Marooned on Giri Minor

While on account of my own personal feelings towards the genre of this story it took me a while to get past the first few pages of story, I sure am glad I did and can now add another story to my short list of space science fiction adventures that I liked.

The layout of the story is meant to be like a book. There is even a title page with a pretty picture on it. The font choice was something I thought really made the difference between successfully imitating a book and having screwy formatting. In some places, the story might seem linear because of all the choiceless clicking necessary to get through it, but Marooned on Giri Minor is less linear than most stories on this site.
I believe there was just one place that had re-branching, excluding the epilogues. The different paths had wider variety than I expected, and that in itself really makes a difference. After all, this is Choose Your Story, not Choose Your Outfit.
The epilogue is mostly the same with some tweaking each time it comes up. This makes sense because of the planned second part, and everything leading up to them is always different. So I did not mind that. The epilogue seemed like it could be a final ending as well, rather than being just a cliffhanger and hook for Part II. I will read Part II when it comes out because I WANT to, not because I was left unsatisfied with Part I.
The non-epilogue endings were pretty fun, and I preferred some of them to the epilogue endings too. However, I think the ending in which the commander is eaten alive but you survive ended a bit prematurely. Everyone else was alive and doing fine, and it was not as if the commanders death meant an automatic death sentence—especially since that one trader supposedly passes through. I also question why you survived the beetle attack by being unconscious and unmoving but those in stasis did not. It was the same situation when it came to that, as far as I know.

I did not really get into the story until I reached the part with the psychoactive beetles (this was still my first playthrough), but at that point, it really had my attention. The psychoactive beetles are really cool and definitely my favorite creatures on Giri Minor.
On the subject of animals, I preferred when animals and plants were described in either purely alien words or purely English. I can easily picture a beetle crab thing, but wondering what an alien-language-word walrus is supposed to be just leads to more questions in my mind that sort of pull me out of the story a bit as I think about walrus screeches instead of the story.

I would have liked the ship to be referred to by a name rather than a bunch of numbers and letters. Even if it is just a small vehicle, that is easier for me to pay attention to and seems more realistic to have it have some sort of name like the Orion does.

There was something about the scene where Ibanz was out yelling while under the influence of beetles that I really liked. A lot of that was because I could see people having the same reactions to a similar incident in real life as they did in Giri Minor.
The description of the world and characters, I like. There was no need for a ton of physical description of the characters, and there was just enough description of the planet that I got a clear picture of what it look like in my mind without having endless paragraphs of that bogging the story down. Had Ingersoll not mentioned the general lack of physical character description to me beforehand, I would never even have noticed that. So any more would have been unnecessary.
The technology as well did not suffer the excessive detail devoted to it that too often happens in this sort of story. After all, if I know more about how your fake tech works than I do things that I use every day in real life, you have too much description.
I do have one issue with the technology though. Who the hell thought piloting a ship through body movement was a good idea? The pilot can’t even eat a sandwich while driving without it ending in disaster that way.

Marooned on Giri Minor is definitely worth a read for any science fiction lovers on the site and some who are not.


P.S. I think you should know that I misread FabBot as FapBot nearly every time. That may be something to think about in the future.

30,000 words tells me you're committed, and I like that. Though I did find quite a few endings, the number of endings you have and the amount of brnaching shows this word count was put to good use in making a proper, non-linear CYOA. That doesn't sound like much but so many people seem to jump into writing a storygame without realising how much effort and how time-consuming the exponential format is. 30,000 is a good length for this story, though some of the pages could have been fleshed out a little more.

In terms of content: this was a great story that I could tell from the first page would be better than about 70% of the content on this site off the bat. Indeed, it was engaging, set in an interesting and nicely developed setting, and delivered a plot that was intriguing enough to get me to go back and find other endings. I find that if a storygame isn't drawing me to find a 'good' ending when I encounter a bad one, it's not worth reading. I found 4 or 5 of the endings and they had nice variety.

Personally, I'm not a great fan of exposition on the first page, or first few pages in this case, explaining the story background or setting. I like stories that jump right in and explore aspects of the world throughout. However, I also recognise it may be important in a CYOA especially as the reader may miss a page explaining something you want explained. Still, I like a little mystery, but each to their own.

"...and he has a habit of changing a conversation by singing a few lyrics from one of his favorite songs." Surely a Bowie reference upcoming?
"Some days you get the sun, others it's just the moon/ If life's not spent having fun, it's over too soon." Nope, just made up songs, oh well

Onto what I think could have been improved:

It's a minor gripe and I'm sure you've written this on Word or something originally, but putting the actual choice instead or 'if you want to do X, turn to page...' would make things a little more imersive.

Also, as has been mentioned before, there are quite a few unnecessary breaks in between pages with no choices. From hearing what others have said, most people only like one or two pages of linearity in between choice pages. The linear pages aren't even filled with text, so I'd say putting some together and having some 500-1000 word pages is fine.

In terms of writing and grammar, this story is definitely above average for the site. I only found two spelling mistakes ('belogings' on page 28 and 'arived' on 109 if you wanted to know). The writing was engaging and to the point and the characters' dialogues were ceftainly believable. Description in some parts is excellent.

I think the characterisation and development of the playable character was a little bland and times and could have done with a little more attention. If I had to be extra critical, I would also say some of the other characters didn't seem to quite fit the initial descriptions they were given from the perspective of the player. For example, Hatuso doesn't seem to be quite as reserved as described in my opinion. All in all the characters are well written and, most importantly, believable.

Of course you are clearly an experienced writer so I look forward to any further installments on the series, especially as good sci-fi is few and far between on the site. With more content like this, I'm sure you could produce multiple featured stories.

6/8

I really enjoyed this, the site needs more quality sci-fi and it's rare to come across such a well written and polished story from a newer member. (Although obviously the author is not at all new to writing in general.)

Even the description itself is really well done and catches the attention with teasing the content a little. The fact that it's gotten so few ratings and reviews is unusual, but I think the issue lies with the number of pages there are between choices putting people off. I know a big part of what you were doing was going for the aesthetic of the old CYOA books, and the structure you used is pretty faithful to that, but just so you know the norm on the site is not to go more than three pages without a choice, even if it's a minor one that doesn't effect the overall plot. Your pages are also not especially long (particularly in the intro section) and the six there could've been combined into three without issue.

Now as for the story itself, as I said it was *really* well done. The first few pages do a nice job giving a sense of the setting and even little things like slipping in a description of the ship using the toy were nice touches. I did think though that it could use a bit of physical description or otherwise more of a way to distinguish important characters though, because there are a lot of names and ranks without any other details attached to keep straight. (Taking a bit more time to establish them would also make it have more impact when things start to happen...I liked Captain Siggo and he was also the only loss I came across that had any emotional weight, just from that short time getting to know him and giving him personality quirks like the singing.)

The first time through, I did a really bad job keeping everyone alive, and I appreciated that it wasn't because I'd done anything particularly dumb so much as it was a cause of being on an alien planet and not understanding how things worked there yet or what the dangers were. The next time I got practically a perfect ending (and I'm looking forward to the TO BE CONTINUED part of the adventure...) although there were a couple of things lacking in consistency; namely it seemed like the survival or success of others didn't necessarily depend very much on my characters' actual actions. In both the paths I originally got, I obviously had no way of influencing the pair sent to look for the colony and yet their fates could change dramatically and alter the whole plot.

I feel like I'm just nitpicking now though because there isn't much of the usual stuff to criticize, this was an enjoyable story all the way through with some passages of really excellent writing. Everything about the crash landing in particular stood out, it was tense and felt realistic. I like too that there's just enough clever sci-fi stuff going on to be engaging without overwhelming with technobabble or feeling like there are any magic solutions to anything.

Really looking forward to the sequel(s).

Really well-paced, enrapturing storytelling!

excellent adventure! I loved the choices here. It wasn't too impossible to find a solution of some sort. It was more of a realistic story, I get that, so not much chance of a heroic Buck Rogers ending. I can't think how to improve this story.

I think I got the good ending first try as I got to the epilogue but im not sure. I'm not a fan of sci-fi and this story didn't really do me in either

Good

It was super good with a ton of deaths(This is my first go ahead and if this was me in Real Life I would not have been able to write this comment XD). I was dreading the length at first, but it actually wasn't crazy long. It was a very enjoyable read of good length and detail and had me hanging onto the edge of my seat. I eagerly look forward to playing the sequel.

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

Marooned on Giri Minor is one of the most thorough and professional stories on the site, in both writing quality and appearance. That much is fairly obvious to even someone giving it a passing glance. What isn't so apparent, and was a pleasant surprise for me, was in addition to all this, it tells a story with personality and soul.

SPOILERS:

It was very easy to accept the nature of the world that Ingersoll has created here, and it's established pretty quickly for a sci-fi story. The characters are introduced (and killed) nearly as quickly, but still retain enough impact to affect the way you make choices later in the story. I still opted to take every reckless choice I could get my hands on immediately, though.

I also enjoyed the lack of stereotypes and cop-outs; in a story where 95% of the characters are in the military, I was expecting certain archetypes to pop up, and they did not, as far as I could tell.

I'm having to seriously rack my brain for something that I could give actual feedback on that isn't minor. Perhaps my criticism is that while this story is a spectacle, there's a certain weight and gravity about the situation that my character is placed in that prevents me from giving it a perfect score. It reads like an origin story, which is it, and there's a clear motive to raise the stakes in the sequel, so we'll save it for that, given it's just as good.

All in all, in the end I wanted more, and it seems I have it at my fingertips with "Secret of the Grass Planet", which is triple the size of this story. 7/8, excellent work.