Player Comments on Traitorous Ossetian

This story game, while not the worst I've ever read, has a lot of problems. There were some things I liked, and it's a good first try, but there are just so many glaring problems that I can't overlook. I got the epilogue where you confront her with the pistol and call the cops on her after reasoning with her for reference.

First is the world building. This is just super confusing. Maybe I just don't get it, but it seems there is some kind of war with a ton of countries who all apparently are super close together. One thing that caught me off guard from the start was how the main character is with this girl and they are the only ones? You would think there would be some kind of organization backing them, and that they would come extract the main character or at the end he would go back to them? It seemed like they are the only two people on their side and that they are the only people in this war.

Speaking of the war, this does not seem like a war at all. The civilians are happy, cops chasing petty thieves, and just all around nothing to indicate unrest at all. This could be building tension and you're some undercover spy for your side, which would make a lot more sense, but I didn't see that said anywhere so I'm just inferring. And if you are a spy, why do you have no money behind enemy lines, and why don't you go back to your job after this mission. Oh yeah and speaking of petty bike theft, why the hell are cops chasing me to punching a guy and stealing his bike. This isn't gta, you aren't going to get a star for that. The cops have better things to do. Yeah they might come find you later, but you start to ride off, a cop sees you, and high tailed speed chase ensues. While this is kind of realistic, you expect me to believe that you go on some back roads, and lose a cop, on a bike?! You wouldn't even make it to the back roads to lose them! You are on a bike, they are in a car.

Going off of that, that is mostly continuity stuff that can be fixed, and some of it might just be stuff I missed, but a more pressing issue is the writing. Dialogue makes up a large amount of this game. That is not an issue. Dialogue is a very good way to make a scene interesting, and I think you found a good balance between dialogue and description. But the dialogue just isn't realistic. At all. You don't have to write dialogue to be real, but it isn't good in a quirky way either. It just feels like a giant chore and I found myself cringing at the dialogue at multiple points. I think the worst offense was when the character is about to confront the girl in her office, and there is a huge scene with the protag talking to himself in his head. I mean this can work, but here it just came across as off, and cringy.

Coming off dialogue your descriptions were a little better, but still not the best. Don't really have much to say about them that I haven't said in the world building section. Now you may be asking yourself, how do I improve this. Now this question is both easy and hard to answer. The easy answer is to just write. There isn't really any way around it. You write words, you get better at writing words. You will improve, writing isn't something with super hard fast rules, beyond spelling and grammar and things like that, you just have to learn how to write better, and the main way to do that is by writing. Saying that you might want to look into looking up some writing advice, especially centered around dialogue since you seem to like writing dialogue heavy stories.
Now that was a lot of berating, so let me tell you some things I did like. The spelling and grammar was great. Keeping in mind that you wrote this in two weeks, or a little bit over with 15 days, the word count is impressive coming in at about 490 words a day. The fact that you were able to do that and keep the spelling and grammar in check is impressive. I also liked that this isn't a copy of our world. It seemed to me that the countries have moved around and that this is a unique world. That is rare to see in the modern adventure genre, typically the setting is modern day earth.

In conclusion is this game good? No. Would I recommend it to others or re read it myself? No. But is this a solid first attempt made in only two weeks? Yes, and I think if you keep on writing you will create good stories and since you only made this in two weeks it shows that if you took a bit longer you might be able to make something better. My advice to you is to read some of the featured stories, anything by EndMaster for fantasy, my favorite is Necromancer, and for other genres the featured ones are good. For your next story you might want to try going a bit bigger. Maybe 15k words? Or try another story of this size and focus on getting dialogue right. This story was a good start, so try and follow up on that and make sure you take your time with your next one

Even if this in itself isn't breaking any new ground, it makes me excited for the potential of future works from this author. Typos aside (I know he had a self imposed deadline...) the writing is actually really capable and this had one of the more interesting settings of any modernish story I've read here.

Unfortunately in a lot of ways this felt like it didn't live up to its true potential. As I said, I loved the setting, but it was more like I was fond of just the idea of it as it's not really explored much in the story itself. There isn't much branching despite places where having more options seemed sensible, and the choice that does change the ending really shouldn't have any effect at all.

It all just seems like the perfect setup for a classic revenge story, which ultimately makes it all a little disappointing when it doesn't quite follow through. If HM isn't sick of this one already I could see (and would enjoy reading) this being expanded into a much more substantial adventure with more satisfying endings.

But for a first story meant to showcase writing ability this is perfectly serviceable, I hope to see the talent here put towards more ambitious storygames soon.

First off, great setting and premise, it's very rare to see any writing/media about Eastern Europe that isn't about Russia, so the idea had me intrigued in the story before I even started reading. That's always a good thing.

The writing itself is decent, a couple typos (nothing major/disruptive), but you have an issue with repetitive sentence structure. You use a lot of sentences that are just "You go here. You do this. You think to yourself." This isn't great, because it's not that difficult to avoid, by adding in some parentheticals, or prepositional phrases, or whatever. I feel like this is the main detractor in the quality of this game.

Spoilers:
The plot is fairly good for how short the game is, although here there are a couple issues as well. Firstly, there's no real explanation about what happens from the description of the game to the beginning, UNTIL one of the epilogues. Why include this basic information at the end of the story, especially one that some people will never see. I personally went through a few different epilogues, and it's interesting that there are some that differ from the character's original purpose. I feel like there could be a bit more characterization or explanation behind these, because you don't have any motivation for these actions. This could be just my opinion though.

Overall, it's a pretty good first storygame, just working on some of these basic things will seriously improve the quality of your writing.

I dont think I picked up the gun at that one screen. Whoops.

Not bad, but why did I tell Nutella that she betrayed her country if she was actually from South Ossetia? She's not even Georgian in the first place.

Good: minimal spelling errors, decent thriller atmosphere and action
Bad: lots of punctuation errors, lack of geopolitical background information, characters not fleshed out, some plot points made no sense

A brief description of what goes on:
Take revenge on your traitorous ex-crush in this high stakes thriller of a story game.

Positives:
-The combat/chase scenes were very well written. I especially liked the first couple of pages where you’re fighting soldiers in a building: it was super tense and well paced.
-You really made me hate the main character’s ex love interest through some great characterisation, I think she’s incredibly well written and I genuinely felt my gut sink when she betrayed me because I was hoping for some sort of romance route. I was glad in the ending in which she got caught by the police, she deserved it.
-It was interesting to have an Eastern Europe story that has themes of communism while not being written from the Russian perspective. There were obviously mentions of Russia, but it was brief.

Things to improve:
-Some of the character dialogue felt slightly strange to me, like it was written with exposition in mind first and not characterisation. I don’t know quite how to describe it, but I felt very uncanny valley in a strange sense.
-As others have mentioned there were several spelling errors that stood out to me, but more variety in sentence structure would also improve the quality of the writing.
-occasionally the bad endings of the book felt somewhat unfair. The main one that stuck out was going down the highway in the police chase scene. I know this was foreshadowed in alternate timelines, but getting this ending on my first play-through kind of felt like it came out of nowhere.

Overall this is a pretty good read and I’d suggest playing through all the different endings because the alternate timelines are interesting. I can’t wait to see what you write in future, good job!

Pretty good for what it was, liked very much the setting of the story but took me a minute to realize what time it was taking place in. Wasn't a very big fan of Natalie for the most part but she wasn't a horrible character.

Grammar wasn't all that terrible either from what I saw, just some minor mistakes here and there and didn't really detract to much from the story.

I can't tell if a part of the story was broken or I over read something since some parts from another path were overlayed where they shouldn't have and made me confused at times. Kind of dissapointed that there wasn't all that much branching off but I feel the author will do a better job next time.

Overall liked it for what it is and had a good time reading.

I know that this was rushed to publish before a deadline, and it’s pretty good for that. Overall, I enjoyed it. The writing is really good. However, my main criticism is about the dialogue. A large part of the story is dialogue, and as well as some not making sense, it is formatted incorrectly.

“I give your story a 5/8!” said 325boy, not “I give your story a 5/8!” Said 325boy.

What others have said, the writing is very good but there has isn't much to the plot. This idea could've been so much more.

I really really liked this. Make More!

This is not a bad story by any means. It’s actually quite coherently written, which is something that I feel to be always important at the end of the day.

I’m not sure if it’s just my experience, but it seems like all roads in this story lead to the same end in a sense? The story referenced a “stolen Ducati“ that I’ve never stolen, but I do know that you can steal one in another path.

Would certainly be more careful of things such as that in any future stories that you might create for this site.

Besides that, I felt like this was worth the time that I’ve spent on reading it.