Aenigma Academy

I'm not exactly sure how to feel about this game. On one hand it definitely has it's shortcomings. There are many of them, and I will go over them at length later. However there is something about it I just can't place. I'm going to try my best to articulate my thoughts on this story.

For starters a lot of the writing, mostly the dialogue, feels… forced. I'm not sure the correct way to describe it but it doesn't feel natural at all. There are also things like how a malnourished thief living on the streets can accomplish the jungle obstacle course. It's not just that the protag can, most of the people at least make it through. That's bullshit, because by the sound of it it is something most people couldn't do even if they trained for it.

Now about the three courses. The one I liked the least was the cipher training. I'm not sure what the author expected you to do here. Like I guess you could copy paste every code into decoders. What I personally did, and what I suspect many others did, is just click ever choice until it worked. The one thing I liked about this though is that seeing lorem ipsum made me laugh. It might be the thing I remember most about this game in the long run.

The fighting one was pretty standard. Just descriptions about what happened. I enjoyed it. Not much else.

Now my favorite one was the logic one. I really liked the puzzles. They were pretty standard, and were easy for me, but I still liked them. I will admit I just clicked through on the last one since that one would have involved me using a piece of paper. It was well designed though.

The branching was pretty good. You have the intro, the three trainings, and the end. It is very much a branch and bottleneck. It is pretty good for what it is.

In conclusion this story gets a 4/8. The main thing holding the story back is the quality of the writing. I liked the plot, I liked the branching, I just didn't like the writing itself and the polishing errors that happened like spelling and grammar. I think your writing will improve in time and you will write something pretty good. When that day comes I look forward to reading it.

Aenigma Academy is reasonably ambitious, for a first stab at a CYOA. Unfortunately, there are a few serious issues with the game that prevent me from rating it higher than a 4/8.

The world of this storygame isn't presented naturally. The reader gets a page of exposition, and is then thrust right into superspy training before having a chance to really connect with the protagonist or the setting. The storygame feels like it has no stakes because the terrible circumstances I'm supposed to be escaping aren't known to me. If you told me all about how like, the rad-goblins fuck me in the ass every night and my brother got dismembered by a security robot, the plot would feel more meaningful.

There are no developed characters in this story. I barely know who these people are, or why I should care about them.

The plot feels somewhat illogical. Surely there is more to being a high-paid hacker or mercenary than answering some riddles, fighting a few people, and knowing ten cyphers that I will likely never use in the far future (they can all be easily broken by computers as of the year 2020). As far as I'm aware, the protagonist never even learns how to shoot a gun. Also, why are they kidnapping street kids? If this is such a horrible dystopia, couldn't you get them to volunteer?

Also, there are some formatting and grammar issues. You can indent or not indent a new paragraph on CYS; pick one, stop switching between. You need to tighten up your use of homophones, and make sure you're using the appropriate contractions. Also, you sometimes suffer from the dialogue curse that affects everyone on this website. I've linked a resource at the bottom.

In the future, please consider developing your characters and fleshing out your settings more.


https://www.authorlearningcenter.com/writing/fiction/w/character-development/6491/8-essential-rules-for-punctuating-dialogue---article

poop

VERY good story. It was hard, but I made it.

it ok

I thought this was a fun way to waste some time, however a single question wrong results in the end, and if you manage to get to the end, you win with no struggle. It's very guided and only really has two endings, graduation or death.

So much fun. Just pure fun. Though those who are a bit squeamish should avoid this.

im a hacker and i gotta say i tried being a fighter and boy howdy is it tough! i died in the pit of spikes and im glad cause if i had to climb that mountain of chairs i definitely would have died there. i'll prefer to sit behind my computer and hack the CIA and expose the shadow government. this was like a modern day hogwarts adventure but modern.

As far as puzzle games go, this is one of my favourites so far. I especially liked how you introduced the story, and that you gave an actual reason why the puzzles need to be completed- and the last few riddles were great, since they put you in a real-life situation!

On the other hand, at times -well, at all times- it was pretty gory, and I didn't enjoy it as much because of that. And although the thinker and the fighter sections were interesting, I found the ciphers way too hard. Because you had to use the Internet to figure them out, it didn't feel as rewarding when you got it right, and, after a while, it became fairly tedious.

However, your link to the theme of 'Welcome to the Jungle' was original, and I did get hooked on those riddles!

I am definitely a sucker for puzzle games, so solving all those riddles made me happy. Got to say though, I wasn’t so keen on the cyphers. In this sort of puzzle game, I think that having one cypher is good, because, if nothing else, it determines whether the player is smart enough to recognise that you’re using a cypher… But when you have like 10 cyphers in a row, it’s literally just a case of figuring out which cypher you’re using, and there’s not really much fun in that.
Spelling was fine, grammar could’ve used some work. Plot and characters weren’t great, but then I suppose they don’t really have to be in a puzzle based game. One thing I don’t understand is why you kept the unclickable options visible at the end. I mean, near the last page, there was just a list of 5 options all saying “The fight starts”. It really would’ve made more sense to make the unclickable options invisible, since having five options all saying the same thing just looks messy.
All in all, it was decent. Could’ve done a better job at explaining the different puzzles and why they worked the way they did. (Also the combat training just felt kind of pointless.) Still, I enjoyed it. Definitely worth a playthrough.