Nautilus

Not bad! The writing was pretty good, and the story was interesting enough. Though, the endings felt a bit rushed, especially with the dialogue.

Ah yes, the ol "offhandedly mentioned two suns", a classic. Nothing more succinct when you want to quickly and easily establish that your historical seeming setting is actually not.

The baseline prose quality is as expected for a guy that's a part of multiple IF communities and working to overthrow CoG. Only a few typos, the most noticeable being the doubled first line on the “I regret many things, but not leaving" page.

The story itself starts out promising, but just sort of feels like it's lacking some oomph. Many choices only effect a small bit of dialogue, and they all start looping once you get out to sea, or sometimes leading to identical pages in addition to identical outcomes. There's basically only two endings once you set out to sea, with some very slight variation in how you get there. From the setup it really had seemed like there'd be more dramatic places to steer this story.


Also, nitpicking perhaps, but it's a fantasy setting, and I'm just not really seeing any reason WHY it's a fantasy setting. Nothing happens here that wouldn't fit the (much less crowded) real world categories besides a few offhand mentions of non necessary background info and yes, the two suns.

Anyway, this was published so early I know the deadline wasn't a factor, so maybe the inspiration well just ran dry. But it's still a pretty solid and decent little piece and far and away the only passable thing that's ever come from the land of KAE.

Ah yes, in a dramatic scene where I choose to betray my own brother, %%CHOICE%=%2%% is the perfect choice of words to match the situation.

The rest was good though. 5/8.

Good story nicely written. No big SPAG issues, although I did catch a few words that were obviously intended to be other things, but the misspelling still almost worked (i.e. now for not).

The relationship between the brothers was interesting to explore and bringing the opening parable back at the end rounds out the story nicely.

Solid writing overall with decent branching and endings, Nautilus does well on developing themes of family, guilt, and fishing in just 9k words. There were some odd sounding bits here and there, but nothing stuck with me that I needed to point out. All in all, an enjoyable quick read.