Player Comments on Project Lovecraft

I’ll start by saying that the title sucked. It didn’t tell us anything about the game (other than it being Lovecraft inspired). You could’ve even named it Dagon for all I care, but you named it “Project Lovecraft'' because you were making it as a project on a short story by H. P. Lovecraft? Also, in the description for the game it should be “created in 2024” not “created 2024”.

The grammar overall was fine. I noticed a few small errors, but it didn’t detract from the story. Not that there was a story to detract from. Seriously, with the amount of detail you put in I would’ve thought it was a story outline/planning, not the finished product.

On the page “Jump in the Water to Cool Off” you say we can see something underwater, but it’s a ways off. In fact, it’s so far that we go to sleep to swim to it tomorrow. From my experience, you can’t see very far underwater. If you can see it, it's definitely within swimming range, even if it’s almost nighttime.

The way you say “fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, mollusks, whales, and other likely extinct species” makes it sound like all of those creatures are also extinct. If you just took out the “other” then you’d be fine. Oh, and btw, “fishes” isn’t a word. Fish is already plural.

I got the same death a bunch, which wasn’t very fun. Almost every end to the game is because you get taken by that stone octopus and put in the weird future desert. If you’re going to kill people, at least make it creative. Speaking of getting the same death a bunch, there was so much illusion of choice that every link just ended up looping back to something I’d already read. I would get excited about going down a new path, but then I would either get taken to a page I’d already read or be grabbed by the tentacles.

Overall, I didn’t like it very much. You could definitely do better. The premise was interesting, but it felt rushed and there wasn’t really any writing that went into it. Like Mystic said, it felt more like a summary than a story. It was still better than many others I’ve read here though, so good job I guess.

Disclaimer: to the author, take everything in this review with a grain of salt. I’m not a professional writer and only somewhat of a seasoned reviewer. To the readers, this review will contain some spoilers, so I implore you to read the storygame first.

I'll start by saying that I'm not familiar with Dagon, so if this review misses any important references to the original work, then that'll be why. It's kind of interesting that you're taking a pre-established story and adding alternative paths to it, though.

Right away, I can see the main issue with this storygame. It seems more like a book summary of another story than a complete story in itself. Another reviewer has already pointed out the repetitive structure (you do x, and y happens), so I'll provide some feedback on that. First: focus on grounding the reader in a scene (showing) instead of simply telling us what happens. For example, in the scene where you escape in five days, more information on this would be useful. How did the protagonist escape? Was it an easy escape, or one that took the whole five days to plan out? Give us some details to make the reader care.

And speaking of keeping the reader invested, it's important to develop your protagonist. They're the lens through which the reader views the story. It begins with the officer being captured. How do they react to the capture? Why do they want to escape? It may seem obvious, but to show the reader why something matters in the story, you must do two things: one, make them care about the characters, and two, show them why the plot matters to the characters.

Yet, this story is not without its merits. I quite liked some of the descriptions, such as “The air around you is thick with the scent of decaying flesh and putrefied fish; The mire is a waste of marine life carcasses, some which you can identify, and some which you cannot.” (the word after the semicolon should not be italicized, though). Speaking of writing style, the whole story was quite well proofread with minimal grammatical errors.

The protagonist also ventured through lots of different settings and terrains. These descriptions were well-written, painting a vivid picture of the places that the protagonist ended in before facing yet another conflict.

I'm not sure if this was the intention, but I found the scene where the protagonist cuts off his hand to offer it to the stone spire rather funny, in a dark humor kind of way. It just felt so out of place. Why would one cut off their hand and just give it to a random spire? Then again, the whole story seems out of place, like the way the protagonist passes out, suffocated, and when he wakes, he's in a desert. Still, I believe that's the lovecraftian absurdist horror tone at play.

The branching seemed quite good at first glance, as even the paths which strayed away from the main storyline had a good amount of substance. Yet, I soon noticed a lot of paths branched back to others, especially the part where the protagonist is dragged down underwater. Not that this is an issue, of course, given that a number of stories on the site do the same (I'm guilty of this too, sometimes).

There were some interesting moments, like the part where the protagonist seemingly traveled to the future, or sought mental help. My main critique is that I would have liked to see these parts explored more thoroughly. The plot seemed to touch on too many things, and spent too little time exploring each of these.

Ultimately, this is a well-written storygame, though it would be much better with a greater focus on plot, characters and pacing.

I teach the story "Dagon" at times, and so I was intrigued. However, I didn't think much of this attempt to make a storygame out of it. It's very much on the rails, in a Cave of Time style storygame structure, and the rails in question hit all of the storybeats of the story. It's not quite clear to me what is gained there, particularly when the golden path is asterisked so cleanly for the player.

There were definitely a few short deviations from that path, but these typically ended swiftly in "start overs" rather than a proper end game, which would have been much more interesting, if some sort of novel plot element could have been devised. Overall, it's not even really fanfiction, exactly, so much as an attempt to Cave of Time-ize a short story, that doesn't even really shine in terms of plot. It's not the story I would pick of Lovecraft's to do this to.

It was alright, just kind of boring. The narration was really flat. Too bored to even write a full review.

I can see what the author was trying to do here but the descriptions were too matter-of-fact to really draw the read in (you are this, this happens to you), the reader needs to experience things rather that be told they are happening (show rather than tell). I think the writing did improve towards the end of the story and the ending was particularly strong. I was a hit puzzled why some of the links had apostrophes (and those the ones we were supposed to click on?) but there was an ok amount of branching here, though as Malk says readers prefer having end game links rather than having to continually start the stories again from the beginning. Not a bad effort here considering Lovecraftian stories are pretty difficult to write.

oh, the horror!
It's the genre where there are no happy endings, at least not that I could find. Fair enough.

Not bad.

One thing really jumped out at me. The beginning mentioned being a WW2 officer. However, when you time-travel you mention the year you left was 1919. That's 1 year after WW1 ended and WW2 doesn't kick off until 1939.

Like I said, overall not bad. It would have been nice to see more creative touches with the other paths besides being railroaded into the same choices (you can loop prying your leg free).

Satisfactory enough. I changed it to Fan-Fiction as it relies wholly or in part on existing works that are not the author's.

For future reference, it's considered pretty bad form to not include an End Game link after every ending. People really dislike having to click back through the whole story to be able to rate and comment.

I haven't read the short story myself so some of the differences between asterisked and non-asterisked paths were lost on me. Nevertheless, the story is not bad.

Solid branching, SPAG, and writing, and reads like a pretty standard CYOA. Not too shabby.