Player Comments on Silent Night

This story was really quite good. The writing in particular was solid. All different interesting sentence styles, an immediate noir tone to the narrative voice, and a really good sense of authentic dialogue structure.
I love when storygames give me interesting, developed text for the choices--not just "take them to a soup kitchen" or "fight them" but choices that give motive and character, like " Desperate or not, a crime's a crime. I crack my knuckles and prepare to go to work." Now that's a well-written choice! Now, I'm not just choosing fight/no fight but what kind of guy I am. So I was hooked right from the first choice.

That strength in the text of the choices extends to make an actually interesting fight: I often see choices like dodge/punch/kick with no reference to the story. If you carefully read the text of the story, the choice to make becomes obvious. The man is large and burly--better to dodge and duck. So again, the choices and the body of the story work well together. That doesn't happen easily, and I appreciate the work that went into that.
The second fight was quite good too, although I think I would have liked perhaps one more tactical choice there, since I enjoyed that in the first fight--the second fight feels a little less characterful, perhaps because it's less personal feeling.

My one comment about narrative flow is that the paragraphing needs work. There are a few times when multiple speakers all speak in one paragraph, and it does get a bit confusing:
"Don't mention it, kids. You need a place to stay?" They look to each other for a moment, before shrugging as if figuring "what the hell" and nod their heads. "Well, there's a shelter a few blocks that way." You point in the direction of the homeless shelter. "Only place on that street that's lit up. They'll let you stay there, even feed you."
That's a pretty interesting moment that loses some momentum without more clearly breaking it out into multiple paragraphs.

All in all, this was seriously impressive as a piece of fanfiction. It was well-written and managed to create some narrative suspense, as well as make me makein-character decisions about morality and combat tactics.

I thought the moral choices were pretty thought-provoking (well, as thought-provoking as two opposing sentences can be) and gray, different people would have different answers to those dilemmas.

I also like how you can tell which option is going to get you killed beforehand if you're really trying to avoid dying. No tricks or anything. For example, when someone throws a punch at you it sounds pretty implausible to just grab their swinging fist and break it. However it's not overly obvious so you can still die if you're not thinking that hard about it.

My favorite part (I'm pretty sure I played through every page unless there were hidden variables) was when the Question rushes in at the eight men and then gets pushed/kicked into the water and starts drowning. Obviously it gives you the "Dead" ending, but I thought it was realistic that there's an option to just give in and die, anyone might have a little part of them thinking that if they get beat up and shot and pushed into cold water. I liked "It doesn't hurt." It kind of made the scene better than if it had been "You sink into the freezing water, your whole body hurts, you want it to end, it really hurts, finally death brings you sweet relief", that was probably what I would expect to happen. I guess maybe you put that because he was numb from the cold. But still, I thought it was good and a little unexpected.

This is a short and sweet Christmas story. I ended with an ending which resulted in me spending my Christmas as usual knowing that I had done good deeds. The branching’s good and there were plenty of choices that actually mattered.
5/8. Pretty good story.

A Christmas special that's quite mediocre. Nothing too good, nothing too bad. The plot is honestly boring and linear, and it's just similar 'crime scenes' that involve fighting. As soon as I got to the guy beating up the children I realized how this prose will go on.

However, the writing used makes the entire storygame enjoyable despite the plot. The uses of onomatopoeia and decent sense of immersion are the main factors in the storygame. The game isn't too hard to complete.

Overall, this is a decent storygame that I'm not against reading again. Overall, 4/8.

Yet another excellent question fanfic by the man who seems to only write question fanfics. not that I'm complaining!

9/10 I save 10/10s for truly special occasions now, sorry.

5/8
I really liked how you let me go back to the start of the fight.

Well, I can't say I felt much about this story either way.
It was more of a series of fist fights than a story anyway.

One choice was pretty much totally meaningless, which is really one too many in a story of this length.

There were some cool lines, and the action is nice. I enjoyed bringing JUSTICE upon the TV thieves.

That's really all I have to say that wouldn't be meaningless padding. Nothing to complain about the writing, but there could have been more of an actual story.
It shouldn't take too long to read though. So check it out if you were feeling like it.

This story is okay. I'm not sure if I like it more than the first question, though it is okay. It can mostly be broken down into three stages, so I’ll talk about all of those later. Though this is a warning that this review will spoil all of this game. It is a 5 to 10 minute read so if you are wondering if you should take 5 minutes out of your ever so hectic life, then just do it.

Now at first you have a couple stealing some TV’s. They are some drug addicts and in some ways I sympathize with them. I like how you let them go after they surrender, I mean they were scared shitless after all. I don’t think this should be fleshed out more because it just feels real. Also the soup kitchen was a nice touch.

Then you have an illusion of choice with the children. I wish it would have just resulted in a game over with you just never learning about the docks, though I guess it works. Not much to say about this encounter. It is short and sweet and I like it.

Though I wish more happened in the docks. The other two things were small scale crimes, though this isn’t. I wish there was some BBEG or just more things that happen on the docks. This is one of my only criticisms of this game.

Though on a more general note about the story itself, it is fairly linear, though I like how it is separated to the point that I don’t mind it all that much. This story just sounds like a typical night for questions. Nothing much happened, and it is just a bunch of small things, and while I prefer a big plot were one major thing happens, that is this games major difference from the first one. They are about the same length, and the main difference is that this one is a few small crimes and the other one is one big crime.

In conclusion, I like this game about as much as the first question. It is short and fun, and a good read. I enjoy myself a quick, good story and this delivers on that.

5 out of 8

This story is actually pretty interesting. Many people like to role play as police officers.
Very well thought out, also.
8/8 by zaydam1000000

Despite being short and quite linear it was still enjoyable because the scenes were descriptive enough and your style, as usual, was very similar to that of an actual comic. As Jodie said, the fact that the right choices weren't always obvious also gave a nice touch to the story.

I really enjoyed this.

It was short and sweet, well written, but it felt very linear. I would have liked to have seen choices that didn't strong arm me. There were multiple endings(different results for the fight and some bad ends), but the choices felt a little empty because they all lead to the same fight no matter what.

Besides that, it was descriptive and engaging. I had fun reading it and wish there was more of it to read.

Great job!

I give it a 4/8, would have been a 5 if it wasn't so linear.

Pretty cool story

Hey, Chris wrote another storygame. Since he said it won't be a question fanfiction, I wonder what it is?
Oh... It's a Question fanfiction.

Anyway, it was a short story and all, but it did have a nice amount of FEELS for the length. Plus, it's sorta CHRIStmas themed, so that's fitting.