How To Bring an End to Things?

Disclaimer: to the author, take everything in this review with a grain of salt. I’m not a professional writer and only somewhat of a seasoned reviewer. To the readers, this review will contain some spoilers, so I implore you to read the storygame first.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Instantly, the description introduces the setting—a city of undead—along with the situation it faces. Due to the prompt for this story, it makes sense to focus more on the society as opposed to individual characters here. The rhetorical question at the end nicely summarizes the stakes.

The opening of the first page illustrates the grimdark nature of the story. Discussions of violence are not shied away from, even when speaking to a child. This provides more context to the relationship between necromancers and ordinary societies, where the former were persecuted and ostracized. Perhaps this foreshadows a source of future conflict in the story?

Regarding dialogue spanning multiple paragraphs, the general rule is to place a quotation mark at the start of every paragraph (not just the first), while only adding a closing quotation mark to the last one. I caught a slight grammatical error: “born and raised by a family not linked by them by blood” (the first ‘by’ should be replaced with ‘to’).

The first page ends with a prophecy about the chosen one, and if this goes like most other prophecy stories I’ve read, it also serves as a call to action for the protagonist.

WRITING STYLE

The protagonist’s personality and thoughts shine through the narrative. Descriptions are based on his feelings towards certain events and situations, like the boredom of riding the camel and his favorite parts of the lesson. Even the information provided about the goddess was more in relation to how it could help him rather than general information about her. This is a strength of this storygame, which ensures the narrative is paced well. In some stories I’ve recently read, the author either over-relies on seemingly irrelevant descriptions that slows the pacing or places an info-dump in the midst of a story. Yet, this story avoids this by ensuring everything is filtered through the lens of the protagonist. As such, each detail is made relevant. Even the similes reference things the protagonist is familiar with: “the place was as cold as the winters back in the village”.

Speaking of character voice, to echo another comment, the characterization of the protagonist as a child is done well. This is evident in his dialogue, which captures the over-enthusiastic excitement of a child, along with the tendency to both oversimplify and dramatize matters. Choice of diction was employed effectively with phrases like ’then all of sudden’ and ‘blasted all the bad guys away’. Him being distracted while resurrecting the rat is also on-point for children with their shorter attention spans. Also, I enjoyed his brutal honesty when describing Nachalo’s home, along with his insistence he’s not a child. It reminds me of my toddler cousin who never fails to let us know that he’s not a child everytime we visit him.

A note on dialogue: when using a dialogue tag after a sentence or between two lines of dialogue, do not capitalize it. Nor do you use a full stop for the end of the character's speech, but instead, replace it with a comma. Example: it should be ‘So it is important to separate the truth from the glamorized tales,” he said.’

“Even though you had been very secret about it, the baker discovered it and told on your parents.” - There are slight grammatical errors here. First, ‘secret’ should be ‘secretive’, as the former isn’t an adjective. Next, it should be ‘told on you to your parents’, as the current sentence implies the baker revealed something about the parents rather than the protagonist.

The writing style keeps me immersed, yet to take it a step further, the author could focus on eliminating redundant words. I’ll paraphrase advice given to me a while back: when writing, the aim is clarity. Try to prevent repeating information unless it is very important to the reader (e.g. foreshadowing details) or done to create a certain effect (e.g. used to portray a descent into insanity). In this phrase, you could change ‘the practicing part’ to ‘practicing’: “The theoretical stuff and memorization of useless facts were boring, but the fun part is the practicing part.” Similarly, “there was no way going back now” could be shortened to either “there was no way back now” or “there was no going back now”. And “Breathing felt as if you were breathing through a thin straw” could be simplified to “It felt as if you were breathing through a thin straw”.

There were a few grammatical errors throughout, mainly missing words, but nothing that a quick proofread wouldn’t fix. However, there was a sudden shift to first person pov in the paragraph starting from ‘I opened my notebook and started my prayer’. This was slightly jarring, though it reverts back to second person pov later.

CHARACTERS & PLOT

I really liked the unique premise—a child necromancer trying to master the art—as it opposes the usual portrayal of necromancers. Anastas is a realistically written child, with noble goals, even though he often gets bored or distracted in his lessons. The two possible futures he desires are both optimistic and moral; a departure from the normal depiction of necromancy as dangerous and evil.

It was an interesting detail that his hunger while casting the spell made the rat start consuming everything in its path haha. The existence of goddesses and different levels of spells added to the rich worldbuilding.

I don’t know why I laughed at the line: ‘Neither of you laughed. It wasn’t that funny.’

Nice touch that the teacher’s lessons influence the protagonist’s actions. After making a choice, he thought about the teacher’s words and justified the decision accordingly.

Given that the story is focused on necromancers, the narrative balances the lighter moments with darker scenes almost veering into horror. One instance is when a lady randomly collapses, dead, in front of him. Then one of the choices lead to a neverending walk to a tower before he too ends up dead. I enjoyed the flashback which showed the beginnings of necromancy and how it’s often associated with motifs of blood and pain. Despite these, the protagonist manages to see beauty in the art.

The twist, that Nachalo and Nastava wanted two different worlds and the protagonist had to choose between them, was unexpected but executed well. Ooh, I liked that it was actually the shapeshifter goddess who he met. This was foreshadowed well. Moreover, the protagonist’s frankness and boldness is demonstrated once again, this time as he stands up to the goddess. Even better, he used the advice of not wavering in his choices here too.

The ending brought everything full circle, with the memories of the teacher and Alyona drawing parallels to the first scene at the start. I like that it references a more positive outlook towards the future, a nod to the first choice, showing that the protagonist achieved his greatest desire.

In the other path, using an excerpt from a chronicle about the protagonist is a great way to show his corruption arc. It allows us to see this from a far, distant view of an unbiased writer, covering moments over a long span of time without dwelling too much on specific scenes. And in the branch where the protagonist chooses to protect his loved ones, if he follows the path of the goddess, the information revealed in the other path foreshadows the mistake of this situation; it’s implied that his son would be manipulated by her too.

Overall, it’s a solid short story and I can’t believe you wrote it in a day.

This certainly isn't Darius's best work, having been made in a day, but it could be a good contender for one of his best works if it was a lot longer. I'm not sure why Darius didn't just keep what was written already and publish it unfinished. Surely he wouldn't have gotten shamed for having 50k words already written. It would've been a better entry than this thing anyway.

Well regardless this story is definitely just what he had originally planned condensed into less than 10k words. There's character information that isn't relevant or needed and the magic system is so complex that it doesn't make sense to be in this short of a story.

I did like Darius's portrayal of Necromancy though. The idea that the protagonist wants everyone to see that Necromancy can be used for good, rather than what we usually see in other storygames on the site, evil, is rather cute and wholesome.

I also enjoyed how one of the choices you could make in a later part of the story depending on one you made in the past. I originally thought you had just missed the choice due the time constraints but was pleasantly surprised when I went back to see the different options.

I can't really see anything bad with the story itself, other than the plot being pushed too tight together and the fact that the writing is a little choppy and odd. But those things are probably just due to the word constraint.

Overall the story was fine Darius, but I really think you should take this down and finish writing what you had originally planned. Or heed Cel's advice and stick to writing gay stuff. Whatever works best for you. ;)

IMPRESSION #1: Epilogue: Bringing an End to the Age of Gods (Read the afterword too)

I relate to the afterword partially. Literately just because the game I'm currently working on is way too big. We'll see how that goes though.

Sadly I can't critique this too deeply as a first impression due to being quite a bit sleep deprived now. But given that I got a satisfying ending after doing some reading this at least felt complete. Generic praise but I liked how I started by picking to be a necromancer then slowly was shown why that wasn't a good idea and was able to seemingly undo that. Its kinda cool.

Prose was um...I guess not my style but noting came off as bad. There was one paragraph that had I instead of you that stuck out but that's pretty darn minor (though its cool to see that you write with I as default in some scenes).

I will say...and this might have more to do with not paying 100% attention...but there seemed to be a lot going on that didn't really have much to do with your progression or helped too much with immersion. Some pages did the latter well...others didn't. What I actually mean is that there were a lot of characters that seemed to just kinda be there...I kept being told they were important...but it was hard to really parse what that meant in the context of the story.

Like I get that the Gods are...well Gods and all but...because there was so many of them all being presented about equaly regardless of what you did...I stopped keeping track of them as individuals. I'm not sure if that was the point...or if there even was a point to that...but it seemed a bit unfocused. Not all the time mind you...but most of the time...maybe like half.

I will say this though. I'm very impressed you wrote this in one day...even if it took you the whole day! Perhaps that's just my issue though with not being able to write that much that quickly though.

Fundamentally I would have a much easier time critiquing this if I knew what exactly you were trying to go for. I think that would be useful in general I feel. Like if I said "this scene is boring" it would mean nothing if the scene was not meant to be entertaining on a shallow level. Or "This prose is overly dense" when that's the point of said prose.

But yeah...I did think the pages leading up to the ending were satisfying...felt like it was tying what it set up together...even if it happened near the end. To be expected of a story of this size...especially if its written in one day!

May come back to this...who knows! Found this entertaining enough I suppose! ;)

I enjoyed this. It was a nice read and I liked the plot. You actually gave the main character a background and a personality unlike so many other shorter stories on here, so that was good. It made me care about what happened. I really liked my first playthrough, but it gave me higher expectations for more playthroughs, which didn’t deliver. This really feels more like a linear short story than a game.

The intro to the story was good in that it gave us information without info dumping, and it flowed well into the actual story. It built the universe for us so we could fully appreciate what happens in Anastovok.

Now I have some small nitpicky things that bugged me. On the very first page you say “for years, decades, hundreds of years”. You could’ve just said centuries. You also had a lot of extra words. For example: “made even the history lessons less dry in comparison”. You didn’t need to add “in comparison” because the word “less” is already comparing them. There were many instances where you repeated the same word in a sentence twice, and the grammar wasn’t the best. However, all of these things could be fixed with a simple proofread. It feels rushed because it is rushed. If you wanted to spend time cleaning this up you could.

Some of the dialogue felt very unnatural. It read like you wanted/needed it to be written but you just put it in quotation marks and assigned a person to be talking. Speaking of dialogue, on the page “make everyone see how beautiful necromancy is” it was formatted weirdly. When the teacher was talking you wrote two sentences, started a new paragraph, and then continued what he was saying. I don’t see the reason for the line break. It confused me because then I thought the boy was talking again, but it made no sense whatsoever.

Lastly, there were a few words that didn’t really work how you used them. For example, you wrote “and is rushing inside not the penultimate evidence of you panicking?” Penultimate means the second to last. How would that be the second to last evidence of you panicking?

Overall, I liked it. It would definitely be better if not written in one day, but I get it. If you spent time revising it then it could be good, but as of now it’s meh.

This is not one of my preferred genres but the story seemed fairly well written for what was there. I found it hard to engage with for some reason and the story ended a bit unexpectedly but according to the comments this was written in a day, which is quite an achievement! The whole ensemble, characters, plot, setting etc, were all fine and it was a nice distraction for five minutes, perhaps this story could benefit from being developed and expanded? Not a bad story but Darius is a good writer who has written some much better stories :)

My first playthrough I got Epilogue 2. I really enjoyed the way you write kids. I think it’s really easy to characterize them as TOO childish, and veer into corny territory. You really sold me on him being a young student of magic, especially in the thought processes like praying to Nachalo so he would become powerful enough to not have to use magic circles anymore! (It was also a nice touch mentioning his son complaining about learning the fundamentals of magic … it really brought everything… shall we say… full circle, hehe). Also was Alyosha named after Alyssa/Alyona?

I’m not going to be too nitpicky about grammar and spelling since you basically wrote the whole thing in a day per the afterword! But some things I noticed:

- Paragraph 6 of “‘We’re Here.’ Your Teacher Said” - vile should be spelled vial in this context
- Paragraphs 9 & 13 of “The House of Nachalo” - Point of view changes from third to first person… don’t think this was intentional.
- Paragraph 16 of the first Epilogue - Reconned should be reckon (unless there was reconnaissance being done that I didn’t pick up on!)

Overall, I enjoyed this, and would love to see the Expanded Vision as it were. :^)

There’s not much in the way of branching paths here, but the prose is still good.

Though it’s a little short, the mythology and world-building kept me engaged and wanting more. The world here is creative, and I’d be interested in what a sequel would look like.

Alright story.

>So I settled with this one which is planned and written in one day.

I can tell. Stick to writing gay stuff, Darius.