Player Comments on The Shameful Dead

Oh wow. This is good.

It’s good for many reasons, but I’ll get the criticisms out first.

**spoilers below!!**

There’s only one thing really wrong with this: the endings feel rushed. It has all the ingredients of a top rated story, except for the length. It’s just… so… short.

The characters were amazing. I could almost feel the motherly urge to find Amy and Millie, and most importantly, I actually wanted the main character to succeed. I understood how she felt in nearly every situation, and could find good arguments for both choices presented in a vast majorities of situations.
This isn’t only true for the MC. The side characters were well made, too, from the dad my horde killed all the way to my shaky, sobbing daughter.

The branching was also good. Even though it’s short, there are several different plots and storylines to play through, which is always a plus.

Overall, I’d give it a 5/8, though I definitely think there’s a potential here for much more.

If you’re looking for an enjoyable way to spend a half hour or so, this is the story for you.

Only very minor spoilers below.

After reading through one path, I wondered why the rating was so low. The writing is amazing, the characters are fleshed out, and it all works together to create a beautifully immersive experience.

Then I read another path, which revealed a huge issue. It just wasn't long enough. 7k words isn't nearly enough to have a complete story. There was good branching, but all the branches seemed cut off too early. From what I could tell, this seems to be a trend in your work. The writing is absolutely wonderful, but the story is too linear or the branches aren't expanded upon enough.

Everything else was spectacular. All the characters were relatable, with clear goals and feelings, and each of the branches revealed new information about the main character and her family. The writing had the perfect ratio of description to thoughts to action. Font was nice as well.

Highly recommend, definitely one of the best zombie stories on the site.

I read Fey Light as my first Fluxion story so coming into this, I already had really high expectations set.

I really liked the title page, it was really well designed, and I thought that it does a fantastic job of being interesting to potential readers and getting them to click on the story.

The concept itself is remarkably interesting; There are many zombie stories done to death that focus on the survivors and treat the zombies as mindless brutes and obstacles to overcome. So when I saw that the actual people themselves are mentally locked away in the zombies' bodies, I was sold. I had to read this.

Now on to the actual story itself:

I love the author's beautiful evocative writing; Phrases like "you're looking into a snow globe" and "fey light reflecting off of red, gold, and green Christmas baubles(typo, I fixed it here) hanging from a tree" make me want to read more not only for the plot, but also to enjoy the beautiful writing.

I've said this before in my review of Fey Light, but generally there are 2 types of writers that are successful the ones that keep the plot moving and create amazing worlds, while using simple, frank, and direct language, and those that paint a picture with a thousand words. Fluxion is clearly of the second kind.

The very beautiful setting in the first paragraph is juxtaposed with the harshness and brutality of the actual world, while also setting up an interesting effect of the main character seeing events through a snow globe, where it's distorted and she doesn't see things clearly, indicating she's not in control of her own body, which is basically the story.

Reading this story made me scared and concerned for the family, while also feeling deeply sorry for the person trapped behind the zombie.

I really loved this line: "those with your condition would welcome death, would willingly place their faces at the barrel of that gun. But how can they? We have no control.", it's such a succinct and perfect way to capture the main character's helplessness.

Interesting points of choosing to commit suicide rather than turning into a zombie and lack of proper scientific information were raised, and I thought that they made sense.

I also liked the superpower that the individual couldn't stop the zombie from killing, but the individual could somewhat redirect the zombie's aggression to another person, this makes the story morally complex and forces the protagonist to live with the guilt of her choices.

The choices reflect this moral ambiguity, basically making us, the readers choose the lesser of 2 evils in the hopes of reuniting mother and kids, or at the very least, allowing the mom to save her kids even if she can't reunite with them at the risk of her killing them.

The story pacing was excellent, the choices were brutal and well-selected, and I really really enjoyed this story. Fluxion, you have a gift for engaging story telling with very original out-of-the-box premises that really force the readers to sit down and think. You don't give us an easy way out, a happy ending, because the premise itself is so fucked up that all we can try and do is to do the best we can and preserve the most basic and essential moral principles while breaking other moral rules in an effort to preserve the most essential ones. I do like how every choice made is somehow made to mitigate the situation and do a little good, but the people who were hurting genuinely don't know that, and how can they? Unless they become a zombie themselves, they'll never know about the people trapped behind the corpses.

I got the bittersweet ending where one of the daughter survives and shoots me, but I'm still so happy that she has that survival instinct, just as the author intended. I've never felt this conflicted about what should be an objectively good ending, in another story. In another story, the young woman killing the zombie would have been celebrated, but here it's just so sad knowing that the mother was rooting for her daughter to kill her the whole time and survive.

I'm going to give this a 7/8 for a very fresh premise, great branching, and just being overall excellent! I absolutely loved this story! The only thing stopping me from giving it an 8 is length, it's a very beautiful, poignant story about free will and loss. Absolutely amazing

Very well written, with gripping characterization and an interesting take on the zombie trope. Not a ton of choices, but the two endings I got were both interesting and satisfying.

Too short. I really liked it though

Great story. This seems more like a demo and hope that maybe it can be expanded on at some point in the future. The writing was top-notch and I could actually feel the emotions running through the mom's head. I read this and the concept made me just sit there like holy shit this would be absolutely miserable to live through. Being a passenger in your own body, forced to watch your body consume others would be torturous.

Loved the concept, wish there was more.

That was so good, but a sad ending.

Pretty good short story to play through.

It's got a good beginning, but the whole thing was way too short.

I'm always down to read a zombie game as they seem to be rare and inbetween now a days given the fad has died down, and with the decent length of this one I went in with good expectations.

Didn't expect it to be so depressing and sad, and you were honestly able to pull it off rather nicely given the length, with acute and orgiginal depictions on zombisism that I found rather pleasing.

I don't think many zombie games take the approach in which you slowly lose control, which is what I liked from dead island among some other titles.

Good work with this, 8/8.

This was really good.

I truly enjoyed reading this story. It is extremely well written, the characterization is good, and the story has a good flow. I liked being able to get inside the zombie’s head, and feel her internal struggle. Also, I liked the concept of the zombie being able to exhibit some control over its direction even though it was not able to change its nature or instinct.

My main complaint would be the story’s length. What is here is great, but it would have been so much more fun to get to follow along with the character for a longer time. The branching is fine for the size story, but would be even better if expanded upon.

Overall, great writing, great story but would benefit from more. Definitely recommend.

It was ok, but excessively easy.

I really liked the concept of this story. The choices you could make, especially in the beginning, were quite interesting. Like others in the comments, I think this story could have continued on longer if you let it. I also enjoyed the formatting, with the first letters of the page being larger.

I enjoyed the piture at the start

Short but good. An interesting take on zombieism. Don't read it if you're feeling depressed, lol.

God damn. This must be the best take on a zombie story I have ever come across. It certainly takes the top 3. Excellent job.

Certainly a story of both body and mental horror, losing control of one's self and the like. I enjoyed it.

Man this story is really good and short at the same time. It actually feels shorter than the word count would suggest, possibly due to scripting? Or maybe just due to the number of paths, who knows. Either way I enjoyed the story, especially considering how generic the premise and the prompt is. I’d recommend reading this story if you want a good zombie story. It presents an interesting moral dilemma that didn’t interest me too terribly, but it’s short and you can read it pretty fast, especially considering how short each path is.

Which brings me to both a strength and a weakness of this game, the branching. There is a lot of different endings, which is good. But all of them are 3-5 pages long, which is almost nothing. Especially since three of the endings share the same first 3 pages. This needed to be a lot longer for it to capture what makes this story good.

And what makes it good is the writing style. The story hooked me and experiencing the main character's struggle with the horrors of her new form was great, you captured it well. The whole story was written so well, but at the expense of length. I assume that you used the time to polish what was there instead of adding new things, which leads to this story not overstaying it’s welcome. But it also severely limits the impact.

This might be a me thing, but I didn’t really care about the mothers journey to see her kids. I mean logically she should stay the hell away from them, but I understand the need to protect them. And I like how it is a choice whether to go to them or not.

All in all, a really good game that needed more to it. To use an analogy I’ve used before, decent bones with great skin, but super frail and lacking almost any muscle. It needed more to it to really place itself to really make it memorable instead of just something that exists.

Sometimes I get handed in an essay that is *really really good* and it's three pages long for a 6-8 page essay, and it breaks my heart. That was this game. What you have here is so good! It's stylishly written, and you took some effort to make the game itself attractive. But there is just not enough here, even for a short story.

The game looks like this.

Choice 1: Man/Children

Man branch: Feeding Frenzy/Attack little girl
------Feeding Frenzy branch is game end
------Little girl: Stick to plan/off highway
--- Both Stick to plan and off highway are game ends
Children branch: West/East/Remain
------All three are game ends.

There's just not enough meat on those bones, or brains in those victims, if you like to sustain this as a choice game. Consider quadrupling this game's size, because I really, really liked the prose here. A lot of those branches really could have been developed interesting into little stories with their own choices. I would have loved to see you write about those bits in the excellent style you have already, all too briefly, displayed here.

I really liked the story as a whole; I thought you captured the mother's dilemma and pain well, and in a perfectly twisted way, I was really happy about the reunion and about the daughter killing her and ending her misery.