Hyperborea

It was an overall good experience

This story is really interesting. On one hand, it did manage to hook me, on the other it had a decent number of problems with it. I mean, it was okay. I’d say read at least a path of it, it isn’t overly long.

Starting with the branching, it’s okay. I didn’t like all the choices linking to the same place in the first choice, unless I missed a hidden variable thing that affects, but besides that the branching was decent. Not the most amount of paths I’ve seen, but the story has fun with it and isn’t overly committed to some singular plot.

I liked a lot of the hospital stuff, thought the nurse was a robot at first lol. The plot itself is pretty decent, don’t want to go into too many spoilers.

The main issue with this game is the spelling/grammar. Sometimes links aren't capitalized, the formatting was goofy at time, the game broke my cys dark mode (which isn’t a criticism, just an unfortunate side effect of custom fonts I think). It felt like you wrote the story not caring about these things that much, promising you’d come back to it later, then didn’t. Because honestly the prose and everything isn’t that bad, it’s just a lot of this stuff. And usually it isn’t a problem for me at all, but here it is.

I’m not saying this game is stellar, pun intended, it certainly has problems with its story too, but that’s the main thing that stuck out to me. You said you’re going to take it down after judging, I assume to fix all of this stuff and expand the plot, and I recommend you do, because this game has a lot of the bones of a good story, just missing some muscle and a lot of the skin.

This seems to be a kind of murder mystery in a sci-fi setting. Or rather, an attempted murder mystery.

The setting is somewhat interesting. I liked the labor versus power conflict. Those are always fun in a sci-fi or cyberpunk type story. The emails were a nice immersive touch.

My main problem with the mystery, however, is that I didn't get too many raging clues. I suppose it could be that it's late and I just failed to see them, however.

I wasn't terribly satisfied with either of the two endings I got, but overall this wasn't bad. There were a couple of odd grammar issue, like a few sentences starting with lowercase letters, and, unless my eyes are deceiving me, I'm pretty sure the font size changed at one point.

But yeah, I've read three stories in this contest so far, and this one rises to the top of them. That's not necessarily high praise, as the two I've read were very obviously put together on the due date, but I've definitely seen worse on this website. Overall, cool setting and premise.