Player Comments on Alone with a Presence

Please finish this. That is my first a most important comment. You are excellent at building atmosphere and your use of items is adept. Giving us more than one item to use in a given scenario is dynamic. Having more than one way to solve a problem is a huge plus in my book. The body in the closet was just weird to me. If it is my closet why is the body there, why don't I react to it? How did I not know it was there? If I did, why haven't I done something about it yet? That was the only thing that broke suspension for me. the story-game I played here successfully made me ask questions and want answers. I really enjoyed puzzling and genuinely getting immersed in my attempt to survive. But as soon as I got thoroughly interested I hit a new page and a disappointed, "oh" is all I could manage. Great work, I read through it several times and I really want to see it become what you advertise! My advise: because you let players solve problems in more than one way, it would be perfectly alright for paths to sometimes come back into one, because players will have different items and resources by that point and will therefor have a different experience. This could really be thrilling. So again, please finish.

I enjoyed this. The writing in general and the action scenes especially were very good, and it looks like there will be a lot of puzzle solving with all the inventory items. I look forward to seeing this finished, but I should mention that it's usually not a good idea to post demos here. A lot of people will rate it based just on the parts you have written and not get around to giving it a second look when it's finally finished.

And I agree with TheNewIAP that there were some things that could have been better explained. The big one being just what exactly is going on...it started as a surreal dream sequence, then the character was waking up in their home and having to deal with some kind of monster/zombie things. A sentence or two explaining a little backstory would have been welcome.

Originally I hit a dead end after picking the lock. Maybe you should let players leave comments and a rating at that point--I wound up having to backtrack and deliberately get killed so that I could write this.

I like the idea but you might be being a little too ambitious by having too many choices. If you have a branch on every page you can quickly escalate on the 1-2-4-8-16-32-64-128-crazy number scale of pages. The writing is strong and I would definitely recommend finishing it but maybe limit yourself to perhaps a dozen or so overlapping story-lines, each 20-40 pages long? That's still pretty epic but doable if you have the time :)

I would have definitely rated this game higher if it had been finished. As it was, I did quite enjoy what I did read, especially as there was an air of mystery hovering around what I did read.

I did feel like the player character wasn't someone whose head I could easily get inside. Part of that was the complete lack of reaction to anything that should probably have affected the character in some way. For instance, the body in the closet. There were no emotions attached to it...no disgust, or even curiosity about who the body might belong to. And the note saying, 'You look pretty when you sleep'. Really creepy...but no reaction from the player character at all? Having said that, given the 'dream' sequence at the beginning, I do wonder if the intention was for that lack of emotion to play a part later on in the storygame.

I really liked the variety of items that could be picked up. I'm one of those people who, when playing games, will pick up anything I can, just in case it might prove to be useful later on. So I really liked that aspect.

I did find the dream sequence at the beginning to work really well, and I did feel like it's maybe supposed to foreshadow later events in this storygame. I did find it a bit disappointing that there was very little background information about the player character. I could almost believe that there was amnesia involved...but the thought about not being able to afford laundry seems to disprove that theory. There was also one very jarring moment where the tense changes from present to past, which unfortunately did pull me out of the story.

This works well as the start to a storygame, but it would have been nice to see a finished piece. Lots of great potential, but I would love to see it explored further!

great book pls make more

This is amazing, I don't know how else to put it.

nice

It was kinda confusing to me I had to keep going back and trying other options

Everything u choose is wrong

This is really great and i would love to see this project become a full story game. Some things in the story fell purposeless like the dream sequence at the start or the rotten meat but you'll probably make use of them in the finished project

I was disappointed by the lack of choices I was able to make, The narrative was descriptive and interesting, but the story was too linear.

I guess I won. Rather than hitting the page of no return, I hit the page of no possible progress with no links or text to allow me to continue. This is good, however, even if the beginning is a little vague. I like that the items actually did something, too, and they weren't too difficult to figure out.

Incomplete

I did notice a broken link. Spoiler: when you open the door with paperclip, and click 'move on' , it is a broken link. Its great, anyway.

5/8

There's a dead page. Fix that.

I like the story, but it was a bit confusing at times. Words have meaning and in some places you either left out words or used the wrong one.

I don't mean to sound overly harsh, because I realize this is only a first draft (and an unfinished one), but you'll need to go over it again to make it clearer in some places.

If and when you revamp/revise, I probably won't notice without my attention being drawn to it since I've already left a rating. (This is the main reason you should never publish an unfinished story.)