The Rise of the Shirlynx: Adventures in Modern History

"Play game, win game, get code" is a simple enough premise for me. Let's get right into it!

You play as Shirley, a high school student with an English-teacher sized chip on her shoulder. Shirley wants to get into the University of Chicago in the good ol' US of A, but as a budding humanities student, she'll need a glowing letter of recommendation from humanities teachers, like her very own English instructor. A pretty straightforward conflict, but it's an entertaining read nonetheless.

This definitely reads like one big inside joke at times, and I'm sort of convinced it was just written to be "real-life fanfiction" or something to share with friends. I'll still give it an honest review either way because it's publicly published, but I'm keeping that in mind.

I think I won with the Bill Clinton route, reaching Shirley's "Apex Predator" mode and...telling your teacher you don't care about him anymore. Hey, it's the win the protagonist was looking for, and she got it! This leads to her being revered as goated by her classmates, winning prizes, and getting Mr. Henry under your thumb. Nice! Anyways I managed to get to the code, which was literally a tinyurl to a Google Doc with another riddle to solve, but I kind of lost interest in solving it.

Also, word of advice: don't waste an entire paragraph on the *very first* page of the game battering your own writing. It's already well established that this is not a serious story, there's no need to tear it apart before any readers do. Let us read it for ourselves!

** CHARACTERS **
The best characters here are, of course, Shirley and Mr. Henry, her dastardly teacher. Shirley is a very believable high schooler, dramatizing trivial disputes and petty exchanges with Mr. Henry. With that being said, Mr. Henry encapsulates the whole "old, mildly creepy, sour teacher no one really likes" persona very well. He's not someone you want to be around, but he can still be a caring person at times, especially for students he particularly takes an interest in.

Unfortunately, the disparity between the best characters and the rest is pretty large. Aside from Pei Jin and the handsome, toned, and tattooed Mr. Burnell (the author's description, not mine!), the rest of the cast can seem a bit bland at times. I feel like a good portion of the characters are kind of thrown at the reader instead of being properly introduced. Who are Cherry and Chloe, and why would I talk to them specifically about my teacher? Who is Linda in relation to myself, Shirley? Are these characters exclusively classmates, or do I know them outside of school?

At the very least, the characters are all distinct from one another and serve their own purpose, may it be a one-page gag, a recurring role, or to increase or decrease Shirley's Bossiness meter. I just wish I knew a bit more about them so I could care that they even exist.

** WRITING **
The writing here is actually good. I would've liked a bit more description, a greater understanding of my setting and who everyone was, so that I could wrap my head around the stakes a little more. But the story is entertaining to read regardless, and the punchy writing (although it does fall into the "lolrandom" realm sometimes) keeps my attention.

I'm not the biggest fan of the constant abbreviations and acronyms for things the reader may not be aware of. HoGs, UGCs, omfg lol. I have to use context clues to glean them, which are sometimes not that helpful. I'm not against abbreviations in writing, mind you, but in this context, I feel like just writing out the full phrase would've worked better. Maybe I'm being a filthy, fat, clueless American though since this is, I'm assuming, a British story.

I quite liked the characterization and clashing with the English teacher. The conflict brings me back to my ultra-dramatic high school days, especially junior year when we were prying letters of recommendation out of our beloved (and simply tolerated) teachers in the hopes of making it to our dream schools. Everyone has that one teacher they just LOATHED, and their presence alone became something of a bit in and of itself. This story handles that concept well enough, which is why I can relate to the protagonist.

There are some SPAG issues throughout but nothing extremely bothersome, just some occasionally misspelled words or missing dialogue tags. A bit of advice for dialogue: the end of dialogue tags, when followed by speaking actions ("she said", "you say"), should always include a comma if not a question mark or exclamation mark. For example:

"I understand Pei Jin" you say firmly.

Would become:

"I understand, Pei Jin," you say firmly.

In general I think reading up a bit on the grammatical rules of writing dialogue may be beneficial for you.

Additionally there are some times where informal speech or text talk ("wowzerz" and the like) leak into dialogue. I understand this can be a stylistic choice, but it can come off as improper or jarring to some. I personally don't think it fit that well into the story, but that's just my opinion.

Finally, there are some pages that don't have any links, even if they are presumably an "end game" page since they do lead to endings. Even if you don't reach a "main" ending or the "true" ending in a storygame, you should still include an End Game link on these pages to signify that it's the end of that route for the story. Having pages with zero links can make your story look unfinished and unpolished.

** RATING **
I'll give this an okay score for the effort and the fact that I did find it entertaining, but it isn't without its issues which I mentioned earlier. There was clearly a lot of effort put into this story, and I commend you for putting this out! I encourage you to continue writing or even to rewrite this story if that's in the cards, as I can absolutely see your potential. Best of luck!

4/8.

A decently fun read. It does read like a journal of sorts. Some nitpicks that I have:

1) I wish characters were introduced better in terms of what their relationship was with the main character.

2) The language sometimes uses colloquialisms like 'chillax'. While this is fine in dialogues, it is usually avoided in narration. I suppose it did make the story feel a bit more personal; I'm willing to accept this as a stylistic choice.

3) Some pages don't have any links. To be fair, these do appear to be ending pages of their own. But even in such cases, usually a link is manually added to allow the users to reset. It's just a way to tell your readers that you did intend for the story to end there, and that you didn't just forget to add links to that particular branch.

I did manage to get to the code at the end but I didn't try decoding it. I shall leave that to beings smarter than me.