Player Comments on The Gold Bar

Initially, this looked fairly promising. A decent premise, a suggestion to go through every ending, and the writing looked okay. Unfortunately, the story ends up disappointing.

The first thing I noticed was the writing. You change tenses randomly a couple times (e.g. "You breathe slowly, wondering why the hell you ran. Something deep in your gut twisted as you realized") You go from present to past-tense here, and stay in past-tense for a bit. It's important to establish your tense and keep it consistent for the whole story (you could also include tense changes that serve a real purpose).

The second thing I noticed is the poor grammar and sentence structure. This isn't a big issue, and while it's less jarring than random tense changes, it ALSO shouldn't be present in a good story. However, I'll give you props in that it's a lot more legible than a lot of noob stories, and you should be able to fix all these issues by reading Gower's articles and then proofreading.

*spoilers*
The biggest issue with the story is that there's not actually any different endings. This is really problematic, ESPECIALLY when you tell the reader to go back and read every path! There is the "good" ending, which is just you leaving, and then there is bad ending 1, where you fall and drown. This ending is problematic because it takes whatever atmosphere and immersion this story had and sabotages it with a lolrandom "you slip and fall and die". This ending isn't satisfying. There's no reason for your character to die, and there's no real conclusion if you get this ending. Plus, why would you steal the "gold" if you're just going to throw it away? Why not pay someone on a boat so they give you a ride out of there? Very silly.

The other ending is even more egregious! There are four pages, two of which are identical and the other two half are only half identical. Still, it's ridiculous to suggest the reader explore different paths if there's only two endings and even they only differ slightly.

Overall, my biggest advice is don't get discouraged! I just tore into your story mercilessly, and for good reason, but you can definitely do better. For your next story, just expand and proofread and you'll have a much better finished product. Don't copy endings without a very compelling reason, don't add in lolrandom deaths, sort out your grammar, and you'll be in a great spot!

From the description, I thought this might be better than it actually was.

SPOILERS - (well kind of, not sure I can actually spoil this story.)

First, I'm not sure why it is listed as a HORROR story or why the maturity level is at a 7. I really found no tension built in the story whatsoever, which is kind of key in a horror narrative. The fact that you die at every ending - meh. People even die in ROMANCE stories all the time. But the deaths here were pretty mundane, not unique or graphic.

I don't usually like stories that just give a couple choices and then you are done - or dead - on every path. I read through them all, and found them all fairly similar. They just need more. The description set me up to expect much more than what was given.

This story is short, too short. Sometimes very short stories can be good, but this one really needs more development. There is no real atmosphere created and the characters come across as flat, and because of that the story is very disappointing. It is a decent idea, and the concept of trying to figure out what this gold bar is has possibility to lead you down a nice path. Unfortunately, none of this develops. My thought is that you published way too early and should really have spent more time working the narrative before putting it out there.

I like that you tried to use dialogue to tell parts of the story, instead of just giving us an info dump.

Overall, not good but has potential.