out as weird. Filled your nose maybe? 
- There are a lot of commas out of place. 
- You used the metaphor “holding my grief like a bag of bricks on my back”. I get the image you’re trying to display, but as far as I know, people don’t carry bags of bricks on their backs. They use wheelbarrows or some easier way since bricks are goddamn heavy as shit. 
- My favorite line in the entire story: “I was a little desperate for attention and Greg was supplying it by the bottle.” I thought it was a great line and fit perfectly in the setting. 
- The opening page has the line “nobody ever went here (the cliff) except for those that never went back home.” A few pages later, you visit the same place and you make it back home. Plus, that happened 12 years earlier. 
I found this storygame to be entertaining, which says a lot for the writing since it’s a topic I usually avoid. I give it a 3/8 for the story pace and engaging writing, but its lack of consistency, player choice, and formatting (spacing and grammar) ultimately swayed my verdict to the lower end. 

-- ninjapitka on 12/11/2018 6:22:20 PM

2. http://chooseyourstory.com/story/what-magic-ability-would-you-have~3f 

Ok... that was a strange quiz. 
There was far more in-depth than was perhaps necessary, even from the first page the options were massively longer and detailed that the single solitary sentence that made up the page, I think some serious editing could still have got the meanings across in half the words. 
I found the choices insanely specific, for example on the hobbies page I couldn't find an option for my preferred hobbies (namely reading, writing and smoking) so I had to go with music, drawing and art as I did one of those three but didn't really do any of the others in the other choices. I ran into this problem repeatedly, even on the "what is your favorite color page" (oh, black isn't listed but "rust" is? Seriously? How many people love rust more than black?) 
I was also a bit embarrassed that of the poems listed the only one I knew was Jaberwocky… this whole quiz was a lot more adult that the simple question "what magic ability would you have" seemed to require, it's like clicking on what you think is a casual 5 minute quiz to find a detailed philosophical exploration of the sub-conscious hidden within. 
After working my way through everything, most disappointingly, what I got was literally "nothing". I didn't find the explanation "those who use nothing are extremely powerful" particularly convincing, in my experience "those who use nothing" are seriously lacking in the personal finances side. 
On the plus side you are an extremely articulate and intelligent writer whose work seems free from the spelling errors and grammar mistakes that plague most of us. If this quiz was surprisingly in-depth it says good things about what your next story game is likely to be like: something deep and interesting. It is good to write stuff like this quiz to get used to the system, advanced editor, variables etc and I'm sure you'll put this experience to good use :) 3/8 for this story, perhaps a bit harsh but based on personal preference and for the reasons mentioned above it wasn't really my thing, though it did have many good features.

-Will11

3. http://chooseyourstory.com/story/in-the-pale-moonlight

This was a great game. I started reading before the contest results were announced and wasn’t surprised to hear it got 1st. Congrats. From the violent killings to the “calm before the storm” Lodge preparations, it was very impressive how you set the tone. 
*Spoilers* 
Let’s start with the things I enjoyed the most: The main character and his badassery, the lore, and the werewolf primal urges. 
The Main Character: Good ol’ Willy. Like the description states, you have completed 12 hunts and the game takes place on the 13th. There is an interesting background page regarding William’s childhood and father – I recommend finding it (I don’t think you’re forced into it). Rather than a generic Van Helsing knock-off, which would have been an easy pit to fall into, the MC has his own story and is shaped by his own unique past. 
The Main Character’s Badassery: Ok, I decided this gets a section of its own. You’re armed with a shotgun and a revolver. Pure badass. Depending on the choices you make, you become blessed by a prominent Nordic figure and make the Alpha Wolf your Alpha Bitch. Oh, and did I mention he smokes weed? 
The Lore: The game shows us an unseen war that has been going on for centuries that has elements from Catholicism and Norse Mythology. An ancient order that protects weak humans from terrifying beasts could easily turn cliché, and I think Steve did tremendously well keeping the reader from having an “I’ve been here before” feeling. 
The Primal Urges: HUNT! KILL! EAT! Need I say more? 
There wasn’t anything that jumped out as something the story desperately lacked or needed to change. I didn’t mind The Fool’s riddles; I thought it was a fun twist and a nice break to the dark, gloomy setting. There were a couple places where a title or sentence was mistyped, but that’s easily corrected and didn’t affect my rating at all. I read through two endings and was deeply entertained the whole time. 
-- ninjapitka on 11/15/2018 1:01:38 PM with a score of 0

4. http://chooseyourstory.com/story/escape-the-torture-mansion

I don't know anything about whatever the original fiction is. Even so, the content was colorful and interesting. I liked the rapid pacing of the game and the variety of different characters involved. Every step of the way, you would find yourself in a different scenario. You also did a good job with having different paths through the game. 
Here's what I would have liked to see different. The characters had a lot of flair, but most were only briefly in the story. If you had put a little more into each page, you could have taken advantage of the over-the-top characters, especially later on. I would have liked to see a little bit of setup for the story, even if it was just more reaction from the protagonist to their predicament. 
Another thing was that there were a lot of random death choices throughout the game. I like a little more rhyme or reason to the outcomes of my choices. The brevity of the deaths themselves was something I thought could have been different. It just felt like a factory line of wrong choices instead of adding to the experience. An epilogue would have been nice. 
The technical side wasn't too bad, some inconsistencies with writing, exclamation points felt overused to the point of losing their impact. Nothing was broken, though. 
Overall, it wasn't bad. It just felt like a bit of a cheap thrill.-- OriginalClamurai on 1/1/2019 3:12:53 PM

5. http://chooseyourstory.com/story/arakhan's-vengeance

I enjoyed playing Arakhan’s Vengeance. While it had less focus on storytelling, it was supported by great choices, interesting paths, and fun puzzles. It was clear that careful thought was placed into the choices. I liked how your character could branch off into different paths (the death scene with the children and playing cards made me laugh), and I will definitely replay the game for different endings. I also enjoyed how picking up items opened new choices. The world felt well-planned. The story had great grammar and spelling. Although it had quite a few punctuation errors, it didn’t take away the enjoyment. However, one aspect of the game that I felt needed improvement was the writing. 
The dialogue was fine. Sometimes, it felt unrealistic (mostly Arakhan’s lines felt very forced). There was good dialogue though, such as Joad’s and Riker’s parts. You did a good job at showing some people’s personalities through their lines, and I felt like you thought about their characters. I liked how you added bits of humor (an example being the bar scene when you hug your right-hand man). 
Meanwhile, the writing was simple and got its point across. There were a few somewhat immersive scenes with good descriptions, such as when Arakhan entered the town, saw the destruction, and smelled blood. However, for the most part, I felt that the matter-of-fact description held the story back and caused it to feel bare. It seemed that you often did more telling than showing which made it hard to empathize/connect with Arakhan. I felt like I didn't really get to know him. 
For example, when the official messenger told Arakhan what happened to Lyestra, it was meant to be a horrifying moment, but it honestly didn't feel very serious. I felt that more vivid descriptions and a deeper focus on emotions/senses could have enhanced the suspense and tragedy of the news. An example of how it might go is: 
. . . at that moment, a (young/old/dark-haired/light-haired) man comes hurtling through the bushes, his (color) cape flying behind him. He stumbles, (color) eyes widening at the sight of you. 
You freeze. Your hand falls from your sword. “Adonis?” 
“Arakhan!” the man cries, lunging forward and clinging onto your arms. “Thank the gods I’ve found you!” His legs suddenly buckle. You stumble back from his weight and grab his thin shoulders. “Hey, careful!” you snap. 
He trembles against you. Sweat runs down his (pale/tan/dark) skin as he pants, mouth struggling to form words. 
“Calm down,” you order, slowly releasing him. “Breathe.” 
As Adonis bends over and sucks air into his lungs, questions explode through your mind. Adonis is the official messenger of Lyestra, so it’s not unusual for him to travel around (etc. This is where you can add some background to him, showing why it’s unusual for him to be far out in the woods. For example, where is his horse? Is he dressed appropriately? What does he look like?) He lifts his arm and wipes his forehead against his sleeve. A dark splash of red grabs your attention. You snatch his wrist and stare at the blood seeping through his (insert color) shirt. (END OF EXAMPLE) 
In addition, you frequently wrote “you feel/hear/see” or “it appears”, and I felt that it could have been changed so the story feels more immersive. For example, rather than “You feel your heart sink/You feel his hatred wash over you like the tide/He appears to have sustained a nasty cut along his bicep”, it could be, “Your heart sinks/His hatred crashes over you like a tide/Dark blood oozes out from a deep, jagged cut on his bicep.” Or instead of “You are suddenly interrupted by an incredible crashing sound coming from behind you”, it could be: 
“Actually, Lodan, about that—” 
A sudden crash erupts behind you. (end of example) 
At times, I noticed you repeated yourself and could have been more concise. Here are several examples. The first one is when you’re describing the search for goblins. You wrote, “However, you told them you would like to make one last sweep of the area before you return home. You and your men have split up to search the area for any sign of the goblins. You are on your own, in a dense area of the woods. You are searching for any sign that the goblins were here.” I felt like it could have been condensed to: “However, you told them you would like to make one last sweep of the area before you return home, so you have all split up to search for signs of goblins. You are on your own in a dense area of the woods.” 
Another example is the description of an arrowhead, which I felt that could’ve been written with fewer sentences. You also kept repeating the word “arrowhead.” I felt that it could have been shortened to something like: “As you stare at the tree, you notice something that had escaped your search before. There is an arrowhead embedded in the trunk of the tree. Someone has snapped off the shaft. You yank it out and notice a small, white feather attached to it. You pull it off and spot a strange symbol painted on it, something you have never seen before. It’s a red, two-headed cobra that fills you with dread.” 
Overall, I loved reading the story. I enjoyed the various paths and puzzles, and you clearly worked hard on the choices. Like I said before, I’ll be replaying the story. I only wish it was longer because for how well-planned your world and characters were, the length seemed surprisingly short, like a mini adventure. I felt that the story’s main weakness was the writing. I thought a deeper focus on emotion/the five senses and more detailed descriptions would help the story feel more immersive. I hope you continue writing and submitting more games, and I wish you all the best!-- SummerSparrow on 4/4/2019 2:12:29 PM

6. http://chooseyourstory.com/story/surviving-pre~2dschool

This game captured the essence of childhood really well, it made me wish I was that age again through the child's thought process. I wish my problems involved dragons in books. :( 
It actually brought back a few of my own Kindergarten memories, so thanks for that I always enjoy a good memory flash in my brain. 
The extended metaphor of the prison was also very clever and well done. I liked how it started in the cot and then moved to the kindy. I interpreted it as the child's state of having no power over anything and feeling trapped. 
One thing that was a bit weird was the age of the kid. Kindy aged kids normally don't sleep in a cot or still breastfeed? 
I found the story very lighthearted and pretty funny. The transgender book thing was pretty good and I also enjoyed the mum dumping her kid and gapping it- it reminded me of my mum! 
Each page flowed seamlessly from each choice to the next and it felt like I was reading a book. It was easy to play and although short still had a pretty decent plot.
Definitely deserves to be in the top 10 for 2017, well done :)-- ghost11 on 1/16/2019 3:05:12 AM with a score of 0

7. http://chooseyourstory.com/story/the-knight-order-of-the-golden-sun  (not sure if this and the following qualifiy since the game is fairly new?)

Out of nowhere, a man by the name of RND Gamer comes and writes 4x the amount of the other Corgi (not cori) contestants. Is this man a legend? Will his tremendously impressive word count help or hinder his story? Read and find out for yourself, you comment-lurking leech. Seriously though, if none of it is copied and pasted, then I applaud the hard work involved in getting to that number. 
As the description suggests, this storygame is written to be fun and humorous. I’m glad the author included that note since the title alone is obnoxious… and very similar to 3J’s masterpiece. Due to its nature, the beginning Disney movie cliché is very fitting. I mean, what’s more cliché than a princess trapped in a tower? Opening with a tavern brawl scene perhaps? It’s a fun, light-hearted opening scene though. Reminds me of a skit you’d see on SNL or a parody movie. 
I’m neutral on the POV switching. On one hand, it’s a creative way to switch scenes. It’s like a movie in that regard. It definitely keeps you on your toes since this is the first time I’ve see anyone incorporate POV switches. It is a bit confusing at first, but once you adapt it’s not a problem. Still, I’d prefer some narration to give context along with any POV change. 
I do think the writing style fits the story. It’s quirky. Although English isn’t the author’s first language, it’s not noticeable. That being said, there are a lot of weirdly structured sentences and I’m not sure if one can technically ‘nip’ at their tea. If the story tried to be serious, I don’t think I’d be able to handle the structure. Luckily, it doesn’t try. 
The dialogue and character interaction is sort of what you’d expect from a live play. It’s almost like every sentence a character speaks is outlandish and over the top with excitement. There is also heavy use of hyperbole almost like every dialogue option could determine the fate of the world (see what I did there). 
I have to admit, there was a point in the story where the length was too overwhelming without anything majorly happening. I rushed through 15 pages randomly selecting links and didn’t die. I think the author should have incorporated more ‘dead ends’. There’s a shit ton of content, but no way to lose for a long time (unless I just got lucky). The reason I rushed through the pages was to see if my choices really mattered. I know they do when you arrive at the variable section, but until then I felt like my choices didn’t determine much. I wanted to know if making a bad decision would kill me. They didn’t at first, although I do realize they could have just earned me less points. 
I think there was certainly a large amount of effort put into this storygame. Almost too much, if I’m being honest. That being said, the funny/weird story definitely fit the author’s strong points of writing. Although it was a large text wall to get over, it wasn’t unenjoyable along the way.-- ninjapitka on 4/15/2019 4:34:05 PM with a score of 5

8. 

Same story as above

I liked this story as a whole, It had some good plot twists that kept it interesting. I couldn’t tell what was going to happen at any point in the story, until they happened, maybe because it’s almost entirely dialogue, and there’s not really any descriptions or background knowledge given. I got epilogue B first, and then I got G and F in my second one (back button). 
PLOT: 
The overall plot was ok, but I felt like it was kind of linear. It really only divided up when you chose not to do something (like helping the ‘alchemist’). I also feel like this could be divided into several different short stories due to the way that you transitioned from one point to another. There was little deviation between the gender choices, but I could tell that it wasn’t like POF, using scripting, because there was a little more difference than just him/her and the name/title, so I’m guessing that there is a lot of copy and pasting. I didn’t really understand why the king would send his inexperienced son/daughter out, or even why they what the purpose of them going out was, and I wish that there was more of an explanation on what was going on, apart from the short little thing before I even start reading. 
SETTING: 
There was very little descriptions of where I was at. The most I got of the description of the capital is that is is grander than some other undescribed city. I didn’t even know that Valinor was on the water until the climax of the story. I really wish that you would have done some world building outside of dialogue. 
CHARACTERS: 
I felt like I had very weird control over my character. I could choose to do snobby things as well as heroic things throughout the story, which is a little weird for a spoiled prince/princess surrounded by his/her spoiled friends. I wish that my actions had more of an impact than just 2 seemingly meaningless numbers at the bottom of my screen. I did like how helping out/ being nice to some characters opened up some special choices later on however. There was a little description of the characters, but it’s not close to satisfactory. There wasn’t really any thoughts or emotion described. There wasn’t really any character interaction/chemistry and one of the worst things is that there isn’t a single love interest. 
GRAMMAR/SPELLING: 
I’ll blame the numerous mistakes on your claim of not being natively English, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any. It’s very apparent that there are some, even without looking for them. I can understand what you’re trying to say, but me going back over a couple of times does take the immersion away. 
All in all, it was an ok read, but it is definitely a lot heavier in the quantity department then the quality one. It took me around 2-3 hours to read, which is pretty good. I’d give it a 5.5, which rounds up to a six, solely because I can tell that you put more time and effort into it than the average noob’s first story. -- Austinc on 4/15/2019 2:11:37 PM with a score of 250

I would like to put my forum thread, 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Person - Which to Choose? for commendation because it gives examples going into detail the different points of view while still asking an engaging question.

Plus, if you do this I will give you a cameo in my storygame 

http://chooseyourstory.com/forums/writing-workshop/message/25266#822978

Everyone gets a cameo - but, as with most good action books, a few have to, erm, die.

I have some power in that 

So... Commending your thread would probably be a bad idea for the mods, if they don't want to end up dying. 

Shhh...

Recommending these three comments from my story Dusty Fist for featuring.

Chris, you're supposed to rename The First Page!

But this was just good goofy fun and a worthwhile way to spend five minutes. A storygame doesn't *have* to be a giant epic to be enjoyable and yours are nice to be able to point to for all those trembling noobs who either get their own 2000 word stories tragically wrong or else refuse to ever try in the first place.

Glad to see you writing again and I can tell you had fun with this. Some of the lines are just hilarious. 'The desire to not be gay and to get a glass of water gives you the motivation to see this fight through to the end.' That and the tea and scones ending were my favorite since of course I did not choose to be THAT kind of guy.

First ending I got was the happy friendship ending two clicks in, but going back I was pleased to see I had correctly sussed out that one does not merely *become* fat in the post apocalypse without being important...or without at least having a lot of really good friends in assless chaps who are in touch with emotions and sensitive to your plight.

-- mizal on 5/8/2019 2:44:25 AM with a score of 0

Story: Very short, but the absurdist humor, especially the tea and scones path is spot on.

Prose: The writing style was often really funny. The narrator's light and sarcastic voice was great, and propelled the story on. Some jokes didn't work for me ("you guys share a pair of balls and a brain") and sometimes the narrative does the heavy lifting with exclamation points or stuff like "ohohoh" when I wanted more description and jokes. But that's probably a good sign that I wanted more!

Grammar stuff: Punctuation needs a bit of work, especially comma placement.

In short, a ridiculous blend of different genres in the guise of a western.

-- Gower on 5/7/2019 5:25:30 PM with a score of 0

I found this story hilarious.
The humor in Dusty Fist would not be everyone's cup of tea. If you are one of those weirdos that actually read reviews before the story, and you do not appreciate the Rule of Funny, maybe you should not bother reading this. You won't find it funny and will just click through for the free point.

If, however, you don't mind a little absurdity, I highly recommend this story. It is short and can be read when you haven't much time to spare, and of the stories of this length which I have read, I enjoyed this one the most.

There were several parts which had me audibly laughing even on my second read through, and the grammar and writing are good. The first page may make it seem as if it will be just some cheesy action story if you're not paying much attention, but it becomes clear that it is not by the second page.
There are a few pop culture references, but they weren't very distracting, even for me who did not initially get them.

The branching style is my favorite, and it made reading through the whole thing very easy without making me read the same page multiple times.

Good job on your first story of 2019, Chris.

-- Cricket on 5/7/2019 10:30:47 AM with a score of 0

Adventures in Hollywood

1. Recommending a comment for deletion

It's a good story I just wish there was a couple more options for some of them and ending when you do something wrong.

-- Lily on 4/27/2019 11:53:47 AM with a score of 0

Reason: Duplicate comment

2. Add Tag

Female Protagonist

On the story A Mutt's Purpose:

1. Featured comment suggestion:
This story was coherent, but it was trash.
First off, was it really so hard to write some new pages or take away some of the options after they had been chosen already so that there weren't all these endless loops? For example, if the dog runs into the forest after being with the people, they have an option to go back to the road, which leads to the same exact situation with the people as before. That could have easily been fixed if the author had just taken a little extra time to write a new page where the dog decides to go back to the people instead of starting the whole interaction over again.
And that same choice is labelled, "I've played this game before!" Although it usually is not, fourth wall breaking can be pulled off and can be funny. This was not one of those situations. It was annoying and cringy and the first thing that really brought out my contempt for this story. In fact, just thinking about it wants me to go lower my rating. I'm going to do that after this is posted.
If you don't go with the humans, this becomes a wolf-imitation story. Sure, I was almost amused when the dog ate the nuts *hehe* and didn't like them, but the story was too far gone for moments like that to be of any use.
And the dog gives its puppy a "proper burial"? Since when do dogs give one another proper burials? Did it make sure to bury it on consecrated ground? What the hell is that?
Then there's a dreadful romance page that if you don't go along with you end up dying of insanity because you have no purpose. You just successfully raised several pups to adulthood. Why is guarding some human children a true purpose but not raising your own puppies?
And what's with the apology for gender-locking. Of all the things in this story worth apologizing for, that was not one of them.
Don't bother with this. The grammar could have been worse, but everything else could have been far, far better.
-- Cricket on 5/7/2019 12:44:51 PM

And suggested that it replace this comment because Sethaniel:
Although the description insists the player-character is female, Mom and the little girl refer to the PC as "him" (I suppose they could just be incorrect?) Also, I didn't encounter any explanation for why the story would be "ruined" if the PC wasn't female.
At one point, the story switches from second-person to first person.
Overall, it felt extremely reminiscent of a typical Warrior Cats fanfic, just with a dog instead.
-- Sethaniel on 10/13/2014 2:25:50 PM

On the story America: Made Apocalyptic:

1. Featured comment suggestion:
There are a lot of issues with the structure of America: Made Apocalyptic, but it was somewhat entertaining. You start off in a bunker a few months after the nuclear apocalypse, and the narration is in present tense. Then, the narration switches to past tense as if you are thinking back on what happened. However, the story continues in past tense, even when the time is explicitly said to be two years after the story started, and nowhere do you end up back in the bunker.
The absurdity of the events such as the Canadian, moose-riding militia is entertaining, but the reader chooses what events happen rather than what the character does. Rather than feeling like a CYOA, it feels more like reading a strange bedtime story and deciding what you are going to have happen next. Maybe some will enjoy that more than I did.
I did get a laugh at the part when you are stationed in Wisconsin. That was the best part for me, because I have totally known a Frank, several really. It made me wonder if the author has lived in or near Wisconsin, or maybe the reputation of Packers fans has spread across the country.
If the formatting and structure had been less screwy, this might have been a very entertaining story.
-- Cricket on 5/9/2019 5:06:02 PM

On Survive the Zombies:

1. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Nonsense
X
-- D on 2/11/2019 2:21:23 PM with a score of 200

2. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Gen Z nonsense:
oof
-- Azharia on 1/7/2019 10:14:07 AM with a score of -666

3. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Spammy punctuation and lettering:
THEEE BESTTT!!!!!!!!
-- xavier on 9/17/2018 1:51:25 PM with a score of 9001

4. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Does not address the story correctly:
yes
-- yes on 3/28/2018 9:11:48 PM with a score of -666

5. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Whoever wrote it would be ashamed if they had enough working brain cells:
grr, such angers, y caont figt wih bear hands wht not fair i anger send bad report, just kidd, good report, but i rate bad cuz angers and grr and very angers. fat man cnt figt bear hans i figt bear hands not hurt not zombie bit me im strong? no. god game non ta lesz
-- young man on 3/17/2018 10:01:44 AM with a score of -666

6. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: While true, the comment does not address the story directly:
Awesome website
-- Skyler Dutter on 3/2/2018 9:15:33 AM with a score of -666

7. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Does not address the story directly:
Yay!
-- TestingJest on 11/29/2017 11:17:59 PM with a score of 9001

8. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Spammy punctuation and does not seem to address the story directly:
Family man...??????
-- nishan on 11/23/2017 4:58:58 AM with a score of 100

9. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Does not address the story directly:
hoora
-- lordofheros on 4/25/2017 1:16:37 PM with a score of 9001

10. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Likening the story to waterfowl:
hoora
-- lordofheros on 4/25/2017 1:16:37 PM with a score of 9001

Recommended for featuring:

I thought the moral choices were pretty thought-provoking (well, as thought-provoking as two opposing sentences can be) and gray, different people would have different answers to those dilemmas. 

I also like how you can tell which option is going to get you killed beforehand if you're really trying to avoid dying. No tricks or anything. For example, when someone throws a punch at you it sounds pretty implausible to just grab their swinging fist and break it. However it's not overly obvious so you can still die if you're not thinking that hard about it. 

My favorite part (I'm pretty sure I played through every page unless there were hidden variables) was when the Question rushes in at the eight men and then gets pushed/kicked into the water and starts drowning. Obviously it gives you the "Dead" ending, but I thought it was realistic that there's an option to just give in and die, anyone might have a little part of them thinking that if they get beat up and shot and pushed into cold water. I liked "It doesn't hurt." It kind of made the scene better than if it had been "You sink into the freezing water, your whole body hurts, you want it to end, it really hurts, finally death brings you sweet relief", that was probably what I would expect to happen. I guess maybe you put that because he was numb from the cold. But still, I thought it was good and a little unexpected.

-- jodithewitch

On Silent Night by Chris

I also recommend that Love SICK by EndMaster be moved to Love & Dating.

Recommending comment for featuring:

This is one of the most cliche horror stories I have ever read. The plot was okay, it wasn’t really subversive at all. If you were to build up the suspense, instead of hearing the moan about three pages in, then it would be slightly better. It really wasn’t too immersive for me. The length made it not as good as it could have been. 
The pictures you had made no sense, not even the first one where he is going to live in a house so derelict a sneeze would blow it over. Then you show pictures that make it look like the inside of a mine, not an actual house. 
The grammar was okay, but you had a lot of mistakes that only a fifth or sixth grader would make. You didn’t use a lot of commas, which represent pauses when reading, so it could make it seem like there is at least a little bit of length. 
Overall, a 3/8 (but it has potential).

-- The_Broken_God on 5/22/2019 1:40:36 PM

On Out Alive by thelegitginger

Sorry, it just automatically does that when I copy it.

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/out-alive

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/silent-night

<a href="https://chooseyourstory.com/story/the-journey-of-seamus-dregg">Link</a>

Intro: I will start by saying I like this story. It has a lot of potential. Unfortunately there are many things wrong with it I must highlight. However let it be known that there are much worse stories out there and yours is by no means the worst. I sincerely hope that you continue writing storygames for me to read in the future. If there is one thing you take away from this if you don’t want to read my review is that your story is very liner. That is the major fault of this story. 

Concept: The concept is good. I especially like the pirate theme, as I have not seen as many stories go for that type of theme. One thing I did not like about the story however is the repetitiveness. The game mainly boils down to going to landmarks and seeing what you can find. 

Plot: Now the plot is lacking, which is a shame because it is the main focus of any story. You can make a compelling concept, with fleshed out characters, though if you have a poor plot your going to struggle to produce anything good. 

It starts off with you going to look for your crew. While this is not bad it could be a lot better. For example you could be able to look for them by checking rooms in the inn. 

Next you encounter an enemy ship and pick a course of action. The action determines if you have to fight them or get to skip it. While I like this my one major complaint is that for one of the options you can choose the outcome. It may just be me but that kind of defeats the purpose. 

After that you come across an island that you can explore. This is one of my favorite parts because you can skip it or open up the closest thing you have to a branch in the story. The only thing I see wrong with this section is the fact that if you head back sober you can’t find the ship, but if you go the next day with a hangover you make it back. It could be the fact that sunlight helps you but I’m still not sure. 

After this you find a island that your not able to dock at. If you try you die. While it is short there is not much wrong here. You get a proper warning in advance so it did not come out of nowhere. 

After this you come across a bigger ship that turns out to be the ship of an old friend. If you took your time to explore the island you would be able to spare him and go on your way, but if you didn’t you would have to kill him. I have no complaints here besides I would like the option to have a backstory page explaining the two captains pasts. 

Lastly you finally make it to the treasure island. I like the riddle, though it is a little easy giving the options. Also there should be repercussions for picking the wrong choice. You could have started digging in the wrong place, and while wasting your time a tribe of natives ambushes you and kills you. 

Characters: The characters were on of my major complaints of the story. Only two characters have name. Those are the protagonist and his old friend. The thing is we have no idea anything about these people’s pasts, and such can not be invested into them. If you would have simply put more descriptions or wrote up optional backstory pages for them that would be great. If the crew had names we would also be able to care about them a lot more. We got a glimpse of their lives when you kill the old friend, but all that does is leave the reader with more questions. 

Structure: While it was liner there were parts where it bottlenecked so I can’t say it was exactly liner. The one thing in your favor in this section is the fact that you can use the supplies you get to spare the friend. 

Word count: 2.4k words. It’s an okay word count but if you want to make a decent storygame the general accepted bare minimum is around 5k 

Spelling and grammar: This was actually not that bad. I did not notice any mistakes myself. 

In conclusion: The storygame is okay. It’s not exactly worthy of a 4 but I’m rating it that anyway. It definitely better than a 3. As I said before I hope you go on and make more storygames on this site. If you will take this to heart and add more details you could make a fairly good storygame for the site to see. 
-- Serpent

https://chooseyourstory.com/story/grief

No but I was editing that post lol, trying to copy paste my comment

Sorry could not edit post above

------

https://chooseyourstory.com/story/grief

Intro: I will say that I love the direction of this story. It could have been an amazing story filled with tons of potential. However the word length crushes everything that it had to offer. The author even admits he wrote it in fifteen minutes. However for fifteen minutes of work the payoff is quite wonderful. This story exhibits almost all of the bad habits of writing a storygame. Minimal effort, liner, less than 400 words, and much more. However I still see it as a game that should stick around. The emotion and passion I sense from this story is astonishing. While that may not be easy to capture in a longer story, in this one it works. Another thing is the level of mystery surrounding the story. We have no idea about anything, and everything is vague. While this could be good here it is bad. Now without further ado let's begin with the review

Concept: The concept is the worst part of it all. It had so much potential to be something good. Something you could be proud of. All thrown away because you were too lazy to act on it. The story is not bad, but if you would have spent a few days fleshing it out it could have been so much better.

Plot: This is basically non existent. We have a idea of what happens, someone dies and you mourn for her relentlessly, but how did she die? Also at the end you get to choose your outlook. One makes you commit suicide, the other makes you move on. This is good, but I wish it was fleshed out more.

Characters: What characters? All we know of is the protagonist and a girl. They both are lacking names. This is a huge issue. All we know of is a girl who died and the protagonist got depressed by it. What is their back story. Are they lovers? I would assume so but it never tells me. How did they meet, what was their childhood like, just something anything that can help me know them better.

Structure: Well this was liner. It was one of those stories where you have a straight path and one choice at the end. Though there is one thing that sets this story apart from those structure wise. That is the fact that there are FOUR PAGES IN THE ENTIRE STORY. In one playthrough only three. Now do you see the big structure problem here?

Word count: This one is just sad. My review will be over 500 words but this story is less than 400. This and the structure are the things that have killed you story. They are the reason that it is so bad.

Sperling and grammar: Not bad at all.

Conclusion: Good game with lots of potential. Though the fact that its word count and structure are so bad makes it a three. If you were to fix it up a little bit I might have put a four but with this word count and four pages I don't know. Anyway hope you write more 3/8

Ghost House

Recommending  comments for deletion:

1.

rape me

-- bitchbaby jr. on 5/17/2018 10:38:16 PM

2. 

kill me in a sexual manner

-- bitchbaby on 5/17/2018 10:33:30 PM

I personally found those comments to be extremely insightful. ^_^

Pity bitchbaby didn't leave those on Love SICK, they might have gotten featured instead.

Add Female Protagonist Tag

1. ...In Love and War

2.  My First Day Of Preschool

3. Stockholm Syndrome

4. The Proposal

5. His Smile

Recommending a storygame for unpublishing:

https://chooseyourstory.com/story/dugeon-master 

Reasoning: Not sure if the literal misspelling of dungeon in the title is any indicator of the quality, but. Well it's not really good, I think? For some reason I rated it a 3 but on a more recent re-read I have been left scratching my head about that.

It needs to stay. It is a crown jewel of a story. I have not seen this captivating since necromancer! also I have a featured comment on it so...

I must admit to rating my receiving of a single point higher than your featured comment on a low rated storygame with a wrongly spelled title that was apparently supposed to be one of three parts.

Recommended comment for featuring on The Great Jungle Escape

***Spoiler Alert*** 

Intro/Backstory: This needs quite a bit more information than “the pilot is dead”. Or, just change it because it is extremely cliche. As in, copying Hatchet cliche. A few ideas instead: 
- Main character is in the US Navy, and works on a submarine. 
- Main character is on vacation, and is swimming, but gets sucked out by a giant riptide. 
There are really multitudes of ideas that can be used instead of the ‘plane crashed, pilot dead’ one. 

Main part: So, there are quite a few things to say about this bit. For one, it is very random. The main character is on the island for less than half an hour, and BOOM! A tiger attacks you. Then, in order to escape, you run away from it, even though it is practically impossible to outrun a tiger in the jungle. Furthermore, when you climb through the cave and are seized by the cannibals, that page was way too short. It was one sentence long, and just simply made me loose interest in the story (though I never had any to begin with). And how you escape, by punching your way through a crowd of cannibals, is absolutely unnatural. Ever tried punching your way through a crowd? Now try that again, but instead the crowd must be savages that see you as your dinner. 

Climax: This is very anticlimactic. It simply doesn’t make the reader sit on the edge of their seat and hold their breath. And no matter what you choose, fish or crocodile, it takes you to the same page. Here is literally what you said: If you said "fish" you were wrong! IT'S A CROCODILE!! It makes no sense to have a story as linear as this one, and then go on and make it so that no matter what you choose, you go to the same page. Don’t ever do that in a storygame unless it is absolutely necessary. 

Resolution: Way too random, in fact doesn’t make any sense. The pilot of the helicopter can somehow pull you up with one hand, WITH A STICK, while piloting the helicopter with the other. This doesn’t really make sense. And, how is the main character so lucky as to be able to get to the helicopter in the first place? Why is the helicopter on an island of savages and (to quote you) “ferocious beasts”? It really doesn’t make any sense. 

This story is rather boring, and doesn’t really hook the reader in unless they’re 10 years old. The description of it was horrible. You spelled ‘escape’ wrong, and you said something about being “doomed to death”. 

Overall, 2/8. Horrible. 

-- The_Broken_God on 6/3/2019 9:13:11 AM

It's 2.99, just missed the minimum to feature comments on it.

Can we get an F mega in the chat please

Dammit

The odder thing is despite you rating it a 2 in your comment, you actually rated it a 4 in the real rating section.

I want to move the rating up a little.

I know, but I want the commendations

OK, *now* it's above 3.   I second the request to give this pretty bad game a moment to flourish and then wither and die.

Recommending a comment for featuring on The Second Battle of Bull Run

https://chooseyourstory.com/story/the-second-battle-of-bull-run

Usually the school projects we get here are uh, not great, so this one was kind of refreshing. It definitely could've used more description and detail, we're often just briefly told that major things happened. More time could've been spent in the beginning especially, describing the camp and setting the scene. But aside from all the classic 'show, don't tell' advice, the writing itself is solid in all the technical aspects like grammar and punctuation and so on. 

The "diary" entry on the first page made me chuckle and there were other details that were reminders of what a fun person John Pope was (more to read about than to live with for sure...) but there were a good number of options for more logical actions too, and some that were just fun. (The Traitor/Martyr choices were kind of wtf in the way they came out of nowhere but something about the whole scenario of having Stonewall Jackson just walk into your tent was amusing enough I didn't mind...) 

I know the author just did this for a school project but I wouldn't mind at all seeing more stories from them, whether they stick to historical stuff or have other stories they want to tell, I'd say they've got a lot of potential here. 

Many others have tried and failed to do school projects here. I hope they take note of this because as you can see, it's quite easy to avoid having your story taken down really. If you want to hit that publish button, all you have to do is not suck. 

-- mizal on 5/1/2019 3:41:54 AM with a score of 0

May I present to you for unpublishing: http://chooseyourstory.com/story/science-fiction-project. It's the newest game on the site and it's even worse than my attempts at storygames somehow. 

In the description it's described as being completely random, has 5 or 6 pages, AND identical links that do different things, one of them being a death link on the first page.

Gotcha.

For Orion
1. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Does not address story.
Ok... -- Lol on 6/13/2012 1:54:21 AM with a score of 0

For Fish Filet
1. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Does not address story clearly.
Just once... -- Geordie on 2/14/2019 5:29:50 AM with a score of 0

For Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
1. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Does not address the story directly.
I lost. Wah. -- Jeff on 8/21/2010 1:40:40 PM with a score of 0

For The Ocean's Daughter
1. Recommendation for comment deletion. Reason: Spammy lettering and uncreative flaming of the author.
WASTED MY TIME F YU -- Kuro on 3/17/2019 1:52:36 PM with a score of 265
2. Recommendation or comment featuring
'The Ocean's Daughter' is written beautifully. Despite other comments, I think that the grammar and spelling was done exceptionally well compared to other stories on this website. There are no complaints from me on that end. Though I have to admit that I did have trouble connecting with any of the characters. I feel that there could have been more character development, and I certainly would enjoyed reading more about the mermaid and her past. The ending struck me as a bit disappointing; I was expecting more of a climax or build-up at that point. (Though I clearly got the bad ending.) Overall, this is a well written short story. The author has talent and skill in terms of writing fiction. If only I could have learned more about Marina and her life as a mermaid! Maybe if I play again, the "good" ending will be better...? Rating: 6/8 -- Killah_B on 3/7/2014 8:54:11 PM with a score of 270
Recommended to replace:
Definitely reminds me of Snow... Of course, that's not a bad thing at all. A grammar mistake here and there, but this is honestly really good! -- Doodled on 2/11/2012 10:21:36 PM with a score of 270

Finally noticed these.

edithe-zilonis

Intro: Now I'm going to start off by saying this is a great game. You should definitely read it and I would definitely recommend it. If you are the type of person who reads reviews before games, I'm going to warn you that this review will spoil the entire story for young and before you read this review you should play the game. Also by all means you should play this game. It is a great game that by all means deserves to be featured. Besides one major problem I'm going to touch on later this story is magnificent.

Concept: The concept was the main reason why I was drawn to review this story. I love the whole undertaker thing, and love how it is implemented. I lean towards darker themes in general so that definitely helps. I also the whole afterlife thing, and how you are judged before judges and get to pick where you go is great, and it is implemented great as well. I would of liked to see it explored more, but given the focus of the story I see why it wasn't.

Plot: The plot itself is pretty basic, though the way it is written makes it go from basic to amazing. While a girl getting murdered and you having to find out who did it may be basic, the story puts a lot of different spins on it that turns this into a story worth telling. That combined with how well it is written and this is a must read. I can't pick out what, but something about the authors writing puts this story on a whole new tier. Even though the plot is kind of basic, the concept and characters are the main driving force for me. Speaking of...

Characters: I absolutely love the characters in this. The undertaker himself feels like an old man, though it is stated later that that is not the case. The girl herself has a flaring personality that contrasts nicely with the more reserved, sweet, and caring vibes I got from the undertaker, and their senses of humor pair nicely.

Structure: This is my biggest complaint with the story overall. The story itself is very liner, with the only major decision being the final one and all that one determines is what ending you get. Honestly if it just had more paths or just something to make it more of a cyoa the quality would be improved drastically. Though I would rather have this than a story that branched, and because of that the story suffered because of it. But if you can keep this quality of writing, and add branching, then do that.

Word count:13.6k. Overall not a bad length, though not a terribly long one either. Though in this story's case I think I prefer this length. It makes a decent read while not being too long as to be overwhelming. Also the fact that it is short means that it is nice and compact, and that makes it so that it is interesting throughout.

Spelling and grammar: Amazing. Noticed a few things, but nothing to detract from the story.

Conclusion: Definitely a story worth reading. I would be interested to read more from the same author. I have to give this game a 6/8. The writing was amazing, and the only bug flaw was the branching. If that had been fixed I would have given it a 7, but as it is it is a welcome addition to the featured page.

Well hell, if you're going to commend this review, might as well keep going and commend the previous two insightful comments on the same story as well.

Since when are we self-nominating, anyway?

The other ones weren’t commended initially due to the story not having enough ratings to even have a score though since it does now comments can be commended.

Serpent is still a tard though.

"Serpent is still a tard though."

Let's all drink to that! (Those of us who are old enough to do so.)

This warms my heart.

Is this what it feels like when your dad suddenly comes back fifteen years after he left to buy cigarettes?

Intro: Before getting into this, I would like to mention I know this is a parody, but for the purposes of this review I'm going to be ignoring that fact.

First of all I want to say that even though this is a parody the writing is not that bad. I still kind of enjoyed reading this even if it is just another lolrandom game. The style of your writing is very descriptive, and from this and the bio on your profile page you seem to be very great at describing things. Especially outlandish things I have come to notice. If you were to make a serious attempt I think you could make a story worth featuring. I can't think of many authors on this site that go this far with their outlandish descriptions and would like to see more.

Concept: The concept is pretty good. I like the whole walking this, and the inception thing even if it was repetitive after each path to see the whole inception thing, it was entertaining. At least at first. Besides the fact that this is a lol random game the concept of just walking around is an interesting one. In a story with a plot you could talk to characters and explore places with no reason beside something like I don't know traveling or something? Speaking of plot...

Plot: There isn't much of one. This isn't you fault because this a parody but ignoring that the lack of any rhyme or reason or anything at all is infuriating. Why am I walking? While this story is a lol random there could have at least been a basic plot. A reason or goal to accomplish. In any case, let's move on.

Character: Characters? What's a character?

Structure: The structure is very… weird. So you basically pick a direction and you branch off from there. One direction is a death, one makes you turn into a ball of inferno, one lets you walk in circles until your rotation destroys the earth, and another makes you walk forever until you choose to hang yourself. There are a few diffrent paths so at least it isn't liner, but still. How you reach those paths is pretty basic.

Word count: 3k. Meh. Not long, but the fact you put so much into a parody game let's me excuse this.

Spelling and grammar: Good. Not much else to say. Most games are either good or bad and that's it.

Conclusion: This game was well made. It may not be a good game on account of the lack of plot and characters, it is still very well made. I hope that we get more stories from you because your style of writing is unique and I love it. Also I never got to read the original on account of it being unpublished. 4/8

1.  Recommend unpublishing Austinc's comment on Escape from School, as it contains spoilers for the game out in the open. I'd paste in the spoiler comments as evidence, but I don't want to spread them.

2.  Recommend removing below comment from game 2205 as meaningless and dumb.

YAY!!!

-- Guest on 11/17/2018 10:05:09 AM

I recommend that They Murk in the Darknes... (sic) be unpublished.

• Grammar and style poor enough that it cannot be ignored
• A plot which is poor or nonexistent
• Poor pacing (usually characterized by frequent and unpredictable end game links)
• A lack of important decisions
• Unbelievable or overly cliched dialogue (if dialogue is present in the story)

All of those features are present.  And the title is spelled wrong, too!  Gah!

I recommend the bad mod's comment be unfeatured or removed from the game The Weird Day, because I think he should be stripped of every possible honor, no matter how slight or meaningless.

It's a fine comment as such things go.  But every time his name is scrubbed away makes this site a bit better.  Of course, just making this post added his name.  So after dealing with this, feel free change his name i. This post to something harmless.

Alright, allow me to explain something: The whole point of a game being based entirely on the premise of a "weird day" is the craziness of the events and the contrast between the normal and the bizarre. 

Think of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory. The majority of the story is, yes, in a strange and wonderful world filled with oddities, but the writers started us off in a fairly bleak and gray atmosphere, which gives us the contrast. 

It might've helped if you started us off at the very end of a normal day for our character, giving us a glimpse into the norm, and then led us into the bizarre day. On the other hand, you could've also showed us what the character was thinking, and had the contrast come from the fact that they expected a sane, ordinary wake up call instead of their mom being a giant squid. 

Now, if you neglected both approaches, you could've at least given us depth of description. "You wake up. Your mom is a big squid." That's not very interesting, to be honest with you. Sure, it's a weird thing to wake up to, but with such a blunt, brief, and boring summary of something that should be so terrifying, strange, and insane, there's no real impact on the reader. 

This story is, sadly, pretty boring. You can't just say something weird happened and expect your story to be interesting as a result, you need to elaborate. Give us a fully formed world, otherwise it just falls flat. 

This could've been a great, silly horror story. You also included a forth wall joke, asking the character if "we" could get back to the story, and that's all well and good--but you executed it with bathroom humor. Poor bathroom humor, at that. 

-- some random creep on 6/15/2014 10:10:12 PM

So after dealing with this, feel free change his name i. This post to something harmless.

Good idea, Quiller sucks.

1.  Recommend unpublishing this game:  A Little Something About the Phillippines

It contains plagiarized text within it, wholly unattributed (probably 90% of the text in it comes verbatim from online sources.)

Glad to see Mizal got to some of these for a change.

Hi, I know this is quite random for a request of a comment deletion. So, I accidentally submitted three of my reviews in the same storygame called "The Last Moment" which is fresh from the oven (Newly Created Storygames).I want to ask for deletion of my repeated comments: The 12:32:44 AM and The 12:41:46 AM comments by NormPerse. Hopefully, one of you guys can delete them so that I can rest from my embarrassment and cringiness to the poor comment section.

Heads up for the future: don't respond to the latest reply in a thread. Instead, hit the reply for the post you want to reply to (in this case, probably the original post).

Also, the correct formatting would be to link the story (like so) and then post the comments you want deleted, along with a reason. It seems someone got them already though.

Conclusion:

I still have a lot to learn how things work in CYS. Even though, I have been staying here for a month, a newbie is still a newbie. Always listen to the professionals and don't be stupid are my top priorities. Thank you for your correction, I will fix my mistakes soon in the near future. 

1.  I recommend that a comment be deleted in Private Game for Natalie

The comment is, as follows:

-------------

Poop

-- The_L on 10/4/2019 4:04:39 AM with a score of 0

-------------

I am not sure whether this is a command, a sound effect, an assessment of quality, or a verbal tic, but it's not what I would call a worthwhile review.

I'm disappointed in you Gower. Asking the mods to delete negative reviews of you game. Some people just can't take constructive criticism. >.<

Obviously it's the CoG influence showing.

I just can't tell if he wants more or less poop in my next game.

Oh that guy. Yeah he tends to leave a lot of stupid one word reviews like that.

1.  Recommend for unpublishing:

i'm gonna leave

On the grounds of "The storygame is not a storygame and is instead intended to fulfill a goal such as communicating with another member."  This thing doesn't deserve to be crowding another game off the newly published list.

... You know, this "game" where the kid whines about not being able to handle negative feedback, talks about being dyslexic as if they should be parking in handicapped spots, repeats "I'm sorry" over and over, throws a huge tantrum and rage quits REALLY gives me the impression that they make awesome music! Let's all go check it out. ^_^

1.  Delete top comment in Forgotten Magician as some anon has clearly gone off their meds.

>Be then about 17 years old.
>friends and family annouce me as 'Fat Bastard'.
>I don't apreciate that nickname. However, for sharts and gargles I laugh too, all the times.
>Jokes evolve and become more damaging to me. "He is unnatractive because of eexagerated proportions". "He cannot stroke his own penis". "He is a truck loaded with shit and failed dreams".
>continue to laugh with them, being a beta version male that i be.
>new years eve.
>some maiden in our home made turkey. a bird we eat here.
>because of various foods, the people at my lair didn't eight the totality of the bird.
>the folowing morning, some mayonnaise was trown in the turkey.
>friends and family joke that I, being the Fat Bastard that I am, Had Sex with the turkey, and thus, the mayonnaise was evidence that I had ejaculated strongly.
>I, once again, jester "It was not me. She was not even my type".
>audience laughs.
>contemplate self termination at a later hour.

-- Anonymous on 10/5/2019 2:33:11 PM with a score of 0

2.  In Kinnitak Sikuk

I nominate TheChef's comment for featuring:

The setting of this story immediately caught my eye among the rest of the brand new stories as unique. The arctic circle? Haven't seen that before in a storygame yet, so I expected that to play a big role in how this game played, but it didn't. Instead, the stats rule this game.

So the true ending "The People's Champion" is locked behind a big issue. You pretty much decide the final ending of the story by how you allocate stats at the beginning. If you don't have enough Charisma points, good luck convincing the village to stop burning Kinnitak Sikuk, cause you're gonna be about as convincing as a Jehovah's Witness knocking on your door at 6 in the morning.

I put all of my points into being SWOLE at the beginning, and had my entire tribe choke to death on black fog because I couldn't flex it away. Does it make sense? Of course. But it's not a good way to tell a story. You're doomed to fail.

3.  Horus

Delete Comment:

Weird

-- alfiehat on 3/23/2019 8:56:43 AM with a score of 0

4.  Horus

Delete Comment:

Terrible

-- poop on 6/1/2016 7:12:17 PM with a score of 0

Please get rid of my comment on http://chooseyourstory.com/story/technoir

I copied the wrong review lol. 

Dusty Fist 2 is a great story, and better than the first one. That sure is good, because the bar the first Dusty Fist set was pretty decent, and I’m surprised that even with an extended length, it didn’t lose that intal charm of the first game. Everything I loved about the first game translates nicely over here.

For one thing, it is amazing for just picking up real quick, reading all the paths, and putting down. There is no major time investment to be had. All you have to do set aside ten minutes, if that, and read it. No multi hour story to sign up for. Just a nice comedic story to fill a lunch break.

One thing I like about this story, and good stories of a similar length, is that they are often grounded. They know exactly what they want to talk about and once that has been accomplished the story is over. Sure this one is a bit random, though it hyper focuses on a sand whale heading for a village. Once that is no longer the focus, the story is done. One event that you get to see in massive detail without making the game massive. That is what the best short, “toilet stories” accomplish.

In short, this story is great, and better than the first. I hereby dub these kind of amazing, under 5k, stories, “toilet stories.” The comedy is it’s main drawing point, though I still recommend you read it even if you don’t enjoy comedy stories, as it is so short there is nothing to be lost by doing so. I think this story is solid, though I don’t think there is any way I can give it a higher rating then the first one, on account of it is not quite good enough to deserve a 6.

5 out of 8

1. In A Fowl Problem

I recommend  poison maras comment.

It is well written even if sometimes feel off. I just miss more stuff to pick up in the house, and more interactivity with the duck we have. Like, make pop corn for him. You have missed out so many puns. When I when to the bathroom I was really excited thinking about a clear pun with a rubber duck and maybe a small bath with the duck or something.

Or even calling someone else through the phone to have a dynamic conversation. But anyway, is a good little fun and well written, I hope you expand it a little to add real interaction in the house

2. Also In A Fowl Problem

I recommend my comment.

I thought this game was hilarious, but then again, this coming from someone who thinks everything is funny. I mean this game's sense of cynical, serious humor is on point.
You somehow made having a book about how to eradicate yourself of ducks on your toilet lid seem very reasonable, and perfectly okay. You made me kill a duck by putting it in a blender. I mean, that’s the type of shit you do in some grimdark edgy ass story created by a 16 yr old edgy ass emo who still lives with his parents. That's not even the craziest part, the craziest part is it was very freaking funny and enjoyable. The overall story was well built, and the only part I have beef with is the ending. It was like watching all eight series of Game of Thrones to see Jon Snow do the naughty and then kill his aunt. Like who thinks up that type of messed up shit.
The problem with the ending was that it was rushed, you could tell, and next time make the climax of the story a lot more immersive, don't want to be rude, or anything, but your peak was disappointing. The duck disappeared oh no, how did it disappear, why did it disappear, where did it go. These are the questions that build up a story, instead of making the duck randomly disappear your climax. You could use it as a mini climax In the rising action.
I would be harder on you about the missing plot structure, and lackluster of an adventure, but you made it known that this was for a project and I understand that you don´{t have all the time in the world to build up a 50-100K story, which is generally hard anyway if you were thinking about lengthening the story and making it into an even bigger and more funnier project. I would be in total support of it because this short story you wrote was decent.
Grammar was overall excellent; I didn't find any errors that stood out besides one on literally one page. Which is very impressive, like so good it makes my grammar look trashy. Overall this story was hilarious; the grave and sarcastic humor about ducks got me.
Also was the satchel duck female, is that why the male ducks wouldn{t do anything to you.

6 out of 8

3. In Hotel California

I recommend Gowers comment

The looping structure of this game is not especially fun to read; more unique text or interesting description would probably work better. More importantly, the grammar situation is deeply in need of work--possessive issues, run-on sentences, and spelling issues are really distracting.

This is wholly aside from the way the links stop working in your room--I ran into a few times where I had to start over, because neither link worked at all.

4. In Hotel California

I lastly recommend my comment.

This story was really, really good and I really enjoyed it. Sadly, I don’t know what fan fiction this story is about, but I personally like stories that have a bit of supernatural aspect to them. So, at first, I had no clue what to expect when reading this story, but it delivered.
So first off it would be nice if on the first page or something you could explain what fan fiction this story is about. This is because starting of the story I was so confused because it started with you going to jail. I didn’t know what reason I didn’t know why until the second page which was kind off an information rush. I probably would have rated this story a six, but it was really confusing what was going on for the first few pages. But once I got the summary of what was going on I finally understood what was happening and it made sense to me.
Basically, the game is about a guy with powers going to jail to get killed or something he escapes with some dude who dies. Than he goes to some hotel which is alive and has no clue what was going on and he escapes the game is pretty long and has a steep learning curve, but I liked it. It would’ve been a lot of better if it was more explanative.
Now instead of talking about what you did wrong let’s talk about what you did right. First off good story overall, second good grammar it was very descriptive of what was going on and it was long enough to keep you interested and not bored. I like your use of items and I liked how you incorporated the feeling of being trapped in an unending loop by using variables. I can tell that your scripting and variable use is really good and way better than mine.
Lastly im going to talk about the last thing that happens in the game the final battle. The items don’t work I got all three and it didn’t improve my luck or intelligence or maybe something im not aware of happened but I didn’t think it worked.

5. In Hotel California

I recommend these comments for deletion

NO, THIS IS PATRICK!

-- Ogre11 on 8/23/2019 2:18:09 PM with a score of 92

Is this the Krusty Krab?

-- corgi213 on 8/23/2019 12:11:42 AM with a score of 84

6. I recommend Saint Joan for deletion

Reasons, It been three days ten reviews, and its rated a 2.11. It's for a school project, and every time you choose the wrong choice, you would end up on a dead link. Overall missing plot structure and the story doesn't make sense. That is why it does not meet site standards. Also, the information has probably been plagiarized somehow.

A Fowl Problem is pretty new, so it doesn't have a lot of comments to pick from. While your comment is currently the longest, it also has quite a few spoilers and grammar errors/typos in it.

Yeh, I noticed that I changed my settings to Spanish for school and forgot to change it back, so instead of having an ' I had {.  I would go back and edit my comment if I could, but I cant. 

Game: 16 Words

1. Feature comment  by Ogre11:

" Why is this? What is the sixteen? Is that a magical number? It is in computers.

But still, why would you do this? I can see how, but why? For what reason?

Is this truly a representative sample? Does your survey include all groups? I don’t think so.

So it sounds like your premise is flawed. That means the rest is useless as well?

But what if it is not? Why would you continue? Could there be additional, hidden value?

There is not, should you listen to the academics. Their review procedures are clear, you know.

However, this is not the academic world. In fact, it is clearly far, far from it.

Does that make this effort better or worse? Or should the author know better? He does.

But does anyone else care? Based on the activity here, it would appear that they do.

Anyway, obviously I have finally gotten around to reading this interesting story here on the site.

I have read many paths through the short story and have found many endings to them.

Have I found them all? How could I know? I might suspect there are sixteen endings.

Based on the challenge line listed on this page, there may not be sixteen after all.

Do I really try and find them all? Surely it would not take long to determine.

I think perhaps I will give it sixteen minutes to see what I’m able to do.

My time is up, and this is what I have. Now read the story for yourself. "

(16 review lines of 16 words each. Impressive.)

2. Feature comment by Transcendent

"Compressed storytelling enhances the reader's imagination faculties to produce an innovative outlook on CYS. Sincere respect."

3. Feature comment by mizal

"Neat experiment! Sparse yet epic wording made me envision vivid plots; evil sisters, boobs, and more."

4. Change difficulty rating to 3
There are at least a few endings that end in death. I'm not sure how it compares to a typical game, since one can't reach a game over before the sixteen words are up (death just becomes part of the chain,) but there are bad endings. So it seems like a difficulty of 1 is a little low.

Regarding #4, the death endings are just different stories.  I think about difficulty as "hard to get to an endgame link" or a clearly truncated story.

Makes sense.

1.  Recommend unpublishing Forgotten Magician

At 2.01 rating with 13 ratings after 10 days.

1. 

Unpublish Search for Haven.  It is rated 1.94 with 13 ratings.  Granted, this is not quite three days old, but as the author is named "furryfox6969" I feel this is an aggravating circumstance and just action should be taken at once.

Search for Haven

I recommend this comment on my quiz for deletion:

1/8 NOT ENOUGH MEAT

-- Dreggnion on 6/12/2019 3:23:09 AM with a score of 4

Reasons:

All caps

Not exactly addressing the story directly  

1.  Unpublish The Phantom Farter

Dead pages + score of 1.32.

2. Unpublish Baby Steps

Score of 1.24

3.  Unpublish Saint Joan

Score of 1.91.

Saint Joan has already been mention for deletion/unpublishedness. 

Recommending Jacoder23’s comment for featuring on Sabbatical Report Presentation by Gower. 
 

I was thinking of starting this review with either a snarky comment that plays into the metanarrative, or praise for the novel way the branching narrative slowly reveals more and more of the story as the player finds new endings; however, like with your previous stories, I expect at least 10 more writers to show up and find far deeper insights that I ever could. The prose which gushes personality, and the amorphous reality of the narrative had been talked about in Gower’s previous stories. So, I decided to take on the story from a structural approach, by trying to flowchart the story on a whiteboard (emphasis on try, there are probably a few errors). 

https://imgur.com/7ikEgzB (pls I spent 3-4 hours on this) 

(Squares are pages, lines are links, the blue lines mark when a bunch of branching in the faculty route gets “pinched”, the large black circles are endings, and the blue-green circles mark parts accessible only by Whitney) 

And yes, my final exams are tomorrow. No, I haven’t begun reviewing. Also, minor SPOILERS ahead if that wasn’t already clear. 

At first, I thought that the narrative played out like a sorting hat, where in the beginning you chose between 3 choices and get “sorted” into fairly linear narratives all separate from one another. In truth, I was correct to a certain degree. What I got wrong however, was that after being sorted the narratives would continue with more or less no branching. There is a LOT of branching, in the 3 (4?) different “routes” I’ve identified, all with their own possible endings (about 20 in total). There’s the administration route, the student route, the faculty route, and the Whitney route depending on who you decide you are in the beginning. 

I’d like to go over them in detail, but alas, my notes on Chi-Square Tests beckons. Instead, I’d just like to comment on the overall design of the storygame. A recurring pattern is for a large number of choices to appear, but only to get pinched into one route a little later. While this does seem to take away some of the “agency” of the reader, it’s actually quite common. “Delayed branching”, as the COG-ites put it, is when instead of giving choices weight by having long routes diverge into their own narratives, the writer has them tie back together and the only lasting difference is that a variable as been changed. This variable then helps to determine the ending later. In this story, there’s 4 different variables: Fire, Kind, Love, Whitney. On some paths, the final ending and the decisions of the narrator is determined by the first 3, the others are hidden if you don’t have the correct “stats”. 

The effect is that you often feel immersed in the story, as the narrator addresses “you” and like how he has his own clear identity, so do “you” which is something many storygames get wrong. While, you may not actually be Whitney the loving descriptions that the narrator helps you to shape an image of her in your mind. And when you reach an ending with one person, you go on to look for another ending. Each time, you get to see another side of Professor Gower’s personality, like his hatred of the school’s administration, or his compassion for his bright students. 

But this personality can differ depending on your choices, so like Gower’s earlier games, reality doesn’t always seem to follow a set mold. But unlike a fever dream, there is sense in the madness. A cohesive picture can be formed of the plot, and its structure grasped. While, you control certain parts of the story not everything is at your whim. The most important plot elements stay constant all around. 

I wish we could discuss this more, but I don’t have much time left. You see, I’m driving west. Still, I think this was an outstanding sabbatical report presentation. It moved me, and I think it set a flame ablaze in my heart. 

8/8 

P.S. There is a glitch with the “You finally just signed it muttering under your breath.” Link where you just loop back to the “You went in there and told Leonardo in gentle terms to keep it down.” page.

Game: A Stack of Cats

1. Feature my comment instead of Henshaw_13's, since he directly writes a potential answer to one puzzle in his comments.

Camelon:

Meowliciously absurd and purrfectly logical.

While the dressing is cats and a strange maniacal cat god, this game has a handful of logic puzzles at its core. Some are fairly straight forward and can be put into a grid, but others require thinking outside the litter box. A couple are classic 'math' type logic problems, where you must figure out how to achieve a specific number. The wire and fuel puzzles were my favorite because they are classic puzzle adventure type problems to have, but the stacking cats was certainly the most inventive.

There are three major segments: building the device, stacking the cats, and fighting a supernatural dog creature. There is a save option before the cat game, which is useful as the first time through the game timed out and crashed on me. The assortment of cats you get varies, which can change the best strategy used to stack them.

The only minor thing that threw me off was in the wire puzzle, where it says everything is laid out in a "row." "Column" would have been more accurate.

I'd like to recommend a comment for featuring on this story: The Making of: The Best of Both Worlds.

Oh wow just what this site needed, more niggerlicious meta garbage that brings nothing new to the table.
-- Anonymous on 11/1/2019 7:51:35 PM with a score of 0

It is important for the meta garbage.

The use of "niggerlicious" makes it sound like a Ford comment, though I know he probably wouldn't bother.

I was half expecting this to be a comment deletion request, so glad to see you found it amusing as well.

Still, as funny as it is, we generally try to commend story comments that are actually useful.

EDIT: Oh wait, I actually looked at the story. Now it just seems like you logged out and wrote that comment yourself anonymously.

Oh well, I should probably stop making a scene but doubling down on the meta was too tempting.

EDIT: I actually didn't, but was hit with a brainwave when I saw the comment. 

So now it's like my own personal joke with whoever wrote that comment. The update was mainly to make the storygame something, at the very least.

1.  Unpublish The House Down the Street

Game has dead pages.

1.  Unpublish Try to Escape School

After three days, score is in the 1s.

I recommend unpublishing Magic School Bus: The Senses

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/magic-school-bus~3a-the-senses

It seems to be a direct copyright / trademark infringement of an existing publication, and not merely "fan fiction."

https://magicschoolbus.fandom.com/wiki/The_Magic_School_Bus_Explores_the_Senses

Is it plagiarism, or just taking the theme of an existing story?  I don't see its text word-for-word anywhere in my cursory google search.

There are more forms of intellectual property violations than just plagiarism. Creating a story with the same (or very similar) title, with the same characters, can itself be a trademark violation. If you wrote a book with a certain title, and about a certain subject matter... and then I came along and published my own book with almost an identical title and theme... you would rightly be pissed at my lack or originality.

I know, because this happened to me in 2012.

Although the episode described in the link ended favorably for me, it was a very expensive proposition for me to take legal action. Therefore I have taken a dim view on the subject of intellectual property right violations ever since.

It's one thing to be inspired by someone else's work and create something new based on that inspiration. In fact, the next story game I intend to publish is "fan fiction" of a sort. But I scrolled through this "Magic Bus" story and found it horrifically unoriginal. Not that I expect the owner of the rights to the franchise to take legal action — no one is making money off a school project on a free website, and so that's the only distinction that makes this "harmless."

It isn't anything close to the same plot, though, so it doesn't appear to be a rip off of the comic other than of course using the Magic School bus characters and world.  I'm not sure the title similarity would have even been intentional, as the senses plot was a comic and not from the tv show. The story does use images from the tv series though. 

He published his story again. And still being Plagiarism so Please take it back  Sorry I don't know the protocol

1.  Unpublish Cult Status

Dead links.

1.  Unpublish Kite Runner Project

2.05 rating after three days, more than ten ratings.

I want to recommend Pirate comment in my Game Broken hunger for a commendation

Okay I finally got around to writing a review for this. I've read both this version and the IS version of the story, but I'll focus on this.

First off I want to congratulate you on finishing off the story before the deadline. It's admirable that you write so much in a month. Despite that, I do have my qualms with the story:

Mara, I know English isn't your first language and you're still learning, so I won't focus so much on the grammar mistakes and typos. You'll improve that in time.

Disregarding that, the plot is still weak. Sometimes I have to go back a page or two in case I miss some sort of backstory. The pacing was way too quick; the protagonist jumps from one place to another in a swift motion, while I barely come to grasp with the plot. I suggest that you allow Silverman (cool name btw) to interact more with their surroundings, so that the setting wouldn't feel so lacking.

I did like some of the characters, particularly Ariana, but they are way too underdeveloped. I know you said that it's because of the time limit, but there wasn't even any bonding time with the protagonist's friends, let alone starting a romance. To me, most of them are just names, and nothing more. Now that the contest is over, you can flesh out their characters a lot more - that alone will make the story more engaging.

I like how you have different choices for Silverman's abilities, but I can't help but feel that overall there weren't enough choices that have an impact on the story. A lot of them ends with death. There was even a whole route where each of the choices was Silverman dying.

Even though I know you dislike describing combat in the story, I enjoy the fighting scenes. They were pretty intense. My only complaint about this is that when you click on the holographic decoy choice there is an unfinished sentence in the beginning. And to be honest Mara the fighting scenes are my favourite part of your story.

Overall, I think this is a solid attempt as a your first story, but there's still a lot of fixing to do before it can reach its full potential. You do have some innate talent when it comes to writing Mara, but right now it's best if you polish up your skills before you can even think about writing a sequel to this. I suggest you focus on improving your English while improving the quality of this story. Time will help. Until then, I wish you luck in your future writing endeavours!

1. Unpublish The Rescue of Princess Steff

After 10 ratings, the story has earned a score of 1.04, almost certainly due to the complete lack of valid branching. As the author explained to me in a PM: "I posted it expecting it not to last very long, because, really, it doesn't deserve to."

So let's give this one the burial-by-flushing it deserves.

2. Tag change for Marooned on Giri Minor

This one has earned the "previously featured" tag.

3. Recommend the following comments be featured on Secret of the Grass Planet:

3a -

Bill’s writing is perhaps the most detail-oriented on the site. The title page states “Grass Planet” is written in the CYOA gamebook format. It definitely feels like a book, which is great because I like reading. Don’t you? The setting and characters seem to be extremely well thought out. Similarly to the alien National Geographic-looking image in the beginning, I imagine portraits, diagrams, and pages created for the characters introduced. Obviously I have no insight into if that’s actually true, but the level of thought put into the unique characters were definitely noticeable. The names themselves fit the feel and theme of the story too. I mean, Javid Ynthramanni? Pure gold. The same could be said for the setting, especially when describing The Orion. The ship isn’t a wannabe Enterprise. The part that stuck out to me was the “onion” description of the ship’s infrastructure… should have named it the Onion Chronicles… awful joke, I know. I loved the level of detail and creativity put into describing the workout gym. It’s in space; there’s no reason to make it a normal Gold’s Gym. In addition, the fact that you could float in the air after a hard workout felt like the perfect wrap-up to a cool scene.

I really enjoyed the second story to The Orion Chronicles. I enjoyed it more than the first one (Marooned on Giri Minor). The only part of the experience that affected me negatively was naming the links “Page #”. When real choices had to be made, the options were presented (“turn to page # if you want to X”). As there aren’t pages in storygames, I’d prefer to see “Grass Planet” imported to the format better. I’m sure this will get mentioned a lot, so I’ll stop here.

Perhaps the best aspect of SotGP is the sheer amount of content involved. Over 100K is certainly a lot of content to explore. In fact, it relates to the plot of the story as you’re navigating through hard choices and having to decide the best course of action. Reading through is an exploration in itself. At this time, I have not nearly found all the Important Stats displayed in the Author’s note. This also isn’t my first time playing through an ending either, but I came back for more (and will do so again). All that’s to say, I highly recommend taking the time to read through the Secret of the Grass Planet. Brew a cup of coffee, sit down, and strap yourself in for an immersive read. Thanks again, Bill, for the free, high-quality entertainment.

-- ninjapitka on 7/25/2019 7:17:32 PM with a score of 0

3b - 

I was not disappointed with the second entry of this series. While I may have had to put it down a few times, that was purely out of other obligations rather than a lack of interest. The story is very engrossing and becomes even more so the more you learn.

The branching style was Cave of Time, which is my favorite and nearly always goes a long way toward me liking a story. There were a handful of endings that were identical, but very few compared to all endings. There is one stat, but it is very clear where it comes in to play, and it is easy and fast to go back to the choice from which it is tracked. This I appreciated very much.
Due to this being a series, there were some limitations on what could be done with where the branches went. None but the epilogue could be called a real win, although some ends were worse than others. However, the paths to those endings could be quite variable, and there were often several branching paths that all ended in death, which was fun because it made me think that maybe the other choice would work when none did. Overall, the branching paths were probably handled about ideally for a story in a series.
Most non-win endings ended in either a clear mission failure, death, or a clear hint that death will occur, but there were a couple endings that did seem a little cut short. For example, in one ending my guy storms out of the research base in a panic to get some fresh air and calm down. Then the story ends there. I don’t see a reason why my guy couldn’t calm down and continue the mission after a few minutes. Was keeping pride intact a condition for success?

There was one other choice that stood out to me in a different way. In one path, the reader must choose between two—what he is told are-- identical options as far as he can tell. Then after the reader makes the choice, he is told the apparent benefit and drawback of each. If the character has reasoning for choosing one or the other, why make it a coin toss?

The grammar was just fine and the story was very readable. As I did last time, I enjoyed the font choice and numbered pages giving the story a book-like appearance.

The Iib Ch’iib are really cool and total CHADS. It looks like the next story will have even more of them. So I’m excited for that.
I also like the part where Usul is described. Before that I mostly just knew the main character’s home planet had space rice.
Also, the thought of a ship controlled entirely by body movement still sounds like a horrible, terrible idea, and I still read FabBot as FapBot.

There were some amusing bits of dialogue too. One of my favorite bits was early on and fits very well on this site.
“You once asked him where he was from. "Earth," he said, "or more precisely, Missouri." "Misery?" you said incredulously. "No, Missouri," he corrected you, but the distinction meant nothing to you.”

Another sort of funny thing is Dr. Munro’s irritation at others for not using the gender neutral pronouns.
“"Use je, jim, jer when referring to anyone who doesn't identify as male or female." You are surprised by her acerbic attitude”
Enough time at CoG will do that to you, bud.

Also, pollination or not, the thought that the peeps essentially witnessed a Folvan orgy is hilarious.

Overall, I think this story is a great sci-fi that gets even more interesting the more little bits of the mystery you learn. If you faggots who read reviews before stories made it this far, go read “The Secret of the Grass Planet.”

-- Cricket on 8/2/2019 1:10:17 AM with a score of 0

 3c -

If you like to read, you’ll like this story.

I’ll admit I did not read Marooned on Giri Minor (the first in the series) considerably deeply and looking back at it, it’s likely I didn’t read to find more than one ending. I’m afraid I can’t tell you why this is the case- although I’m willing to bet it was relatively mindless late-night reading. Right after I finish this comment, I’m going to go back and give it the read it deserves.
That being said, I did think that Secret of the Grass Planet built very well on its prequel and despite my apparent lack of knowledge on the story’s background from Giri Minor, I found that it didn’t hinder me too much from enjoying the story.

It’s not a light read- 100k words certainly makes for a pretty long bastard of a story- but as you keep reading, the unique nature of the story, combined with the spectacular writing made for a compelling experience and I found myself engrossed in the story more and more as it went on. The page length also seemed to grow in size as my interest in the story did. If I had been faced with a page the length of some of the later ones at the very start of the story, it’s likely I would have winced and grudgingly made my way through the story because ew, too many words. Gradually building up the page length throughout the story meant that this was avoided and instead of being thrown off by the magnitude of the story, I was instead eager to see more words once my interest was snagged and eventually was glad to see that there was more to read. Sometimes several scrolls were required, which I haven’t come across too often on this site.

The level of deal implemented into the story was simply just impressive. Somehow, despite this detail, the story never gets bogged down and remained very readable with minimal confusion. Clearly, the author did a considerable amount of research and this pays off as the story is so unqiue, yet so convincing in its uh… sci-fi technicalities, for lack of a better phrase.

Branching was, at first, overwhelming. It took me a *long* time to get to any endings resembling much of a ‘happy ending’,- and just to find any ending at all!- but each of the many endings I found offered their fair share of satisfaction and worked in their own right as they were developed and provided valuable insight into how the story ends. I’m still far from finding all of the endings, and while this is a little bit frustrating- knowing that there is still much to be found- it also adds to the sheer scale of the story. It’s almost as if the extensive planet described in the story has been completely transferred over into the story, allowing the reader themselves to also dive into the exploration aspect of the storygame. Marooned on Giri Minor is a story I will definitely come back to at least once, if not multiple times, to continue exploring the story and discovering all there is to discover in the vast and appearingly boundless story the author has created.

Characters were awesome. Each were unique and described as so. However, there were a *lot* of characters, and I think a few times their original description got a bit lost. It’s also worth mentioning the names. They fitted the story adequately and in many cases, even added to the sci-fi element, yet again demonstrating the amount of care and detail the story boasts.
This is one of the few storygames I have read on the site that felt wrong to be reading on my laptop. Perhaps this is largely due to the implementation of the page numbers, but I definitely got the vibe that this was a story that was written with those classic CYOA books in mind.

Overall, it’s remarkable the amount of effort and accuracy went into this story. The author clearly did their research and spent a good deal of time into producing a high-quality story that goes unrivalled by many on this site. Thank you, Bill, for writing this and sharing it with the site. I enjoyed myself over the course of several hours.

While I understand the author is on a bit of a break for writing right now (well-deserved, after over 130k over two stories!) I’d make no hesitation in reading whatever story game he publishes next, whether it be the next in the Orion Chronicles or an entirely different story.

-- ghost11 on 10/8/2019 4:23:51 AM with a score of 0

The story was funny, in its way. But all that humor was wasted.

This was the message I got from the author, explaining the motivation for writing the story:

Thanks for taking the time to read my story. I posted it expecting it not to last very long, because, really, it doesn't deserve to.

Whenever I read choose your own stories I always think that they never put in the choices I want, so I made a story where those were the only choices, with only a hint of an actual plot that was constantly trying to get the reader on track despite their own resistance through the more attractive options. I didn't write the other paths because I wasn't interested in them.

I glad you got through to the end through the correct path. You have admirable decision making skills :)

You're welcome.

1.  Unpublish Bomb Defuse Fr

Dead end pages galore.

Recommending a comment for featuring:

Ninjapitka's comment on Woban Island

At last. The long-awaited next publishing of Bill Ingersoll is finally here. We had to wait at least a couple of months for him to churn out this 80K word story. Much too long IMHO. If you haven’t read Bill’s other works, I highly suggest you read them after Woban Island. One element in Bill’s stories is the consistency. You’ll notice the format, images, font, title page, and story page all have a similar design. It adds an air of familiarity. It’s professional, clean, and reminiscent of the old CYOA books. As this is the third storygame published by Bill, and the first outside of The Orion Chronicles, I think it’s safe to say Bill’s style is unique to this site. One more note on the aesthetics: the novel-like first letter capitalization is a nice touch. I don’t remember that in either publishings of The Orion Chronicles. 

The story wastes no time in developing. In fact, you’re thrust into the main character’s perspective after events have already started. Instead of starting out as a normal dude and receiving a one-in-a-lifetime-opportunity from Mr. Bellinger, you’ve already accepted his proposal. It may seem like a no-brainer, but I’ve seen more than a few stories on this site start the opposite way. Not only do they make the main character less interesting, they give false choices (or no choices) in the beginning. WI does not make that mistake. From the beginning, I’m engaged into the story with a relatable setting (airport and all the exhausting elements), shady character who is mysteriously following me, and furthering of the plotline. I think the only non-positive thing I encountered was the small part about Bitcoin. It just felt more Bill-y, rather than main character-y. On a less serious note, one does not simply “exit a plane hastily,” especially from row 30. 

SPOILER ALERT: The first END GAME link I encountered felt a bit off. I think it felt that way mostly due to the randomness of the encounter. For example, the dead branch stemmed from choosing to stay in the same airplane seat and ignoring the sketchy man next to you – something that *should* have no relation to getting hit by a car. Now the only other factor is choosing to stay next to Mr. Plaid Suit, so I suppose that could be interpreted as entertaining the idea to turn on Mr. Bellinger. Though to be fair, Mr. B did buy your plane ticket and technically chose the seat you’re in. Edit: ok, this is addressed later on in the game: Diane will “remove you from the board” if you refuse her offer. Still, the note from Mr. B makes it seem like he arranged the hit like a calling card of sorts. 

The story progresses to a bar in Boston. If you watched Cheers, you’ll be presently surprised by the scene. I’ve never seen the show, but I’m a beer fan so any scene involving a bar, especially with a conversation about IPAs, is an A in my book. Just to add on, the shadiness of Jimmy and mystery of the job is fitting to the bar scene as well. Damn, I want a beer now. 

Some random notes about the boat ride to Woban Island: 

- The fact that the main character travels light is hit upon again. It’s a nice way to introduce the MC’s expertise in the field. 

- I love the small, immersive details that are given about the Zodiac. My experience with boats are limited, but pointing to the fact the Zodiac isn’t tethered and motor starts right away turned a normal scene into a visual masterpiece. Not only did I feel the need to quickly swing to the boat before it floats away, I was brought back to what a huge pain starting an engine can be as I’ve tried to start obstinate lawn mowers and dirt bikes. I could almost smell the gasoline in my mind and was actually relieved when it started right away. Small details go a long way. 

Not to spoil the story even further – I know I always skim the comments before a story – but the arrival to Woban (or a nearby island) is filled with dangerous encounters, treacherous environments, and one doctor with two things going for her. An option for a sequel was set up with the statues; something that I’d be all for. Knowing Bill’s hiking and nature experience, it was interesting to read comments on the island itself including navigating through the jungle and mountaineering. 

I do think reaching the stone felt short compared to the build-up, although the many dead branches made it a fun experience to search my way through. Besides the afore mentioned dead branch, I was a big fan of the ones after reaching the island. Usually, dead branches are short, less thoughtful, and easily noticeable – not in this case. I can tell the amount of detail given to a premature ending were as much as the main path. 

Out of the two other great storygames published by Bill, Woban Island is my favorite. The story draws you in from the beginning and never lulls. Because of the setting, it’d be really easy to fall into Indiana Jones stereotypes, but Woban Island feels unique in its characters and modern approach to seeking an ancient artifact. I tried my best to layer this comment with constructive feedback, but damn Bill, you made it harder than Dr. Bolt to find anything negative. 8/8.

It is indeed a feature-worthy comment, although I'm not sure now's the time. So far, Ninja's is the only comment on that story. Wouldn't it be better to wait until there are a few more before picking ones to feature?

Yeah I guess that makes sense. I just figured that it would be featured anyway, so why wait?

I recommend everyone playing 'The Finisher' by me and writing some reviews!  I wrote all my stories in a coupld of days 4 years ago.  Coming out of hybernation to write again.  Something about CYS called me back.  Thinking about editing and expanding all of them, good starts but need a lot of work :/

1. Recommend a comment for featuring on Love SICK:

Love SICK works because it's an experiment meant to explore what the outside boundary of high volume and bad taste is in this format; its goal is to plant a flag and say "I'm going to write this story exactly as foul as I want. Other sites would not be cool with this. Here it is. You can respond by laughing and saying "ew" -or- by getting offended and angry and feeling as if something should be done about it.
And that seems to be the real purpose of Love SICK. It's a winnower. If you respond the former way, CYS may be appropriate for you. If not, CYS is very much not for you.

Is it a good storygame as a storygame? No, I don't think so per se, especially compared to his other stories. I think it's much less interesting to read than his previous stories, by a long shot. But that's not the purpose of it.
This story is trying to do is shock. It's not about the prose or even the narrative (it's way too short for that) but about trying to figure out how to write this thing at the highest possible volume. That many of the choices actually end with exclamation points makes this literal. It wants to, as quickly as possible, show you incest, cannibalism, blasphemy, murder-porn, mutilation, molestation, etc. etc., very very fast, as if to say, how about THAT!? The choices offer you choices about whether you want a little story about torture or cannibalism, for example. There's no branching away from this grand guignol, regardless of how other reviewer note that amazing branching--it's just what theme you want your gore to be.

Do I *recommend* it? That's completely beside the point. I can read something gross and shake my head and read something else without getting all offended. Honestly, I am way more offended by (lack of) proper comma use. Does it serve an important role on the site? I think it probably does.

-- Gower on 9/29/2019 10:37:28 AM with a score of 0

Reason: There are currently two featured comments by the same person (under different user names) written a month apart from each other, both of which say the same thing. Gower addressed the content of the story from a different perspective, and should be featured for the sake of variety.

Weird. I thought I'd featured that one.

Recommending comment for deletion on Yunakitty's 331 Oakmount Drive

mmmmm

-- ayden on 10/9/2019 4:56:28 PM with a score of 

Reason: unrelated to story content, unless he's referring to the eating of young girls' organs.

I want to reccomend my own comment for featuring. This game currently does not have any featured comments. 

The storygame is titled "The Veil", and can be found here: http://chooseyourstory.com/story/the-veil

Here is the full comment:

There was an amazing diversity of choices, especially in earlier chapters. The amount of coding and effort that must have went into this is impressive. It is probably one of the most interactive stories I have seen on this site; even the tiniest of choices are often recognized (and referred to) several chapters later. The topic itself was intriguing, and many interesting philosophical topics were explored. Overall, I highly enjoyed this.

I did spot quite a few bugs during the late game. For one, when you are doing training with the "schools", the game sometimes forgets when you've already mastered certain skills in the green and gold schools. Moreover, after I was invited to the black school, I found out after several pages that I'd reached a dead end (no links, no game over button, just an empty page). Apparently the only way to resolve this was to restart the story and make different choices in chapters one and two. I also encountered a page without links in one of the last chapters (was easily resolved by pressing the "go back" button).

Although I found a lot of the moral dilemmas presented in this story to be intriguing, I didn't like the fact that the reader had to choose the same option that the author saw as the most ethical, in order to unlock the "true end". (SPOILER ALERT: Why do I have to choose to agree to kill the bad man, but then I have to flake out at the last second?). It is a bit frustrating that in a game which takes several hours to read through, you might have to go back and make certain seemingly arbitrary choices in previous chapters, in order to reach a satisfactory conclusion - and there are a LOT of such choices that must be made, if you don't want to be locked out of the true end.

Finally, although I understand why (given the vast variety of choices present in this game), so many of them had to lead to a dead end, I was a bit frustrated when choices that I thought were meaningful were presented as "wrong" by the game. (SPOILER ALERT: E.g. it is "wrong" to think that we are fighting for love, and this will lead to me apparently being murdered by the organization I'm supposed to work for, but I will be allowed to live if I instead say I am fighting for order in the universe? This doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense). Also, I agree with one of the other commentators that there was quite a bit of religion bashing (this is coming from an atheist).

Despite these few issues, I still found the early and mid game quite impressive. I was shocked by how many choices there were in various scenes (some pages could have up to ten choices, and many scenes had multiple ways to progress - all of which were quite interesting to read!) Since I'm trying to make a game myself that employs similar mechanisms, I can empathize with how much work must have went into this, and I congratulate the author on this. For that, and for managing to maintain my thorough interest for most of it's duration, I've rated a 7/8. I think it has the potential to be better, if the author fixed many of these issues.

-- Reader82 on 11/29/2019 3:27:57 AM with a score of 0

I'll recommend my comment for featuring on that one too, I guess:

The Veil

First, this story is near impossible to read because it is light blue text on white. I control-A'd each page to make it readable.

The idea behind this story is quite interesting. A boy who is-not-quite-normal gets caught up in things far beyond himself, including would-be-assassins, layers of reality, and the potential end of the world. Some of the description is quite nice as well, especially when speaking of nature or theoretical physics.

Action scenes were also written well and generally had good pacing. There were only a couple typos that I noticed.

On the downside, some of the dialogue is outright corny. It seems like characters oscillate between stupid and crass or overly clipped and formal. Many key moments were ruined by overly juvenile thought or speech.

The main character is also painfully juvenile, with no way to avoid some of his stupid antics. E.g. early on, at least in the run through I did, the main character decides to moon another driver, and it ends up very poorly for his girlfriend. Ideally, this sort of stupidity would be the sort of thing that the reader could at least choose to do, not be the sort of thing forced into the story to make a negative event happen later. I prefer when negative consequences are directly tied to the choice the reader makes.

[For example, this would be like if a story asked you to choose to put melted butter or flour into your cake mix next to bake a cake. You choose and bake the cake successfully. Then, the character (without your choosing) goes and smashes the cake on an ox's head because he feels like it then his girlfriend gets gored. Gross stupidity is rarely compelling, especially if you actually want the character to be sympathetic.)

Branching wise, there were many sections that were very linear, with no choices given for pages and pages. Choices were only sprinkled in now and then, and perhaps half those choices were either obviously wrong or led to immediate death. While there were some essential and consequential choices, there were not as many as I would have liked for such an involved story.

Overall, I found it interesting. It wasn't particularly fun, but it had some intriguing ideas and the action pacing kept me interested to see how it would all end. (I'm pretty sure I did not get the best ending.) I especially liked the more descriptive pieces about the way the Veil or the Void or reality worked. The corny dialogue and unlikable characters held it back, though, as did the low number of consequential choices.

-- Camelon on 9/23/2019 2:44:42 AM with a score of 0

That's certainly... a way to die. 

Recommending two comments for deletion on haleybughime's Seasons Change.

That was sad. I can't believe...

-- AMuggleNerd on 7/6/2019 1:56:31 PM with a score of 0

Looks like the best ending is the most tragic one, where...

-- N on 3/23/2018 3:36:34 AM with a score of 0

Reason: They both completely spoil the major endings of the story and is right at the top. I omitted part of the comment in case anyone hasn't read it, but you should be able to find the comment. 

e: as I'm looking at the comments, there's a few spoiler ones. I don't know if that warrants deletion of the comments, but I just wanted to check.

Normally I wouldn't bother, but there's a bit of amusement going on with someone as worthless as you getting the special bolded red name due to having the most daily points, so might as well.

Well, if nothing else, I can amuse the higher-ups. Jesters aren't entirely useless.

Right?

Recommended Comments for Featuring for The Chronomantic Adventures

Cricket:

Well this was a wholesome bit of fanfiction.

The writing and grammar of the story were decent, and it was interesting to see a story that portrayed Professor Gower in a way that didn't involve some level of insanity. Or perhaps it did. This is all just the fantasy of an insane man. I like that.

The structure was very linear. I am pretty sure there is only one winning ending, and it wasn't hard to reach at all. All choices have only one correct option, save those on who to visit, and the other leads to a game over. Because of this, the structure is lacking no matter if "The Chromatic Adventures of Professor Gower: Office Hours" is considered as a CYOA story or a game.

There wasn't much in general that stood out to me about the story itself. I got the general impression that I was watching an episode in an educational children's series.
Some of you faggots who read reviews before reading stories might be into that, but I was not.

Overall this story wasn't bad. I just wasn't all that interested in it, and it lacked in what makes a storygame a storygame.

Sersafir:

Stories on time usually aren't that good in my opinion. It's a difficult subject to write about. But this was written well enough to keep me from tossing it aside and eventually really liking it.

When going in don't take this too seriously, it's a fun story to enjoy when you have free time.

In order to get the full experience, you'll need to be well versed in literature throughout the ages or look them up. I can definitely see why someone who has practically no knowledge of these characters wouldn't enjoy it much.

The difficulty, at least for me, felt a bit strange. Without spoiling anything, in Euripedes content, for example, the author was extremely concerned about something while completely uninterested in another. Choosing to support the other leads to a game over. There doesn't seem to be a reason I'd ever want to pick such a thing. An easy choice if you pay the slightest bit of attention.

In Homer's bits, you could either do a limerick or do something more advanced to impress his kids. The limerick outrages Homer, the other deeply impresses him. The choice here is minefield difficulty. I felt I may have missed out on a part of the experience because I was not completely familiarized with both authors. A quick wikipedia check and a synopsis of the stories they write won't do justice for the depth of the character shadowdrake27 is attempting to reach.

I particularly liked Homer's story. If there's any complaint I'd make regarding this, it's that the episodic adventures the main character go through are paced a bit too quickly. Just as I'm enjoying one episode on this adventure, I fall into the next. There's so much potential in the adventures and, to me, they end on notes that feel very incomplete. Another criticism I'd have on this is that descriptions are repeated in a rather irritable way.

Though I believe some of what the author was trying to convey was lost on me, I really did enjoy the adventure for what it was.

Gower, aka, Me:

Having had some time on my hands, and an empty office, I actually played this particular game about ten years ago, and it was a pleasure back then. It has been difficult for me to wait until now to comment on it, but naturally I did not wish to cause a time paradox, having meddled enough with literary endeavors.

But at last, you have published it, and I can comment. Naturally, there's some difficulty in your having revealed what I use my office for when office hours are slow, and the treasures I keep therein--I shall have to invest in more security, I suppose. But I suppose that your having peeled back the curtain a bit on my secrets will keep my courses fully enrolled, and that's for the best.

Your knowledge of what I do is spot on. Almost eerily so. You catch the bitter, *annoying* tone of Euripedes almost a bit too well, almost as if you were there, and I have the sense that you too must be caught up in my time adventures, Shadowdrake, that you must have been there as well. I would venture a hypothesis about you, but I would not wish to deprive the readers of your narrative, so I will remain silent for now, although have you could have known what I said to Natalie when she came to my office makes me wonder.

She, of course, was dreadfully jealous of Marie, but I explained to her that the past is the past, especially when it's the serious past, as with Marie. But I'm glad you didn't go into that business with Marie in any detail.

I do hope it does not affect the threads of time to tell you that the next four games in this series are top-notch--the one after that a bit weaker, I'm afraid--and then the one after *that* becomes the #3 game on the site.

Regarding the story “Day of the Dead—One Soul’s All Souls Procession” by Shadowdrake27 (available here: http://chooseyourstory.com/story/day-of-the-dead~2d~2done-soul's-all-souls-procession).

1. I posted a duplicate comment and want the first one to be deleted. The newest comment of mine is slightly altered to fix a mistake I made regarding the author’s grammar.

2. I also want to recommend two comments on this game for featuring. The story does not currently have any featured comments. The first is my own. The full comment is available here:

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

I thought that this was an excellent story, especially considering that it was only written in four hours! Does that include the time spent revising/editing? Crafting a tale with consistent characterization of the protagonist and such a wide diversity of endings in such a short time is a very impressive feat, and for that I congratulate you.

I thought the writing was excellent. Most of the sentences flowed very well, and the overall narrative gripped my attention. Unlike most story-games, I read through all the endings in this one, because I really wanted to grasp the full picture.

The introduction to your story was well-done. I love how your opening passages (including the description of the narrator’s feelings of claustrophobia, and that moving around is hard) foreshadow that they are buried in a coffin. I also loved how the protagonist initially described feelings of disdain for their mother’s beliefs, before realizing that they were dead themselves, and their mother was correct all along.

I liked how one of the endings had an epilogue associated with it. Ironically, I didn’t think that this was truly the ‘best ending’ in the game. Although the police found the culprit in this ending (or rather, he found the police and confessed), he still poisoned several of the children, beforehand. I liked the ending “The Office” better, which revealed less information but in which none of the kids died.

Though I could tell this story was obviously thoroughly revised/edited, I did still spot a few grammar mistakes, throughout. For example, in the sentence “Everyone knows that death is the end, you may become nutrients for the grass…” you should have a semicolon after ‘end’ instead of a comma. The same principle applies for the following sentence, after the word ‘today’: “We only get one day now, today, the rest of the year we spend in the ground.” In this third sentence, you should have a comma after the word ‘light’: “Without a body, you feel extremely light making the task trivial”. Finally, in the following excerpt, you should have two extra commas, one after ‘turning’ and one after ‘namesake’: “Turning you come face to face with your late grandfather and namesake Matthew Garcia.” I also noticed that your page “The Office” had a different font than the rest of the story.

Regarding your epilogue – I liked how whether or not the possession failed depended on your choices in the beginning of the story. I also liked how the narrator started to get their own personality confused with that of the culprit.

I felt that the antagonist's motivations could have been explained better. He was upset about someone he cared about being murdered, so now he decided to hurt children in a similar fashion to achieve some sort of "poetic justice"? Poetic justice is when good characters are rewarded for their kind actions, and evildoers are ultimately punished. That doesn't really fit the man's actions, here.

At one point during the final scene, you write the following: “That’s you, the boy in the picture is you… It wasn’t you--why you need to remind yourself that is beyond you.” (Note that the ellipses are included to indicate not all of the author’s initial writing is included in the quotation.) Based on the context of this scene, the word ‘you’ in the first sentence refers to the narrator, whereas the word ‘you’ in the second sentence refers to the culprit – the protagonist is trying to remind themselves that they didn’t commit the crime. This isn’t really clear, and I would consider altering the text slightly to explain it.

Overall, I really liked this story. You should keep up the good work. 6/8.

-- Reader82 on 12/21/2019 4:08:09 PM with a score of 0

3. On the same story mentioned above, I want to recommend the comment beneath mine (by MicroPen) for featuring. The full comment is available here:

I definitely enjoyed this story. To think this was written in four hours is astounding to me, on account of you stating that you wrote it in roughly 3 and edited in 1. This story would be good enough without the fact that it was written in 4 hours, though with that fact it makes the story exponentially more impressive. I read this in roughly ten to fifteen minutes, and that is with ever ending, so there is no excuse for you, the dumbass who reads reviews before the story, to not just go and read this story. Right now. Like for real go do that.

One thing I love about this story is the concept. I love the whole idea of being dead, and only rising up once a year. It is explained in such detail in the first paragraph too. I also like searching for your killer. The killer feels like a real person with his own motivations, and while they are insane, that just makes it better because I can see a person doing this. It wraps up good too and that brings me to my next point.

It is grounded. It knows what it wants to explore. I’ve said this in a lot of my reviews already, though being able to cover something so thoroughly in so few words never ceases to astonish me. This story is about a boy who was killed and while he is a spirt he stops the killer. That is it, no more, no less. What this does is it lets you hyper focus on this concept, and makes a short, focused, and if done well an amazing storygame.

I did like the branching. As I stated I got every ending and it branched fairly well. Every choice you make matters and all paths are roughly the same length. I have stated that time cave works great in these types of grounded stories, and this is no exception.

In conclusion this is a great game, that was written and edited in no more than 4 hours! Even without that it would have been great, though that makes it excellent. I almost want to give it a 7 because of that, though I can’t quite do that.

6 out of 8

-- MicroPen on 11/5/2019 9:29:53 PM with a score of 0

I'm not sure featured articles are the best place for lots of spoilers and grammar notes. I would think it would be better to just message the author with the notes, especially if they are little things like commas. At least when I consider playing a game, I want the featured comments to give me a general sense of what to expect, but not specific details that spoil key elements/mysteries of the plot.

(Also, I think it's generally acceptable to use a comma instead of a semicolon in interior monologue in fiction, even if it might be frowned on in formal writing. It works as it shows "racing thoughts" and is an artistic choice.)
 

Hmm, fair enough, okay. I understand that some readers might not want a lot of the story spoiled for them, especially if they read any of the reviews in advance. (That's why I always try to put spoiler tags, on mine). I do feel like it can be hard to comment on certain parts of the plot without the use of spoilers, though. Maybe I'll consider breaking up reviews into separate segments -- spoiler-free zones for new readers, and comments left more to address specific elements of the plot by the author. 

The Last Agent, I think this one needs some looking over.

I don't exactly think it's the worst thing ever (it's amateur at best), I mean, there be grammar mistakes, unusable items and seriously obvious death flags. The problem is that it's marked PG-13 and there's suddenly a very out of place finger fucking then ACTUAL fucking scene, because teens be horny. The story is subpar, but at the very least the rating needs to be changed.

"OH GOD, HE'S 8 INCHES!"

I suggest you give it a read, it's a good chuckle~

I would suggest this degenerate, @spacewinner  to go write their degenerate porn on this site: https://infinite-story.com

A place where there was even a contest for porn stories, if I remember correctly, lol.

Recommended featured comments for The Sanguine and Blackbeard's Cutlass

1.  Bill_Ingersoll

While Ben Franklin was playing with kites in Philadelphia, pirate-wizards were fighting Aztec gods down in the Bahamas. History is more interesting than most people realize.

I'm not sure that this comes anywhere close to being "edutainment," but it sure is one hell of a fun adventure. You are the notorious captain of a ship called the Sanguine, and as the story opens your crew is effecting repairs after a costly battle. At first, I thought the references to "wizards" was some kind of eighteenth-century slang for a type of cannon, but no, the word is meant literally in this story.

I read through five "main" endings and at least as many quick-death endings; for a story of about 23,000 words, that's not a bad count. These were strung out on two primary branches as I counted them (if there are more, I'll need to dive back in and search them out) with the choices having more meaningful consequences further into the story.

I liked the artistic title on the very first page; the story editor on CYS allows lots of customization, so I'm disappointed more authors don't take advantage of this and add some visual interest to their stories. Likewise with the "The End" flourishes at each of the main endings.

The dialog consisted of witty banter followed by quick analyses of plot mechanics. It was not naturalistic, but appropriate to the story. Action scenes were full of parries, dodges, and thrusts -- about what you'd expect from a pirate's tale. The magic missiles and force fields were a genre-twisting touch.

Of the two branches I read, the one that involved the swim to the underwater entrance was perhaps the most satisfying, but also the easiest; with two female partners to flirt with, the protag didn't seem too upset when one heroically died in one ending. The other branch, with its well-endowed statues, had most of the quick-death endings.

As far as the writing quality, there were some minor quibbles with spelling and grammar, but nothing worth enumerating. What I do want to encourage is an attempt at more of a variety in sentence structure. For instance, take a look at this paragraph early in the story:

"You finish the cup and slam it back down on the bar top. Sunlight pours into the poorly lit building through several open windows creating rectangular beams of yellow. You're reminded of the Caribbean heat each time a wave of warm air floods in. Your crew had certainly seen better days. The last three ships you targeted weren't carrying anything substantial. Your most recent job would have been a huge payday if not for the Galleon's attack. At least you managed to escape alive and with most of your crew. Victoria's former life as naval mage certainly came in handy there."

Nothing here is technically wrong. However, this one paragraph contains eight sentences that all have almost identical subject-verb-object structures, with missed opportunities to join some of the related thoughts into more complex statements. This did make some passages seem too matter-of-fact and far less lyrical than they perhaps could be.

All in all, though, this was an enjoyable story.

2.  Pugpup

This is an excellent story, though it does have a few small problems. I’ll start with the good stuff.

It was entertaining the whole way through, which is less common than you might think. The story itself was interesting enough, but more importantly, the details held my interest- little quips, notes about characters’ appearances, and descriptions that really helped me get into the mood of the setting. The characters themselves were well-done; though I only got detailed descriptions of the protagonist and a couple others, everyone had at least one trait, which kept them distinctive. Oftentimes minor characters blend together, but here Proctor, Victoria, etc. all had at least a bit of personality.

The action scenes were also quite well done, probably because the author didn’t try to make the entire thing action-packed. Instead, we got a nice mix of exploration, dialogue, and description with some exciting moments of combat which never seemed repetitive because they just didn’t happen all that often.

The length was another strong point. This was basically one adventure, though since there was a good amount of branching, that one adventure could take many forms. This seems better than trying to stretch the story out into an epic.

On to the issues. There weren’t a ton of grammar or spelling mistakes, but some of them did stand out. Similarly, some of the phrasing was just a little awkward and broke the flow of the scenes. Nothing terrible, but it’s always good to avoid anything that distracts the reader from the story itself. I could also have used a bit more edutainment, thought that might just reflect the particular paths I took. The pacing near the end was also somewhat odd- without giving away any spoilers, what seemed like the climactic battle was followed by another battle, only I didn’t get to make any choices and this second battle wrapped up in about a paragraph.

Still, overall a good read and an excellent contribution to the site!

3.  Gower

The rightful winner of the Battle for Infinity Contest, this game mixes action, adventure, a bit of mystery, exploration, and wild swashbuckling. I enjoyed every bit of it.

The game offers some really substantial branching, offering rather different experiences and perspectives on the main characters depending on whom you choose to trust and follow--I replayed it several times and got extremely different narratives and had different adventures. I thought the choice design was solid.

But most importantly, from my perspective, is that the game was witty. There were several moments throughout where I laughed or smiled at the dialogue or the narrative description. The wit is mostly snark or cynical comedy, most frequently used to characterize the NPCS through dialogue with wonderful effect. I thought the prose in this game was a lot of fun to write. It fit so well with the dashing quest and dynamic adventure, to have the prose be so light and winning.

I do not want to spoil the adventure, naturally, but I will say that one NPC in particular whom you meet halfway through if you chose a peaceful path was the star of the show for me; Ninja's choices design made it difficult to decide between loyalty and power, and to decide how much I was willing to trust a new ally. I was very impressed with this game.

Recommended Comments for Machine Contact

1.  Camelon

This is a short game about a machine intelligence making contact with the Earth, and how Earth responds.

Overall, it is written well. Some choices lead to plausible consequences, but others seem to require a leap of faith. There seem to be three endings (good, bad, and perfect.) It's a little cliche in parts, but hits the sci-fi political genre well.

The downside of this storygame is that it isn't really character based. There is no emotional connection to what happens. It's essential just summarized telling of first contact, and the player chooses the course of history. It's sort of like playing a textbook.

There are so many characters that could have made this a more meaningful story. E.g. a new diplomat who somehow was saddled with the task of managing first contact peacefully. A SETI enthusiast who the world thinks is crazy, but finally comes across the first message. A skilled lab technician put in charge of translation. Etc. It needed something more personal to make me care about whether or not Earth survives or we gain the ability to communicate with the machine.

2.  Gower

The style of this game was rather odd; the narrative voice was really stiff, and you don't so much play a character as dicate the historical events that take place. You stand almost at arms' length from the world-changing events you are told about, which is a shame, because the events are really quite interesting.

There's no character you are playing; instead things are much more abstract--in fact, the game abstracts the choices so much that things like "Global cooperation" are *items* you pick up rather than narratively communicated. It's a very tell-rather-than-show game.

In fact, it's almost as if...an AI wrote this game and were trying to imagine what a human perspective on AI/human contact might be! (If that was the intent, brilliant! But I suspect it wasn't.)

Anyway, the choices are interesting--there aren't a lot of them, but they do branch, and they do make an effort to consider consequences and ramifications, although in the absence of any emotion or characters, it's hard to get any reader interest. It comes off as a *very good* sketch for a game, but not the game itself. If this game were fleshed out, it has the potential to be an excellent narrative, because it has the bones of a cool story. But in its current state of just bones, it's not that effective in being as cool as its premise suggests.

Recommended Featured comments for Your Life as a Genetic Engineer

1.  Camelon

As a simple exercise on how to discuss ethical issues and potential risks with clients, this works on a surface level. It could effectively be about any medical or ethical subject, though, not genetic engineering, as all the choices are based on communication and listening skills. It's very 'easy' - none of the choices presented are surprising or hard to figure out. This makes it feel like an educational piece geared towards freshman and sophomore high school students.

There are some minor grammar errors, such as commas in the wrong place, but overall it is written well. The first page used "conflicted" once instead of "afflicted" - but that might just be some sort of medical jargon.

2. Gower

While this is an interesting idea for a quiz/edutainment, the problem here is that the choices are so obvious, so starkly clear what's right, that there is no actual education going on here.

I don't know anything about genetic engineering, so I should not be able to breeze through this. But the choices are as blunt as "do the thing without due thought" or "consider the options"--hm, which should I do? Should I "proceed regardless of consequences"? Or be "careful about the ramifications"? My wording may be slightly different from the game's, but that is the level of obviousness here.

So I think it is rather a stretch to call is a "simulator" or something that teaches "ethics and communication." It's hardly a teaching aid, as the choices are far too uninteresting to teach.

--------

And delete the following comment from the same game:

Yay

by DarkRaven5

Feature the story Woban Island. The overall score had been trending toward the sixes right up until the 10th rating. The people who actually left written reviews have been mostly positive so far.

ok boomer

1. Feature comment on Lone Star:

OK, noob. For the first choice (and for that matter, every choice thereafter) leading to a pointless ending, without the benefit of exceptional writing, you earn an automatic 1 rating from me.

This is an, uh, interesting apocalyptic tale, though by "interesting" I don't mean that it was gripping, but that it revealed more about the writer than was ever intended.

First, the clear purpose of this "storygame" is to invoke a nostalgia for America... which is actually kind of hard for most readers to achieve, since in reality the good ole USA is humming along quite well. Some of us have distinct differences of opinion about the qualifications of the current CiC, but what else is new? That's probably been going on since the days of POTUS #1.

What makes this tale "interesting" is what the writer himself fails to understand about the ideals he is trying to make the reader feel nostalgic about. First off is the repeated use of the word "grey." Well let me explain something to you, newcomer. In 'Merica, we spell that word "gray." With an A. As in the U. S. of A. If you spell that word with an E, that makes you a Tory -- someone loyal to the King of England. Go grovel at the feet of George III if you must, but don't befoul 'Merica with your disloyal presence ever again. People have been deported for lesser things. I work for the federal government; give me your green card number, and I'll get the paperwork started on you when I return to the office on Monday.

But adding to the "interest" is this description of what "America" was, and why we all should weep for its passing:

It was a place "where settlements of millions thrived in cities of light and cinema" (so everyone was a huge fan of Truffaut's "Jules et Jim", eh?); "where everybody ate fresh fruit and vegetables everyday" (so explain why 9.4% of the US population suffers from diabetes); "where nobody ever cried" (so explain babies, not to mention anyone who has ever attended a wedding or a funeral, or read any book by Nicholas Sparks); "and men lived in peace" (but not women?). Basically, the writer doesn't have the slightest clue what he's talking about.

And take this paragraph:

"He wept, silently, as not to disturb Frank. His heart filled with grief until he thought it would burst. Frank must have noticed from the wetness spreading on his back, but said nothing of it. After an eternity, Austin felt exhausted, drained of all grief and tears. Just as he was about to jump off the horse to end the despair he felt, several small shapes appeared on the distant horizon."

Basically, this is one of the most emo stories about the apocalypse you'll ever read. If you're looking for something more manly, stop right here.

So even if the first choice hadn't led to a death, the highest rating I could justify giving this story would be a 2. Yes, there is some basic competency to the writing, but then a million monkeys banging on a keyboard will eventually churn out the complete works of Shakespeare. My rating is definitively a 1, because the writer has produced a linear tale that seeks to evoke an emo response about complicated topics he hasn't begun to comprehend himself.

-- Bill_Ingersoll on 12/29/2019 1:01:20 AM with a score of 0

2. And while I'm thinking about it...

On Giri Minor, there are two duplicate comments. I'm glad they see the potential in the story, but only one such comment was necessary. Please delete one. Thanks.

It is a start and this storyline has a lot of potential.

-- Yandeleon on 12/20/2019 12:15:17 AM with a score of 0

It is a start and this storyline has a lot of potential.

-- Yandeleon on 12/15/2019 11:52:15 PM with a score of 0

Feature comment on Woban Island

ok boomer

-- SpartacustheGreat on 12/29/2019 1:32:22 AM with a score of 0

Delete comment from WI:

ok boomer

-- SpartacustheGreat on 12/29/2019 1:32:22 AM with a score of 0

Reason: spammy, has no bearing on the actual story.

Alternate solution, coins actually does a detailed critque (probably a negative one) along with adding his original "Ok boomer" comment and we feature his and Bill's comments on the stories.

Okay, I read the rules and am confident that I am doing this right. If they were supposed to be in separate posts I apologize.

The game/link is Day of the Dead--One Soul's All Souls Procession for all of them.

I have three suggestions for comments to feature and one to delete

1) Reader82's comment to feature:

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

I thought that this was an excellent story, especially considering that it was only written in four hours! Does that include the time spent revising/editing? Crafting a tale with consistent characterization of the protagonist and such a wide diversity of endings in such a short time is a very impressive feat, and for that I congratulate you.

I thought the writing was excellent. Most of the sentences flowed very well, and the overall narrative gripped my attention. Unlike most story-games, I read through all the endings in this one, because I really wanted to grasp the full picture.

The introduction to your story was well-done. I love how your opening passages (including the description of the narrator’s feelings of claustrophobia, and that moving around is hard) foreshadow that they are buried in a coffin. I also loved how the protagonist initially described feelings of disdain for their mother’s beliefs, before realizing that they were dead themselves, and their mother was correct all along.

I liked how one of the endings had an epilogue associated with it. Ironically, I didn’t think that this was truly the ‘best ending’ in the game. Although the police found the culprit in this ending (or rather, he found the police and confessed), he still poisoned several of the children, beforehand. I liked the ending “The Office” better, which revealed less information but in which none of the kids died.

Though I could tell this story was obviously thoroughly revised/edited, I did still spot a few grammar mistakes, throughout. For example, in the sentence “Everyone knows that death is the end, you may become nutrients for the grass…” you should have a semicolon after ‘end’ instead of a comma. The same principle applies for the following sentence, after the word ‘today’: “We only get one day now, today, the rest of the year we spend in the ground.” In this third sentence, you should have a comma after the word ‘light’: “Without a body, you feel extremely light making the task trivial”. Finally, in the following excerpt, you should have two extra commas, one after ‘turning’ and one after ‘namesake’: “Turning you come face to face with your late grandfather and namesake Matthew Garcia.” I also noticed that your page “The Office” had a different font than the rest of the story.

Regarding your epilogue – I liked how whether or not the possession failed depended on your choices in the beginning of the story. I also liked how the narrator started to get their own personality confused with that of the culprit.

I felt that the antagonist's motivations could have been explained better. He was upset about someone he cared about being murdered, so now he decided to hurt children in a similar fashion to achieve some sort of "poetic justice"? Poetic justice is when good characters are rewarded for their kind actions, and evildoers are ultimately punished. That doesn't really fit the man's actions, here.

At one point during the final scene, you write the following: “That’s you, the boy in the picture is you… It wasn’t you--why you need to remind yourself that is beyond you.” (Note that the ellipses are included to indicate not all of the author’s initial writing is included in the quotation.) Based on the context of this scene, the word ‘you’ in the first sentence refers to the narrator, whereas the word ‘you’ in the second sentence refers to the culprit – the protagonist is trying to remind themselves that they didn’t commit the crime. This isn’t really clear, and I would consider altering the text slightly to explain it.

2) The above comment was posted twice by mistake. I would delete one and feature the other.

3) Gower's comment to feature:

This is a quick, atmosopheric, and engaging cave of time style game. Yeah, it's short (written in four hours as it was) but in that time, Shadowdrake has managed to pack in tons of atmosphere and a few surprisingly emotional gut punches in some of the endings. There's sorrow, insanity, the confusion of the recently dead, and a bit of mystery to deal with.

The game will be about three or four clicks long, and the choices make a lot of sense and offer sudden and satisfying endings. You could hardly do more with a cave of time in four hours--the setup is excellent, and I cared about the main character's predicament right from the first page. An original way to approach the Ectocomp prompt. I happily read through all of the endings and wished there were more.

4) MicroPen's comment to feature:

I definitely enjoyed this story. To think this was written in four hours is astounding to me, on account of you stating that you wrote it in roughly 3 and edited in 1. This story would be good enough without the fact that it was written in 4 hours, though with that fact it makes the story exponentially more impressive. I read this in roughly ten to fifteen minutes, and that is with ever ending, so there is no excuse for you, the dumbass who reads reviews before the story, to not just go and read this story. Right now. Like for real go do that.

One thing I love about this story is the concept. I love the whole idea of being dead, and only rising up once a year. It is explained in such detail in the first paragraph too. I also like searching for your killer. The killer feels like a real person with his own motivations, and while they are insane, that just makes it better because I can see a person doing this. It wraps up good too and that brings me to my next point.

It is grounded. It knows what it wants to explore. I’ve said this in a lot of my reviews already, though being able to cover something so thoroughly in so few words never ceases to astonish me. This story is about a boy who was killed and while he is a spirt he stops the killer. That is it, no more, no less. What this does is it lets you hyper focus on this concept, and makes a short, focused, and if done well an amazing storygame.

I did like the branching. As I stated I got every ending and it branched fairly well. Every choice you make matters and all paths are roughly the same length. I have stated that time cave works great in these types of grounded stories, and this is no exception.

In conclusion this is a great game, that was written and edited in no more than 4 hours! Even without that it would have been great, though that makes it excellent. I almost want to give it a 7 because of that, though I can’t quite do that.

6 out of 8

Edit: I changed the last comment suggestion after reading them all again

Recommending comment for featuring on The Gauntlet 2 too, since Ninja directed my attention to this game.

--------

My attention having been drawn to this game by its being mentioned on the forum, I figured I'd see what 2005 had to offer me here at the end of 2019.

The beginning felt as if I were making some real and meaningful choices, although *why* my choices ended up with the results they did was sometimes perplexing: if I wait, I get a vine; if I go, I get a stick. Well, at least if I wait I don't get an insta game over. As we know, in 2019, that is an automatic 1 from many a reviewer.

The game uses items, but in a pretty haphazard fashion. I had berries, but I didn't see the opportunity to eat them, unless I could only "use" the item in a particular place. And it didn't matter, either, because although I was told I was hungry, the game never brought the issue of food up again. The crazy color of that berry was pretty funny though. I was looking forward to seeing what that did to me.

The game's choices were either rather obvious (go right to bed or search the area first) or a total crapshoot (stab the monster's eyes or throat?) with death awaiting you if you choose the wrong answer. This style made the game feel a good length, although requiring heavy use of the back button.

The challenges were interesting and varied, and felt suitably dangerous, especially since for much of the game you are armed pretty poorly. The prose felt all over the place, though, the writer sometimes tossing out just a few brief sentences on an armored opponent, and sometimes spending time tracing the ecology of the wasps that were affected by the ants that the laser-eye beast was feeding on. You can clearly tell where the author was feeling it and where the game just needed to get done.

The worst offense of the game was the narrator being way too cutesy with the player. ("And then, do you know what happens?...." [next page] "Nothing!") And then to do that same joke twice in a row! Not cool.

A cute diversion. They didn't really have much in the way of entertaiment in 2005 as I recall, as most of the greatest works of art had yet to be created, so I can see why this would have been a top ten for that year.  --

-- Gower on 12/31/2019 5:52:59 AM with a score of 0

Get rid of one of my comments on http://chooseyourstory.com/story/a-pixie-danced

Posted it twice.