Sir Osis

Sir Osis was one of the most enjoyable games I’ve read here. The reason for such joy is the light-hearted tone, the cave of time style, and how smoothly and nicely the story flows. Really, I have nothing but praise for this.

Light hearted tone: This is told from the perspective of the narrator, describing the life of Sir Osis of Liver, a lazy knight that has the choice to go on an adventure, in order to exterminate villains. I don’t want to give away too much, so SPOILERS AHEAD.

The jokes from both the narrator and Sir Osis, of how he denies his physical weakness, his laziness, among others, combined with the narrator telling of his actions with a chuckle on her face. A quote from the beginning that I found particularly amusing is: “He had so many important things to take care of, like how he couldn’t open his eyes longer than three seconds.” There were also very enjoyable short sentences, like “Perhaps he should stop there and wait a while, he figured.


So he did.
”

Cave of Time style: There isn’t much to say about this, other than the fact that I enjoyed exploring all the branches, they were all 2 choices, which makes me feel like I’m reading a miniature End Master epic, just with more humour. Every action or choice felt like it belonged due to how well written this is.

Flow of the Story: This is a story that really covers the details of the decisions of Sir Osis, along with the environment. This is paired well with the humour to create a satisfying feel to it. I can laugh at every turn to the specific actions of Osis that would show he’s a crazy pea-brain, and that he really weighs heavily on his decisions, an attribute that gets carried over to the emotions of the reader.
Oh, and of course the dialogue doesn’t trip it up, and instead is used to fuel the reader’s curiosity.

Overall, I loved this story, thank you to Cricket for the fun read!

I learned something new in the first sentence alone. A thrush is a songbird. Who would have known? I thought Cricket was going Shakespeare on us creating her own words. I know it’s only the first sentence, but this is the type of memorable thing that reflects positively on a story. For the reminder of my life every time I hear ‘thrush’, I’m going to think about Sir Osis. Well played, Cricket. Well played.

Shock factor is also included in the opening. The author goes into great detail about the pleasantness of the morning. We read about all the possible factors that contribute to a poor day. And yet the main character, Sir Osis, hates it. Like, why would a knightly man with assuming honorable characteristics hate such a good day? Read it to find out, dummy. And that’s what I did.

I think I saw this mentioned already, but the formatting is a bit distracting. It’s an easy fix too, but I’m guessing the contest deadline played into its apparent rushed import. No need to beat a dead horse on this issue. Unless it has blue eyes and a white walker rides atop it. Then you burn that MF.

I like the decision to go with a third person POV. It’s a nice change of pace from the typical storygame on this site. I will say the past-tense element sort of hurts the ‘game’ aspect since we’re reading about things that already happened in a passive voice (lots of ‘was’).

One thing I really enjoy about Cricket’s writing style is the amount of attention given to little detail. The first story I read of hers in the Creative Corner was the same way. I remember a lot of the comments being “the pacing’s too slow” or “it’s a lot of text about nothing”. With respect to those people, they’re flat out wrong. The attention given to seemingly miniscule detail is part of the reason why Cricket’s writing is memorable and not boring. Think back to my first paragraph. The detail given to a songbird in the background created a positive response that would not have occurred if was taken with a surface approach.

Knowing Cricket a little bit, I’m not surprised she took a humoristic approach. I sort of expected an archetype anti-hero with an “f u and your mother” attitude. Sir Osis is vastly different. His bumbling, care-free demeanor is creatively shown through his actions and not the author telling us about him. You get a sense of who he is by the things that he does i.e. peeing through a window and getting most of it outside. Cricket must have done her research because that’s something every guy has done... Unless Cricket actually incorporated ‘his’ own life experience here.

No surprise that Cricket’s first storygame is deeply entertaining. Hopefully we see many more stories published in the near future!

I enjoyed controlling Sir Osis’ adventures. He had some pretty entertaining mishaps, I liked it when he noticed tracks and panicked, before realising they were his own. His cardio work-out as an excuse was a nice touch. The Silver Arrow of Fortune was also pretty funny.

As well as the Sir Osis charater being funny, so was the writing. I liked the language techniques you used such as “with all the speed of a drunken butterfly” and also found “Here was the blacksmith, the weaver, the tailor, the church, and any nice thing you would expect from a respectable village except for a brothel. As his lord did not allow that within his walls, the brothel was set up immediately in front of and to the left of the outermost gate” laughable, although coming from Cricket that sort of humour should not have been much of a surprise.

I think at times you could have varied sentence lengths a bit more. There were a lot of long sentences of similar length in quick succession of each other. This meant that in parts the story started to take on a monotonous and I found it starting to become hard to read.
On a similar note, I also thought that sometimes (not often, but I’ll mention it anyway) the story could have done with a little less description and moved on a bit faster.
The times that you did work in shorter sentences it worked well and effectively and helped with the flow of the story and I think using shorter sentences more would really improve the readability of the story.

I did get confused about the abundance of Mary’s in the story, but it was also kind of funny to keep encountering Mary’s in different paths. At first, I thought it was the same person, which actually could’ve worked out too if stay-at-home-path Mary broke up with the husband that was mentioned in go-to-the-village-path Mary.

I’m not really sure what ‘Cave of Time’ style is, but I liked the choices at the first part of the story. After that, it seemed to get a bit like ‘choose the right path or die’. Examples of this are when you choose between leaving the prisoners and freeing them, and also choosing between attempting escape and waiting for an opportunity. Choosing the wrong choice there, and also in a few other places abruptly ends the stories.

There were pretty much no grammatical errors that I noticed. I did catch some misspelt words (‘lofe’ on the ‘Wait for Opportunity’ page and then some missing dialogue tags on the ‘Leave them’ page) but aside from these little typos it was pretty sound.
I did notice that there were font changes which were quite distracting at times and seemed to randomly switch between pages.

Overall, I think this was a pretty good effort for your first story (I mean, we can’t really count Ineptitude…) and I’m excited to see what’s to come in the future from you :)

An interesting tale with interesting branches, Cricket. I've enjoyed what I've read.

In a nutshell: A good story, consistent setting between branches, classic branching, no true ending, and a "sweet" narrative as Gower describes it. There are spoilers below.

Sir Osis. Of the Liver, no less. Right from the beginning, it's clear the main character is an idiot knight, which stays consistent in everything the character does and what most people think of him. While at first the narrative felt a little too sweet to the reader, I settled into it quickly enough. The narrative humor in the story worked well with it. The story progression of just bumbling around a bit in the setting gives off its own sort of charm, one that works best in short stories like this.

The story featured classic branching, which was alright. The ending where the caravan is mugged and Sir Osis returns home felt like a little abrupt; the rest seemed fine. I also appreciated the use of Old English phrasing, such as "I advice you".

It was decent overall, and enjoyable.

This was a super amusing storygame.
Good luck Cristet, best wishes.

I really enjoyed the imagery and the great used of language, and I especially loved the descriptions of the old man with the potions. All criticism I have is a recommendation to reread and double-check for any misspellings and typos. Overall I really enjoyed it and am happy this story was shown to me.

Nice boy would like to congratulate you for making this gamebook. I mean

I liked it, It reminds me of A Yankee in The Arthurian court. The flow is nice and has that snarky intelligent tone and the descriptions are fitting and descriptive. My main criticism is there are not enough descriptions of places and characters that makes some moments feel that the action goes too fast. Great fun

Rereading this was a delight. I liked a lot of things in this story, to the point where there is no way I can cover all of them in this review. If you are the kind of autist who reads reviews before storygames, how about you like don’t do that. This story won’t take you more than an hour to read all of it’s paths so just go do that instead of spoiling yourself.

In any case, how should I put this. This story is fucking holarias. The beaver that gnawed off your dick was my favorite thing in this game. This story is just comedic gold, and that within itself justifies reading it. I mean writing a funny game is hard, and even if you do it well, some people won’t find it funny. Though this game certainly did it for me, and chances are it will for most people.

Though this story does focus a lot on comedy, it is very well written as well. Some of the descriptions in this game are just stellar, and if I am willing to use that word you know it’s good. You could write a story that is on paper is amazing in every way, and then fuck up on the writing and create a pile of shit. Thankful, this story is not like that and is able to take advantage of its ideas.

In conclusion, I don't have much to say that already hasn't been said. There is a reason that this game has been reviewed by so many people. I can say with confidence that this is one of the best comedic storygames on this site. It is clear that a lot of passion went into this, and the result is marvelous. While under normal circumstances I would give this game a 6, I won't do that this time on account of how hard it is to make a good game with a focus on comedy.

7 out of 8