The Scary Night

Brief summary:
You play as a little girl playing hide and seek with her mother, until things begin to go very wrong.

Things I enjoyed:
-The twist at the end was pretty well executed. Since I went through every possible route I’d guessed it by the time I got there, but if you only play the main narrative you might be incredibly fucking confused.
-Grammar and punctuation was pretty good and I didn’t find any poor grammar/misuse of punctuation so that’s definitely a plus.
-The story is overall relatively well written and paced: the characters feel pretty fleshed out and likeable despite the short time we get with them.

Things to be improved on:
-Holy fuck this thing is straighter than a homophobe: totally non linear. There are three endings, but each one is basically based on your first or last decision.
-There is a ton of unnecessary worldbuilding. Why tell me trolls are made of fungus if you don’t do anything with that information? It kind of feels like this information, along with a little more, could have been trimmed from the story without much impact to the narrative. I wouldn’t say remove all worldbuilding, but I’d advise trying to make it at least somewhat useful.
-The sentence structure can be incredibly annoying, along with the description. I get what you’re going for with the childish descriptions being a representation of the main character, but a lot of the time it comes of as a bit silly and ruins the moment.
-I assume the main character is a young girl. Some of the scenes seem a bit pervy and oversexualised for no reason. I don’t need to know how small the wendigo’s cock is and I’ve noticed several other users remarking on this too.

This story is rather eerie, as it is haunting, as it is told as if it’s a dark fairytale, poem, or a bedtime story. It really pays off to read every sentence, and every page in this one.

I think what makes this a bit of an unnerving horror in some areas, is that there are turns that this story can take that’s rather unfortunate for the young and innocent perspective that we’re given to as the readers.

Fortunately, that makes getting through the rather frightening night all the more better if you’re able to. But unfortunately for me personally, I’m the kind of reader that just has to experience every possible outcome that there is.

In the end, this story-game isn’t the longest one that there is, but it does do atmosphere and dialogue quite well. Each choice has a weight that accompanies if until the very end of the story.

I kept waiting for a sudden shout of "FBI! OPEN UP!" to come from a random dead character. Definitely a bit of a creepy vibe here, but that's the point, right? I admit,however, that I was a bit disappointed in the barbecue ending. If you're gonna go fully creepy vibe, you might as well have the main character impaled while she was still alive. I mean you made her strip in front of the monster after it suspiciously licked her. What's a little excruciating torture?

So what do I like about this? It definitely hits the dark fantasy setting. The narrative perspective is interesting. I like the use of this particular monster, but some more description would have been nice. Wendigos are suitably creepy for a story like this.

The cute poems were nice, and I liked the matter-of-fact description of terrible realities taken at face value by a young child. Normalization of horror is pretty useful for this genre.


But, there wasn't much to this. I don't blame anyone for writing short, linear stories in a contest. I'm guilty of procrastinating and doing it myself. But everyone who does has to be penalized for it in the ratings.

That said, the author definitely succeeded in establishing a creepy vibe, and that's one of the most important things for this genre.

I got the Nothing Happened ending on my first readthrough. A charming little horror story.

This story was pretty good, and quite creepy. I really enjoy stories with an unusual perspective, and this one is no exception. The writing was pretty much on point to create the perspective of a young, innocent child that's in a situation she can hardly understand, and the premise itself is a neat one.

Plot spoilers:

People also said that the licking is a really weird detail to focus on, but I think that the explanation is reasonable, and that it only serves to heighten the creepiness and weirdness of the story.

There are still some negatives, mainly that there's an entire path that basically has no purpose. The point is to have this plot with a wendigo kidnapping the child, so why even include a one-page segment where you just end the game? It's also quite linear when there could easily be a few different paths.

Another issue (albeit very minor) is why does the main character know nothing about the wide variety of monsters that exist? Every child knows fairy tales, and in this world there would certainly be more than enough myths and rumors about these various creatures.

Overall, this story is definitely worth playing, but could easily be expanded upon.

The story was ok. The childish descriptions make the story a little too cutesy to me, but I got used to it reading through the rest.

The story would be better without the degenerate vibes I got from the focus on being licked. It wasn't really a detail that you needed to circle back around to at the end.

I liked the plot of this story a lot! It was written well and had me interested. Unfortunately, it was short and linear. I would have liked if it went for a bit longer and if not every choice was move on or die. Anyway, this was a great start and if it was longer I would be rating this a 5-6.

4/8.