forget-me-not

For a school project, I’d see this was decently put together. I feel like you could’ve improved the game by exploring the subject matter a bit more and trying to explain Noah’s point of view, being the abused party in the relationship and how that effects him mentally, rather than just focussing on Emily’s mental state.

I don’t really understand why the story has the exact same result regardless of whether to tell the teacher the truth or lie to her. It seems kind of counter-productive to the story’s main message. Abuse victims, for a variety of reasons, do often feel like they can’t tell the truth about how bad the situation is, and lying about it does tend to have a negative impact. I kind of feel like the situation should’ve gotten worse when Noah lied to the teacher, instead of following the same path that the game takes when he tells his teacher the truth.

One thing that I think would’ve been better, at least in terms of advice for people in unhealthy relationships, is if Noah had called the emergency services as soon as he got the suicide threats instead of waiting until he got to Emily’s house. This advice I think is healthier for two reasons:

1. If the suicide threats are serious, then the person sending them might commit/attempt suicide before the other person gets there, so making sure that the police and ambulance arrives as soon as possible could be the difference between life and death.

2. If the suicide threats are not serious (which is most often the case in these situations) then the person who’s sending them is just doing so to further try and control and manipulate their partner, and put them in a situation where they’re too scared to leave. If the partner arrives at their door begging them not to commit suicide, then they’ve gotten exactly what they wanted, leaving them with the mindset that self-harming and threatening suicide are both effective ways to gain control in their relationship. If instead the partner doesn’t show up, and they’re suicide threats are rewarded with police cars and an ambulance, this’ll hopefully teach the person that threatening suicide is not the best way to go about getting attention.

That said though, I thought the general message of the game was a good one. For a second there, I was worried that the couple were going to end up getting back together and living happily ever after… And of course was extremely relieved when that didn’t happen. The game did a good job of explaining that sometimes, even if you love someone, getting out of an unhealthy relationship is the best thing for both of you.

So, to sum up… As far as storygames go it didn’t really have anything going for it, but for a school project, it was actually pretty good. Hope that Miss Altorio gives you a good grade for your effort.

I mean, it's not much of a story in the traditional sense, every page is just a fat paragraph without line breaks passively summarizing events instead of actually writing them out. We get things like:

***

Noah decides to visit Emily. When he visits her, he finds out that she is happier now, and is on antidepressants. She thanks him for helping her when she was in a very bad situation, and apologizes for the way she manipulated and guilt tripped Noah. She realized, with the help of her therapist, that she was putting a huge stress on him. She asks that even though their relationship will never be the same, if they could continue to date. Noah declines, as he wants to focus on his future in university and tells Emily that because he partially blames himself for letting Emily get into that kind of mindset, he doesn't want anything like that to happen again. Emily, although disappointed, understands Noah's reasons and they part amicably.

***

Which in a real story would've been pages of actual dialogue and some semblance of emotion along with, you know, choices.

Agreed that it's better than most school stories we've gotten here, but I'd still advise to just leave these things in Sneak Peek and share the URL with the teacher and whoever else it's intended for instead of opening it up to the public on the site.

Is your Shift button broken?

One of the few not retarded school stories we got. Of course it isn't the best story around but at least its not "lol bootyjuice420 uwu what shirt will you wear on your toast"