Player Comments on 1984: Cog In The Machine

I'll keep it short, as my opinion falls in line with Mizal's and Berka's. The world of Oceania is far too large and complex to not explain the setting. It would be like Tolkien not developing the setting in The Lord of the Rings.

A fanfiction of 1984, in my opinion, would have to be much longer and far more sophisticated. There are inconsistencies between 1984's canon and your fanfic, especially about how the Inner Party works. If you still want to write a fanfic, I heartily recommend you reread the novel and do some analysis of your own to further develop your understanding of Orwell's book. A clueless Inner Party member simply isn't possible in this world.

Grammar and spelling seemed fine, as nothing jumped out at me, but that might be because I was so distracted by the pacing of the story. Others have already stated this. Pacing is absolutely crucial to ANY story and without it, your story is a lost cause. (Save a select few exceptions)

Anyway, good luck on your future endeavors. Glad Orwell's novel at least impacted you enough to write about it.

Berka's already covered the main issue, in that the story just throws terms and concepts from 1984 around without making any attempt to introduce or explain them as things relevant to your story.

Even if it's fair to assume most people are at least vaguely aware of the source (....Bioshock players aside, apparently...), it's still a matter of communicating ideas and flow. Details of the setting, characters, etc. should all be introduced and integrated into the narrative in a natural way.

The pacing and flow of this is extremely choppy in most other areas too. There's really very little sense of who my character is or that I'm getting to direct their actions in any way. When playing a game about choices, I'd prefer to have some say in the matter when my character randomly decides to buy a book full of treasonous material or starts decking guards and staging a prison break right after I decide I'm going to infiltrate the enemy and rise up in the ranks, for instance. Time and major events fly by rapidly with little more than a brief summary glossing over them.

This would be a much better story if the author had just slowed down a little and given the player's choices and everything that happened a little more focus and space to develop and breathe.

The writing is decent, save for a few giant walls of text and odd paragraph spacing.

As for the story itself, it lacks the details necessary to make meaningful choices for anyone unfamiliar with the source material, leaving the reader confused as to the logic behind the cause-and-effect of the choices.

New words are introduced with no explanation of their meaning (again, source material) and the story was too short to develop the character in any way that made me care about his choices at all.

Additionally, only one of the paths had any meat on it; the others ending after only a single page of synopsis. This destroys the illusion of actual choice in the game and suggests the author had the story he wanted to tell and the rest was just a burden.

Overall, the potential to create something good is here, but the opportunity missed in this current iteration.

The writing was alright, There could have been more paths to follow and more backing to the concepts. Another flaw I noticed is that the Party would never congratulate someone who rewrote articles, as the article was always like that in the Party's point of view.

I liked the ideas that were brought forth. I haven't read Orwell's 1984 but I've had at least seen a brief synopsis of the plot. If I had to take away anything from the story it's that death is better than being enslaved to a brainwashing system.

That said I don't think the ideas had time to manifest themselves into something unique and interesting. I would've liked to develop a little more time exploring the ideas of resisting the Thought Police before getting my brains blown out after a few pages. The story concepts are fine but they are just too tightly packed for me to make any sense of what's going on without context to the world itself.

If this story is remade, I'd recommend the author space out the story so all the progress happens over a distributed length of time leaving room for exposition on what exactly this world is and who my character is in it. I need to know my character's motivations and what the consequences of my choices are instead of having choices made for me. All that said this is a fine story it just needs more explanation of the source material it is borrowing from and a longer narrative to fit it all in.

I think I can assume that this is a fanfic of George Orwell's 1984. This was a poor representation of his book. You chose an interesting topic for your fanfic to be sure, but the background was poorly covered, if covered at all. You really can't take sections of a book like 1984 without context.

3/10 would like to see this given more thought and written with more detail.

I don't know if this was for a school project, but in a way a book like 1984 feels like a more "respectable" subject for fanfiction than a lot of other things out there. I like 1984 and I've read a lot of classic dystopic fiction so I may be biased, but I mostly liked this. It should've been longer with more branches though, and it jumped around and seemed to skip over things a little too often to truly stand out.

Doubleplusgood

There were terribly long reads that aren’t preferable on the sorts of games as this.

I liked the story itself, but the freedom in this peace.... not good. You can't really do much to change your path, no choices that matter really, only a few. I liked the concept, but I came for a story GAME not just a story.

Sometimes the player character decides to do things without consulting the player. I believe it would be better if I were allowed to make more choices.

Also, some of the choices were a little vague and I wasn't always sure what they meant.

Hrmm, Bioshock influence, eh? Cool. Out of all the new storygames, this was one of the few that I enjoyed. 5/8

You've obviously put some effort into this, but the syntax and flow just isn't there.