Player Comments on The Unfortunate Disappearance of Curran Strang

Hmm, this got torn up pretty quickly. I know the author already took it down, but just to address the reasons for the less than enthusiastic responses:

1) The obvious: it's very short, and worse, very linear. The only choices affect literally nothing and you're railroaded into the same ending regardless.

2) Stories about some kid waking up and going to school have been really overdone here and are almost never received well. There needs to be some attempt at an plot with a hook to make it actually interesting.

3) Preachy stories aren't interesting.

4) if you really must do a Very Special Episode and label it socially important, at least SHOW some of the very bad terrible things the story repeatedly insists are happening. Despite being told how our poor protagonist is being tormented by racism and very tame, generic insults no one has used unironically since the 1800s, none of this actually happens and all we see is that he's the popular guy that gets invited to parties.

Maybe instead of setting out to pass on some kind of hamfisted moral message not even backed up by the events of the story, maybe you could just write the story of an interesting character that becomes involved in an interesting plot and let the story speak for itself. And also include more than one path and more than one ending; on a site for branching stories, that's kind of important.

What kind of 'indigenous person' was the protagonist, anyway? That's something that would be a big part of his identity, yet the story doesn't seem to care.

Probably the worst IF relate I have ever read. It has no point, no choices, no development of characters environment or NPCs. The author pretends probably pandering people to notice racial struggles. But doesn't show in any moment, any reason for the player to care, doesn't show any personality in the character or anything to make the player feel any connection with the main character.

The structure is nonexistent. Is a bunch of unconnected phrases with no union, or paragraphs. And no atmosphere description of any kind this game as how has written could be in Mars, Japan or Lothlorien.

DON'T READ IT

Too short, with only one disappointing ending and no real choices which you can make to affect the story. Not worth reading.

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