Runaway Man

A modern storygame by PerthMod

Player Rating1.51/8

"Too few ratings to be ranked"

Based on 14 ratings since
Played times (finished )

Story Difficulty5/8

"Run through the jungle"

Play Length2/8

"So short yo' momma thought it was a recipe"

Maturity Level3/8

"Must be at least this tall to play"

Contains content that may not be suitable for persons under age 10. If this were a movie, it would probably be between G and PG.

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A boy named Kevin grew up in a labour camp without ever knowing his parents. An older inmate took him as his son, and Kevin has looked up to him his whole life. 15 years later, Kevin stole a piece of bread for a pigeon he found injured by the electrical fence. When the guards found out, they threatened to kill the thief. When Kevin was just about get found out, Liam (parental figure) took the blame. The next day, in a thunderstorm, the electrical fence short circuited and Kevin made a run for it. There are many different endings. The scoring works like this: You get 2 points if you end with a job. You get 1 point if you live outside of the labour camp but have no job. You get 0 points if you are taken back to the labour camp. You get -1 points if you die. If you get any points (i.e. more than 0), it counts as a win.

Just based on comments I think this is necessary to be said: This is not meant to be an in-depth fantastic project, but rather something basic that was done for school. This isn't meant to be great because I actually don't enjoy writing and I only did this because I had to. Still, those who are simply calling the game bad, please try to make your criticism more constructive so I can get better at writing.

Player Comments

I'm gonna go ahead and unpublish this now but I'll just give a tidbit of actual advice, which is to drop the random author asides if you want to maintain anything like a serious tone. And please have characters acting in something like a logical way...the pigeon and silly thing the entire plot hinges on just makes very little sense for a whole host of reasons.

Otherwise the idea wasn't bad in theory, but the execution of it was just all over the place to the point I didn't even know where to start with a serious comment. What on earth is going on with the first page, for starters?

— Mizal on 4/2/2020 7:07:59 PM with a score of 0

Congrats on publishing your first storygame! It’s a decent first try, but don’t expect to be getting much praise other than that. You have potential and by no means should you give up if you want to keep writing, but unfortunately, this game is severely lacking in most of its aspects. The story is creative, and it’s developed enough to reasonably follow, but other than that, it doesn’t do much of anything; the quality of writing is basic and non-immersive, and the choices you presented for the reader seemed to come out of nowhere. I can tell that there’s effort being put in, but you need a lot more of it to get a higher-rated story on this site. As it stands now, I’d say this really isn’t worth the time reading for anyone that’s here looking for a new game to play.

I’d recommend spending some time reading some of the well-known and top-rated storygames on this site. Or, if you have some extra free time nowadays, read some fiction books or even better, some short stories. Short stories are close to storygames in concept, so modeling your writing after some more established work can greatly improve the quality of your own. You don’t need to write the world’s next bestseller in storygame-form, but what you have now isn’t going to get you any points either. If you do end up writing another project, I’m sure the people here and myself would be glad to help you and provide feedback!

— juliemmarch on 4/2/2020 2:50:50 PM with a score of 0

The fact that the first page of this story was titled The First Page and the two options leading on were called Option 1 and Option 2 kind of set my expectations for the story at the right level :) Having said that you show a considerable amount of imagination, some branching and not an overwhelming amount of grammar and spelling errors so that is good.
I'll be honest, this reminded me of the first story-game I ever wrote when I was 10. It was pretty terrible, one of those either you die in fifty different ways or you make the right choice fifty times and get to the CONGRATULATIONS YOU WIN page. As a first effort it could certainly be a lot worse and with this kind of imagination given more structure and development you could grow into a pretty good writer :)