All Alone on Christmas

First Impression: "okay this shouldn't be all that bad. It's a first attempt and in the romance and dating genre. Maybe some cringey lines and...Why do I always end up so unprepared for this?"

I've decided to just write spoilers below because I've been writing these on mobile and cannot seem to get the line of asterisks right.

Story and Wordbuilding: Well there is certainly a story here. I suppose whether it's good or bad is really up to interpretation. I personally did not like it in the slightest. The attempted humor was dull, the whole plot was odd and uninteresting, the character was boring, and the world building was pretty much nonexistent.

The fact that you are a teenager that decides to announce to the whole class that you plan on writing porn over winter break is obscenely disconnected from any sort of reality. Who would willingly put themselves in that kind of situation? No one would so the whole starting premise is utter BS.

I get that the whole point is to be lolrandom and funny, but none of the jokes landed at all. Heck, Ford's contest entry made jokes that landed better than any of these.

I just...need to stop thinking about this storygame right now. I'll skip to the overall.

Overall: 3/8. I only rate 2s and 3s for things I have utter distain for. Please write something better next time.

Honestly, this was a surprisingly good read for a first work! I enjoyed it for the quick project it was. I was worried for a little while that it would spiral into edgy eroticism, but the whole "obsessed with pornography" angle never overtook the storygame.

I think your writing itself is quite good. No spelling or punctuation errors I could see, just every now and again I'd see some slightly awkward grammar. Maybe try reading your final script outloud to catch and fix that weird wording? Nice job!

You're light on the prose (not a lot of detailed descriptions) but I don't think that's a bad thing. It keeps the story punchy and easy to read, and allows the reader to focus on choices they're making and the whacky events that result from them. If you're happy keeping the focus of your stories on these short, funny/whacky events, then I think this low detail style is perfect for that. We don't need to waste our time describing everybody's hair colour and nail length. :)

I think there's some good, absurdist humour in here (the mother being this feral beast that lunges at her child like some kinda werewolf is bliss). However, be careful about relying on memes and "lolrandom" for your comedy. Done poorly, it can come of kinda cringy and nonsensical, like the author is just blurting out whatever comes to mind. If you're set on memes, always try to put your spin on them and put an unexpected twist on them.

For example, when you mentioned the Spaghetti Monster I kinda rolled my eyes, but since you didn't immediately drop that meme to go reference another one, you were able to explore it a little bit more and get a chuckle out of me with "R'amen".

Similarly, the Father's speech to our protagonist at first just didn't do anything for me. It seemed pretty random and memey for the sake of memey and I didn't pay it much mind. Even later on when I saw the option to invite Gordon for our date, I thought I knew exactly what was gonna happen: "Gordon comes in, shits on the parent's cooking, we fuck, the end".

But instead, you get this pretty well written bit where Gordon comes in with a whole camera crew, disses the parent's cooking but in a pretty subdued way, and then takes us on as an apprentice so we can open a little restaurant in France to finance our amateur smut novellas. By giving some thought to that scene and the application of the meme you were using, you made it a million times better than just a generic, bottom branch "LAMB SAUCE, LET'S SEX" scene.

I also like how you let us chose whether the protagonist gives her phone to her parents straight away or tries to defy them. Even thought both of the choices led to the same outcome, it was a nice opportunity for us to define our character's personality a little bit. I noticed you wrote a little bit extra for what happens if you refuse, so maybe do the same for the other choice and give the player a little bit of unique dialogue if they obey their parents as well? Everybody loves a little bit of unique dialogue, even if it doesn't go anywhere. Makes us feel special~

A part of this story that I thought was kinda weak was the characterisation of your characters. No one seemed to really have a particular personality, just saying whatever was needed to move the plot forward. There is a few times when you do give some nice characterisation (like the best friend pulling the main character out of the snow while being confused what she was doing at his place) but these times are few and far between. Even if you don't want to focus too much on the characters, just giving everybody 2-3 lines/actions where they can express what kind of person they are can go a long way.

If you want to do more romance games in the future, consider borrowing an idea from Visual Novels: The Common Route. Let your player see a few possible romance options, and then make them decide which romance they find more interesting and want to pursue.

For a good example in your game, the player is worshipping the Spaghetti God with their best friend, and then you let the player chose which of those two they want to romance. You gave them a couple of strings to pull on, and they decided on what they found more interesting. Yay!

But if the player chose to go to their room, then they were sorta stuck with picking the Gordon option or just losing the game. Not very interesting. If you instead gave the players another romance option to pick from there, you'd give them a lot more agency in how they enjoy the game. For example, maybe they could write to Gordon, OR spend their time venting to an online friend, who they can then chose to invite as a date (the online friend naturally turns out to be a robot, because we all need a SKYNET BF in our lives).

My lack of creativity aside, do you get what I mean? Always give your players at least a little bit of agency in choosing their romantic interest in dating games.

Anyway, I'd really like to see you try to write another comedic short story game like this where you don't rely on memes for your humour. The best, funniest parts of this story were when you were writing something original, and I'd really like to see more of that! For your absurdist humour, I think you could look at "West of Loathing" if you want an example of writing that goes crazy but isn't too memey or too random, but still a little bit of both.

I think your writing has a lot of potential, and I think you've shown us you can be a pretty good and creative writer. Please write another story! The first step is always the hardest, you can only improve from here :)

Spoilers below.

There wasn’t enough detail. This is a problem I see often in first storygames. I highly suggest searching up photos of surroundings or characters to get ideas for describing them. It would also have been useful to express more of the character’s thoughts during the dialogue.

Work on showing, and not telling. It currently just says what the character is feeling, work on communicating that without directly saying “The main character felt surprised because…”

The plot and characters lacked realism. I highly doubt parents would challenge their child to find a date in twenty-four hours or go into so much detail about exactly what type of porn their child was writing. The child wouldn’t be so comfortable discussing porn with his parents either.

It was also strange to have the mother brutally attack and verbally abuse her child, then never have it be mentioned again.

The sections with Gordon Ramsay and the noodle monster were the majority of the plot, which ended up making the storygame feel like lolrandom. It takes a lot of skill to make lolrandom interesting and worthwhile to read, so I’d suggest trying to keep things decently realistic. There were a few parts that made me laugh though.

There wasn’t enough branching. I found three endings, but all the branches basically led up to those. It was wasted potential. There are so many possible ways to get a date in twenty-four hours, this story could easily be thrice the size. Also, give the main character a name, the y/n stuff disrupted the flow of the story.

I’ll give this a 4/8, it was fun to read through.

Boring

I love it I rated it the highest I could

I got the "John" ending! 9.1 stars, I guess! Great job

Uh, a little rushed.

Really short and kinda cringe ngl.

this sucks. 8/8

You're really great at writing! It would be nice if the humor was a bit better.