Player Comments on Engineered Desires

Synopsis:
The desire chips alter people’s perceptions of reality, but you remain unaffected. Hired by a corporation to stop a terrorist plot to destroy these chips: you must choose whether to bow to the technology, or betray it.

Positives:
-Nice hearing aids reference, I feel so seen.
-I love the idea of a screen coat, wearable advertising seems like something that genuinely could occur in this sort of cyberpunk nightmare.
-In the ‘Woodfolk Option - Use the Device to switch off every chip on the planet’ I like the call back to the city smog at the start. This ‘circular’ narrative is really interesting.

Things to improve:
-SPAG in this CYOA is probably its poorest point. Here are all the errors I found:
1) On the ‘demand to know what’s going on’ page, you write ‘coomputer’. Is this some sort of semen screen? If it’s not, it’s ‘computer’.
2) On the ‘agree to set out on the journey’ page, you write ‘willl’ instead of ‘will’.
3) On the ‘go to the land of untapped desire’ page you write ‘haird’ instead of ‘hair’.
On the same page you also write ‘word’ instead of the appropriate plural ‘words’.
4) On the ‘ask for further information’ page you write coroporations, which I’m assuming is ‘corporations’.
5) On the ‘Desmond's Option - Destroy the Device, keeping things running as they are’ page you add another ‘m’ to ‘beaming’.
6) On the ‘Mysterious Woman Option - Use the Device to put everyone into a state of bliss’ page you misspell ‘reproduce’ as ‘repoduce’.
7) On the awake page you write "Alright boys :get that one!". This should be "Alright boys: get that one!"
On the same page you write ‘You're surrounded by metal bars in a very bright, dirty-white room: an Upcity Prison Cell.’
‘Upcity’ should be capitalised. It’s a proper noun. However unless the prison cell is a named location, this should not be capitalised.
-You repeat ‘smog in this story a lot. In the first three sentences it’s repeated three times and it continues to clutter the rest of the text. Perhaps picking a different word would be better?
-This narrative has three endings from what I can see, with two ‘default’ endings (since they can be achieved anyway due to the gauntlet style of the game) and a third and final ending that can be achieved by speaking to the mysterious woman. Since all of my choices led to endings almost immediately, none of them felt like they mattered. Having a few more choices earlier on would improve this game to no end.

Overall this feels like the start and the end of a much longer story game. Well written, minus the spelling errors I pointed out earlier, I’d be interested in seeing and extended edition with more choices. Good luck in your future writing endeavours.

For something that was submitted for use in the Cyberpunk contest, I do have to say that I was anticipating a bit more than what I received, but for the length, not bad.

You put forth a lot of interesting ideas and concepts, but I felt as though you abandoned those ideas pretty early on. To me, it almost seems as if you rushed this story's making. There were a lot of things you could do with Birch Oak and Desmond, and a lot of other things, but again, for the length, I would expect as much. For something so short, you definitely did show promise and intent. Perhaps if you took some more time to really delve deep into these ideas you've marinated, you could come out with something really interesting.

I do have to mention though, the story felt very monotonous without much character dialogue, or people to meet. It certainly felt like a one-time jog to the end. You go from place to place, doing nothing more than think about your surroundings or say a few sentences. It doesn't leave anything behind for the reader to want to investigate. "That's that," is essentially what someone communicates by doing so. "No point in looking if nothing's there."

There is little reason for the protagonist to be the protagonist. Nothing is explained, nothing is questioned, and the story moves on. Even the protagonist themselves wastes no time thinking, "Why me?" The setup of the world is good, with a bit of description offered, but for most readers it seems a bit lacking. The characters seem flat, with little personality or intrigue, and are simply there because the story needs them to be there.

The story also contains its fair share of grammatical and spelling errors that could be easily pruned through the use of Google Docs or other free softwares like Grammarly (which I highly suggest because they are very helpful for catching things you don't tend to notice.)

There's definitely potential in this concept gaining some ground if only the ideas were developed more. If you add onto this, it would feel a lot more like a proper cyberpunk rather than a themed rainy day click-through. However, for the length, it did just enough to feel like something.

"The story involves learning the ideologies of the three main factions, then choosing which of them you support."

It sure is that, and nothing more. I didn't find anyone's actions to be very believable, the main character seems to have been chosen to make this choice with no one willing to stop him, simply for being the main character.

The whole thing is so simply told I guess the best interpretation I can go with us that it's a fable passed down to later generations from one of the apocalypse endings.

Some interesting ideas, but not much was done with them. The author is competent overall but this felt sloppy and rushed. If nothing else, more proofreading would improve it.

An absolutely amazing piece of science fiction literature. Please make more stories!

Whilst I have no storygame of my own at the present moment, I can say this, I feel like there should have been more options, more exploring to be done in such a massive city. That is just my own opinion. As far as details on the story, I thought the usage of one person from each final choice was perhaps unnecessary. Not to carp, I just felt like there should be more characters to interact with. For the theme of Cyberpunk, I thought it was nice.

This runs a bit on the short side of things, but the writing is competent. That is a trait that seems to run consistent with Flutter's works.

I would say that the length only feels to be a slight detriment, because in my opinion, this story doesn't seem like its had enough time to truly hook me on a grand scale. Still, this little slice of cyberpunk wasn't one that was boring at the end of the day.

Simply having a wall of text doesn't excuse this story of being bad. Yes there's a plot here, yes it's well written (which are the main reasons why this story avoids the trash chute) but the 1,2,3 reason why this story is bad is how ridiculously short it is. I think I got the longest path which was like 8 or so pages nowhere near enough time to actually connect with the characters and what's worse is that there's no real branches that develop the story due to the length. Instead when you reach the end it just gives you 3 or so options to pick from each giving their own ending.

Overall, once again this could of been something good if the author had just waited and took the time to polish and expand on the basic plot.