Player Comments on Durwood Mansion

The writing in this story is so good. That dinner scene was terrifying!

I'm not going to lie, I slogged through it. That says nothing about the quality of the writing, it was very good, just... not my type of book. But the plot was interesting and I liked the family.

This is one of the best written stories I've seen here. Excellent use of description, including subversion of expectations with use of metaphors and figurative language. Just excellent.

Also, the literal descriptions are really nice as well.

Emotionally, this story does capture the dread of the ghost story archetype, but more importantly, it captures the REGRET of that archetype. That flavor is probably the best part of this. The sense of lost control, of being unable to fix the past, being stuck in a state of grief, shame, and sorrow, with just a hint of terror and anxiety.

So, overall, I very much enjoyed this. Well worth the read.

This was really good! I appreciate the conscious choice to focus on world-building before providing choices to the readers. You took your time to set up the characters well and I think it works stylistically with the story.

The imagery and the description of sensations is pretty important for a horror story and again, it was handled really well.

The actual choices seem a bit... counter-intuitive I guess? The result doesn't always seem very easy to predict. For example, you have the option to sit at the dinner table or walk away. Walking away seems to be the better choice, but turns out actually accepting the offer to sit down is the path that leads to the more satisfying endings. It didn't affect my experience too much I suppose, but I still thought that I'd mention it.

In conclusion, really good story with strong imagery. Good job!

There certainly wasn't a ton of branching, but I really enjoyed the writing and Arthur's character. No SPAG errors that I saw, but I also consistently miss those. The dead people felt dead through the way they were described in words, which may seem obvious, but when dealing with reanimated corpses, a lot of people get it wrong, and I really appreciate it that TrueParanormal got it correct.