Player Comments on Novelty Bones

Well, this is a short story. And the "proper" endings come a bit surprising and too soon... I wished the story would go on for a bit longer. I don't mind that the chapters are pretty short, I'm used to that from text adventure games on early home computers, and it has the advantage that you feel very much in control because not too much happend without you being able to influence it. As it stands, I think the story could be extended from what now are some of the ending chapters.

I enjoyed what was there; it was just really, really short.

I'd highly recommend reading other storygames on this site to get an idea of how good storygames can be. Your writing style seems good enough from the little that I read of it; I believe that with a bit of inspiration and some more ambition, you could probably make a better storygame.

Mostly sucked

One more thing, you don't need to apologize and say it sucked. It didn't suck completely(it did suck a bit but not irredeemably), when I read it I saw some passion and genuine interest in storycraft. When you write like that, it won't suck, at least not forever because you'll go back and rework it. It's not in great shape right now, and it needs a lot of work, but nobody's writing comes out perfect.

There were things I liked in this story that I didn't talk about in my earlier review.

I like how you start the story off with a puzzling encounter, that builds some intrigue and suspense into the readers' minds. When I was reading this, I was interested in that creepy robed figure; Why is he acting this way and why does he want an old bone. I really love that because that's what made me click the next link, I was interested to know. So you've got a handle on that, which is workable, you have a foundation to build on. Also, I liked the choices, they were logical and made sense, driving the story forward. You also have a scary monster, which is good.

I like how you have a good and bad ending, but both those pages are remarkably short. That's the main thing with this story, it needs more, and given what you have so far, I'm confident that you'll be able to write a lot more.

I think you made some effort and I really like the humor of the never ending “running away” link. I thought it was kind of cute.

You have a great sense of imagination, but I think you might need to work on this a bit more. I find the ideas compelling but I end this story feeling unsatisfied and with so many questions. Who is that robed man? When he completed the skeleton, why did the skeleton disappear? Why did he fall to the ground bleeding? How did you get to working at the shop?

It’s incomplete and when you want to tell a story you want to really paint a beautiful picture. You want us to know the main character, to understand a bit about them. I totally understand that you wanted to tell a short story of an encounter with the arcane and the mystical, and I thought it was fun, but you could do more with this premise. Really run with the idea, maybe give the main character a motivation, a reason, something that lets us root for him. Maybe don’t have the wizard kill him right away in the bad ending, maybe you fight back or run away.

One of the endings where you chase the man and he kills you with a knife leads back to the shop. In general, when you reach a death ending, it’s better to just end the game than loop back because that can be a little annoying. If the user wanted to, they would simply restart on their own, so just put an endgame link next time, that would be my suggestion. I see that you did do that for the 2 main endings, so good job on that.

I really want to see more from you because it sounds like there’s a lot of potential for interesting ideas about reserruction, necromancy, creepy skeletons, and it would be cool to see a shopkeeper main character in the midst of all that magical chaos.