The Inner Demons - A Ballad

This is a practically completely linear (you get to open doors in the order of your choice!) poem that is an allegory of dealing with sin/mental trauma/disturbances in a sort of amorphous way.

We are tackling, for example, "envy," not connected with anything in particular that would help us feel for the viewpoint character. So much for the story, which is loosely framed in a sort of therepeutic situation after torture, I guess.

The poetry, though, is really not there. Rhymes are clumsy with overuse of off-rhyme and rhyme rich, the meter is all over the place--short or long by varying amounts, and the stress pattern is barely there. For example, "course" is rhymed with "more" and "adored." I am punching my desk as I write this. Sometimes the rhyme is wholly abandoned, as if the poet forgot, went and played some Mario Kart, and returned. On some pages, the poet goes for a rhyme at the end of each stanza, which is neat-ish (haunt, taunt, daunt).

Cringily, the rhymes totally take over the meaning. The therapist calls me "hon" because the poet badly needed a rhyme for "one."

It starts with a sort of halting iambic tetrameter, but then falls all over itself with some nine-syllable lines like "Where they will haunt and craze you, maybe"--with that weird "maybe" at the end, totally messing up the beat.

It's a good idea to do a choose your own poem, but I think if you do that, you have to think of it as much as a poem as a storygame. Otherwise, it just doesn't quite work.

Alright, it is apparent that the author took time and effort to figure out the rhymes. Good job, as I wouldn't have gotten half of those.
The rhymes are also your downfall though, in effort to convey your point, and also put down rhymes(difficult!), the words and sentences were slightly twisted sometimes. This takes away from the storygame itself.
As for the story, perhaps there could've been more endings, but that's not exactly nescessary.

It's possible I missed some kind of site wide memo to ignore this one, but I'll toss down some quick thoughts here anyway.

First off, I'm surprised it counted as a 5/8 length, because it seems pretty short? I'm not seeing any paths I missed, the 'choice' part here seems to be just clicking through all the doors until you get to the end. But I suppose there must've been some scripting involved to track whether all the doors had been opened, which may have padded the length a little.

I'm not sure if this would technically count as a ballad but you had some interesting concepts here, I just wish all the mental stuff had been tied to real world events of some kind to flesh out the character or give some kind of backstory.

It's worth something that you were dedicated enough to go back and finish this even after the deadline however, so that probably bodes well for future projects. Keep writing and best of luck with those.