The Book of Vanishing Tales

THE BOOK OF VANISHING TALES: 93%

SHOULD I READ THIS?
Yes, it’s an engaging story with a wide variety of interesting options.
Preview: Forty years after the muses sacrificed themselves to save the world, stories, dreams, and memories are all vanishing from the world. You, a storyteller and the husband of Ivani (the muse of heroism), go on a journey to the grove of the muses, where the muses’s graves are. Your choices and decisions will affect the ultimate fate of the world.

=SPOILERS BELOW=

RATINGS:

Basic Plot & Coherence: 5/5
This has a strong premise, and it was executed well. This story is largely divided into two parts: The journey to the grove, and the final decision once you reach the grove. The choices made along the journey to the grove ultimately affect which options are presented to you once you reach it.
The journey consists of making choices about what kind of stories you want to tell and what kind of person you want to be, and based on this, you get options for different endings. For example, choose to tell comedic stories, and you have the option of becoming the muse of comedy. Make destructive choices, and you have the option of ending the world. The journey has an incredible number of options, and even after reading through as many branches as I could find, I’m sure I didn’t find all the endings. This story manages to be both expansive and tightly constructed at once.

Characters & Development: 4/5
Mostly it’s the main character who gets development. Beyond the choices you can make as a player, he retains the same basic personality: a storyteller, who wants to understand what’s happening to the world. The side characters are decently developed as well, even those that appear only for a scene or two.

Grammar: 5/5
No mistakes here.
Mastery of Language: 3/3
The language here is poetic while still being direct and comprehendible. Poetic language usually isn’t my thing, but I enjoyed it here.

Mechanics & Coding: 2.5/3 (usually /5)
The coding here isn’t complex (at least I think, I don’t know much about coding), but serves to give the player different options for endings depending on their choices. It serves its purpose and kept me going back through the different branches long after I’d finished.

Branching: 3/3
The branching is where the story really expands into such a large tale. Each seperate journey and ending gives the player new insights into the world and characters, plus the game has excellent replay value.

Player Options/fair choice: 2.5/3
Largely there were no problems with this. There were a few places where I felt that the player didn’t get all the information the character would have had to make a choice, but nothing serious.

Endings: Boy, are there a lot. There seem to be a few standard endings, like “tell the muses your story” and “write Ivani a love poem” that show up in several different places, but the endings that involve listening to a specific muse’s call seem rarer. I’ve found the chaos, comedy, sage, and world-ending muse endings, and I’m sure there are more.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:
I quite enjoyed this. After playing through what seemed to be the simplest path, I went back and found many of the others, such as dealing with the mages and the blood religion. I think I’ve found most of the endings, but I’m still missing a few, such as child of sandrella, which I saw mentioned in another comment.

CONCLUSION: 25/27 = 92.59%

To properly review this story I had to give it multiple reads. I’m glad I did. I’ve gotten to about 10 different endings now, which sounds like a lot, but I didn’t take even 5 unique paths to get there. The story bottlenecks. There are far more endings than unique paths.

This story demonstrates strong descriptive variance and the use of language is fresh and creative. In terms of grammar and editing there exist few errors that distract from the writing. Most of the writing and dialogue sounds natural and has clear intent. Writing could have been more concise at times. Depending on what path you went down, the main character is developed sufficiently, and many of the side characters are given more than enough life for their brief appearances. Pretty good work there all in all.

Some of the stories told by the protagonist are really good (for example, one with a graveyard tryst stands out) there were a few that were not. This of course is tilted by preference, but I hated the story told for the empress. It was a very silly story and didn’t seem appropriate for the audience at all. I felt like a great storyteller would tailor tone, not just subject matter, to such an important audience.

There is a resource management aspect in the game, which for my first playthrough I was very attentive to - and enjoyed. On my subsequent playthrough I realized that the player is never really at risk of running out of funds, and players can make (nearly) any decision they like... Nearly all the ends branch from one page. Endings were affected by neither heaps of silver nor poverty, but occasionally items picked up along the way.

In fact, I couldn’t connect the dots between why some endings were triggered by certain paths and not by others. Sometimes there was a semblance of reason and other times there wasn’t. I can not reason out why sleeping in a random cave unlocks one of the happiest endings or why I can sometimes tell all the muses my life story and sometimes can't.

I did not feel like I was earning, reaching, or achieving an ending, but wandering into it. Dream-like atmospheres are well and good, but events need to be connected on some level. As things are, I didn’t feel grounded enough to have any stake in the consequences or an investment in the success.

I enjoyed this story and feel the writer put in ample work. The lore offered was more than serviceable and added to the replay value. (My first playthrough never once mentioned the blood gods, so my second playthrough felt very fresh) This game deserves at least 2 playthroughs to be appreciated and earns a 6 out of 8 from me.

This story is wonderful. It just fits right. I got lost in it and was so enraptured that when it ended the first time I wasn't sure I wanted to go back and find new endings (my first ending was the lovers one).
When I went back to find others, however, they were different but equally fitting and well done.
Not only did you create a good story, you created a great world beyond the scope of the prompt. The blood religion was interesting and you could uncover bits and pieces of it. The mages were fascinating and it was cool to uncover their story and role with the muses initial downfall and potential downfall in the future. The variance in the branches made it interesting to play again such as the different stories that the protagonist tells, the different relationships that are formed, and the different parts of the world that are uncovered.
I also appreciated that you took the time and effort to explain the mechanics of how the muses in your world work. They give but, when weak, also take. This was not only shown in the end through dialogue but through the outright statements about the Sandman, and in some ways through the stories the protagonist tells about when they were still alive.
There was also good foreshadowing given in different paths, such as the story about the egg and later finding the giant egg in the real world to prompt the reader it is important (though I wish the reader could be rewarded for paying attention by being given options to choose or not choose the egg). Also it was hinted several times that the protagonist was more important than just a simple storyteller which left me wondering throughout what his abilities were and how he would use them at the end.
The premise itself is great and while the endings usually come across as beginnings of something bigger, they are complete as well.
There were very few grammatical errors which is frankly astounding considering how much content you managed to produce in such a short amount of time.
All in all I loved this. This is the type of story I would show my friends to get them more interested in branching path stories.

This game was alright almost my favorite. I think it could be better if the main character was me Ed Higgins.

Very well written and charming

I don't like the description.

The muses are gone. They sacrificed themselves to save Sandrella from [the] cataclysm[*] and all that is left of them are drained, stone husks, and a ring of dust orbiting the world. Your wife was one of them.
But with them went all the dreams and the permanence of stories[**] And now, forty years later, it seems memory is next.
[\n]
Though an old storyteller with little to your name, you must undertake a long journey to the Grove of the Muses, hoping to rekindle the flames that once burned inside you, before you can't remember them at all.

* - the extra comma here creates confusion because of the `, and` followed by another sequential listing in the same sentence.

** - the period should be a semicolon because of the connecting word `and` but with a separate idea

Unless 'cataclysm' is a being instead of an event, it should have 'the' before it.
===============

Onto the game:

I would never wake up in the early winter and go lay out in the wet grass. This sounds unpleasant and gross particularly in the muddy months.

Do you know how difficult it is to count sounds in an active forest? If you've ever sat in a lively wood or forested area, it's basically impossible unless you generalize to words like "bird", "wind", or "squirrels."

"But today is different, for it will be your last day in Dreaming Forest for some time, perhaps forever." I read 'for for for for' in for, forest, for, and forever. Even if this is intentional I think it would flow better using 'because' instead of the first 'for'.

I hope a "weeks' worth of food" includes water or I'm not getting very far as an old man. Medicine of some kind would probably also help with the back pains or to barter with later. I did just come out of an oasis of natural flora and fauna after all.

If I were afraid to forget stuff, I'd probably just die of anxiety. My memory is garbage.

LBH The closest person I have to a best friend is probably just my best friend.

I like te cage bird story.

My play strategy was to get to the...? Garden of muses or wherever as quick as possible. No telling how long an old man will live. As I am writing this while reading, my memory of the goal is fading just as much as the stories in the game. I've been fairly bored for a few pages now with nothing special happening. I'm probably just one of those types of readers that enjoy a burst of fireworks and action rather than the slow burn of a satisfying flame. I'm certainly not the audience for this kind of story.

I have many other nit-picks, almost two per page, but I am also too lazy to write all of them after losing steam from the first page onward. Find someone with an eye for grammar to suggest edits here and there and I think the rating would have an average +0.5 or perhaps even a +1.

I liked the story I told to Ronin.

The sailors were surprisingly nice.

Oh shit the grove was a lot closer than I thought it was! Thank christ for merchants. I was slogging through pages for a while there. Kind of felt like reading a book for a highschool report and it didn't seem the goal was in sight until I was basically there. Now that I'm here...I'm not sure what to do lol. I didn't think I'd make it this far.

Hell ye boi gonna change the mf world. Hype.

Solid 6/8 from me.

Took a little while to get going, but it's a beautiful story, and I'd like to read more about this world. I went with Bivedos since the only other option was to kill Ivani, but I wonder if there's a happier ending that can be unlocked.

Awsome.

Well done, this is a gem of a story, I especially liked how you mingled poetry and prose so perfectly. Amazing!

I have great respect for tales of travel, as they are very difficult to pull off. This one was beautifully done. The narration has a quiet elegance to it. Although the dreams of the world are gone, the story felt like a dream. Very rewarding. Highly recommended.