A Knight's Pursuit

General Recommendation: A well-written gauntlet-style story game.
Preview: To who will you pledge yourself as a knight; your childhood friend, or your sister in need?

=SPOILERS BELOW=

General notes:
This story takes place in a medieval setting, but it focuses on a very human conflict; the narrator’s split duty between his sister and the woman he loves. There’s no clear right answer, and the story doesn’t delve into the morality of his decision, instead letting the player decide for themselves.
The dialogue and characterization is well done, with each of the two major characters showing defining traits and making the narrator’s connection with them clear. There’s not too much depth of course, given the short length of this game.
I would have liked to see some more of the aftermath of the narrator’s pledge. The story makes clear that it’s less important what you pledge yourself to is less important than your commitment to it. Whether or not the narrator can follow through on his commitment to his pledge is his true test, not the choice to do so in the first place. This isn’t covered by the scope of the story, however, making it feel more like the beginning of a time of conflict and trial in the narrator’s life rather than a decision and endpoint, as one would expect for the end of a game.
The use of variables makes the player’s decisions matter, preventing this from being a linear game.

Specific notes:
-I like the poem at the beginning, it sets the tone well.
-It would be nice if the information at the beginning could be conveyed through dialogue or action rather than summary. Even delivering it with some prompting from outside events, such as the narrator briefly interactin with his sister/mother/father could help to fix this.
-In the future I’d suggest making your character names more different from each other. I thought Lia was a nickname for Olvida at first.
-The narrator’s relationship with Lia is well-established in their first scene together, they have a casual way of interacting with each other that comes across naturally.
-I’d like to know more about the process involved with becoming a knight. The narrator is still living at home, but has armor and is apparently a full-fledged knight, capable of competing for a lady’s hand.
-The mother has been poisoning her stepdaughter?! That’s way beyond just resenting her.
-This isn’t important to the story, but historically speaking, the focus of the knights on their pursuits seems a bit odd in a practical sense. Why should a knight choose a single thing to devote their life to? Knights would take on a variety of quests historically, and commiting yourself unyeildingly to something other than a career seems like a financially unsound move.
-I like the structure of the ceremony, with a series of challenges potentially affecting each other’s outcomes. There’s a lot of choices here, and assuming they all matter, it’s done well.
-I like that there’s an option where you can pledge yourself to the baron’s daughter; it’s a completely strange decision given his earlier commitments, but it’s good that the player has that option.

Grammar
All good.
Mastery of Language
The setence structure is nice and flows well, enhancing the story. The description is good and detailed without being too long.
I like “The sun fights through the clouds for attention”.

Branching
Alright, some endings are much easier to find than others and it’s not toally clear which actions lead to which endings.

Player Options/fair choice
Generally good, it’s clear what the outcome of options will be.

WRITING ADVICE:
I recommend making the unclickable links visible, it took me a while to realize there were other endings.

CONCLUSION: 5/8.

This was decently good. I chose the incest path, naturally. I’m curious about the story if I hadchosen Lia instead, which is a good indication the storygame has some value. However, I would have liked an opportunity to change my mind at the end and fck my sister over and choose Lia, instead of randomly being given the option to pledge to the Baron’s daughter.

Positives: the relationships between the protagonist and the two women were interesting and made the world feel more lived in. Same with the brief encounter with Darius. There are few more interesting things than a broken character living with regrets. I would have like to have seen more Darius.

Negatives: Why did I spend all those years practicing to duel if the Baron just decides to cancel it? There didn’t seem to be any consequence for not visiting Olvida. The ending seemed like less time was spent on it than the other parts of the story (understandable if the author was pushing to finish on time). Lastly, I would have liked to see more interaction between Lia and Olvida. Just being told that one is sad because you chose the other seems shallow compared to their direct interactions with you. They are sitting next to each other, but there is little to gauge what if any tension exists between them.


Overall I’d say this is one of the better entries into this contest. There is some good stuff here, but there are also opportunities for more good stuff. Worth the read.

I like it better than most romance stories, perhaps it was because there was also a platonic option as well and that there were plenty of other things to focus on. The fights and sworddancing were honestly more exciting than all the romance parts combined. It felt as if the author has more experience writing action adventure stories than anything about romance.

Lia and Olvida were both allright, but I honestly think that the surprise option felt a little off. It somehow felt pretty out of character for the main character who so deeply cared for these two women in his life, to abandon them without any thought at all.

Of all the three women, I honestly do think that Olvida was the most well written of them, considering that she already has a deep connection with the main character and that there is a hint of a character arc going on. The conflict between them also felt very grounded. It is really about two people who want the other to be happy and think that the other shouldn't sacrifice themselves for their happiness. None of their respective viewpoints are really wrong, what makes it even more painful to see.

Ah, let's talk about Lia, your childhood friend character. I feel that Lia is just a little bland, seemly with no real personal hangups of her own except the vying for his love. Perhaps it would be interesting if she has a little more going. There were hints sprinkled throughout the story like your father's reputation being so bad that her family would be hesitant to approve you. I say, milk that drama for all that's worth.

However, the one that truly has won my heart is our drunk boy Darius and it's not only because we share the same name.

The writing is as much of a pleasant experience as always, but I have to say that the spelling mistakes at the end did become quite egregious. It's probably because you ran out of time, but I would recommend to at least proofread the epilogues again when you got the time and are willing to edit some of it.

All in all, a better romance story than most of the ones I've read. There are some tiny hiccups, but it was nevertheless a pleasant read.

why wasn't Lia a choice to pledge yourself to?

Honestly before reading the book, I scrolled through the comments and I realized the common option was to swear my oath to my half-sister Olvida. This in itself encouraged me to not oath to her and choose Lia, but my lord it took me at least 10 attempts. who would have guessed that I would just have a grudge against my sister because of all the endings I had of her. I enjoyed the story and I'm happy I can finally be with Lia.

Great story, only at the end I only had the choice to pick the sister and not lia.

I ignored the sister and the childhood friend for the Baron's daughter after beating everyone else at the dance, joust, duel. No regrets.

It started out well, but fell flat soon afterwards. First of all, there was no option to pledge to Lia. Initially I thought this was due to the choices I made previously, but I played it 5 times making different choices each time, but still I only got the option to pledge to Olvida in the end. IDK if this is a bug or was intended, but this makes the story complete non-sense as the ending is always fixed no matter what choices are made.

Second, it ended too quickly. I would like to know what happened after the Selection Ceremony. Did he fulfill his pursuit? Or fail like his father? Did Darius' advice help him in any way? I have so many questions that went unanswered. It was as if the story stopped midway.

The plot was pretty well developed, but like many of the comments already said, the commitment part was more important than who you choose, but the story ended when I picked my choice. Considering it’s length both of the ladies did not have much character development. In the future you could try and stick with your theme more and make it a bit longer to deliver your point.

A knight story which held showed aspects of love, family and the importance of working out.

The meaningfulness of the choices was really appealing. There were not a lot of pages with choices, but when they appeared you could tell that they would change the outcome of the story. I liked being able to choose the love of my life and how much strength to use at the Selection Ceremony. For once, I felt that I was actually in control of the protagonist in a storygame. I also liked the information on knights throughout the story.

However, there were also some faults in it that I couldn’t help but notice. For example, Olvida and Lia’s personalities were almost exactly the same. Olvida had terrible and unreasonable punishments on her before, so her talking in the same playful way as Lia did not make sense. There was also an unexplained (maybe bug) twist at the end, where at first I picked Lia to be my lady, but at the end the only choice given to me was Olvida.

Overall, the game still needed a bit of polishing, with spelling errors, tense inconsistencies and missing punctuation here and there, but that did not affect the good experience I had of the immersive knight life you showed. A nice read.