Vanvid

The first thing I noticed about this story is the unfortunate formatting the author employed with regards to spacing, which means there was very little. Entire pages were written in the form of one medium-sized paragraph. I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, the short size of the text means that it luckily wasn’t a giant text wall, but on the other hand, I feel like the author could have written more on each page to flesh out the story a lot more. Also, there was no differentiation between inner monologue and regular text, or dialogue and regular text. For future reference, you can use italics and quotations you know. When readers read, their eyes often glaze over large sections of text with no syntactical variety. Essentially, this story is the equivalent of the flat stretches of desert landscape, endless and rolling on interrupted by brief sequences of scrub brush or plain grass as you drive through Arizona and New Mexico. Like, make your story a bit prettier! You know, make it fun to look at as well. No matter how good the story is, it’s going to be a chore to read through if the visual appearance and sentence flow is not up to scratch. So, therefore, try to vary your sentence structure a bit. Find your rhythm and how it suits your unique narrative voice! It takes a while to get there, but once you do, this story will be greatly enhanced.

This review will be structured in 4 parts. I will first discuss the opening, then move on to discussing the wooden door path, then discuss the golden door path, and finally conclude with my overall thoughts on the story.

OPENING

I did like the opening, it was kind of interesting. Despite waking up in a room with no memory of how you got there being an incredibly common trope on this site, I think you still make it work because of those interesting musings on memory you have. The opening page manages to succinctly introduce us to the setting and bring us to our first set of choices, which is commendable because not every author could do so. However, that conciseness is severely undercut by the fact that it’s hard to really care, and I feel like while it’s important for stories to trim fat, you also can’t just trim everything and throw the most barebones setting at me. You have to build your story up a lot more, because right now, I’m not really invested.

WOODEN DOOR PATH

The story offers you the choice between a wooden door and the golden door, but there’s no real distinction between the 2. For all intents and purposes, the 2 are the same. I don’t know about you, but purposely, I would like some rationale and reasoning behind picking my choices, and the story doesn’t really deliver on that front. I do got to say that after reading both paths, I think the author does a commendable job of making the wooden door path feel distinct from the golden door path, but I do wish the story gave us some indication of that in the beginning. Additionally, there’s no real suspense, because the story just hasn’t done much with anything. So at this point, most readers are going to click off, simply because there are over 1000 stories on the site, and many stories do a much better job of hooking the reader in right from the beginning. I hate that this pattern of arbitrary choices continues throughout the story. At one point, we’re faced with a floating stonehenge and are given the chance to say ‘Unite’ or ‘Transport’. I don’t know what that even means, or why the structure responds to your verbal commands. Do you have magic powers? Is this a simulation? Towards the end, we do get more clarity on this issue, but still. This irks me a lot.

Throughout the story, we learn next to nothing about the main character. Their motivations and reason for ending up in such a strange situation are obscured, as the story instead chooses to show us more of what the main character encounters. This isn’t necessarily a “wrong” approach to writing choose-your-own-adventures, and I’m well aware that this genre has plenty of stories where the character is essentially a blank slate, a conduit that the reader merely adopts to see the adventures and face the choices. But I’ve also seen stories manage to have a fully fleshed out main character along with interesting choices, and I’ve got to be honest, I much prefer these stories because you actually care. Here it’s fun, but after you get a few endings, you’re bound to click off. That is of course, if you choose to repeat it after getting one ending.

I got the Wanderer ending. The story significantly picked up once you made it through the desert and reached the Mystic Pillar. That was the first page where I was actually enjoying the story. Once you get trapped in the cubes, I realized, ‘oh shit, this might all be an experiment or something, let’s see where this story leads.’ The ending where you escape was kind of cool, if incredibly anticlimactic and unresolved. There was no sense of closure or resolution, so for curiosity’s sake, I decided to check out a few more endings because I was a bit disappointed with the ending despite the somewhat cool imagery of a guy escaping from a facility and exploring the desert. Because I just don’t know why or how any of this really happened.

The next ending I got was the Friendly Explorers ending. At least this one gave me some more explanation on what’s going on in the setting, because apparently it’s a different dimension than the character’s own, and it ends with “life continuing as normal”. But what’s normal for this guy? We literally know nothing about him, so how can we possibly imagine what life continuing as normal means for him if you didn’t tell us anything about him?

I got some more endings and they were just as random and perplexing as the last 2. Fairy Fountain has you randomly dip into a magical cave spring and then turn into a fairy. Which is cool, I guess, but it just feels so random. And I’m actually fine with these kind of random endings, I’ve seen them done before in better stories, but that’s because we can differentiate between the main story and the random detours, so we appreciate the random detours more because they’re a testament to the author’s creativity and ability to tie different stories together in a cohesive whole. But here, things just happen for the sake of it. I then got the cave dweller ending, and the same issue is repeated. I actually was interested in the series of events, and reading through the variety of endings, but because of the lack of purpose, I ultimately stopped after reading a few more and I concluded the wooden door path.

GOLDEN DOOR PATH

The first ending I got on this path was the Street Rat ending. I randomly meet a vizier out of nowhere, which was pretty weird because I assumed the story was about imprisoned magical animals, but hey, I’m not going to complain. So basically, I inspect a magical clock, which turns me into a sandman. The vizier then cures me of that affliction, but I have to stay in this middle eastern city forever.

Of the 2 paths, my favorite by far was the golden door path. If you’re reading this story for the first time, choose the golden door path. There are some strange deviations to Arabic Fantasy, but they work really well, and actually reminded me of the whimsy and wonderfulness of the Arabian Nights tales. The 2 endings, 35: Evil Wraith and 36: Good Wraith, were quite interesting, and despite the significant departure from the story, I really enjoyed them.

Also, in the golden door path, you finally get a bit more information on what’s going on. In the ending 39: Single Timeline, the story reveals that all the alternate paths are actually versions of yourself in a parallel universe. That is a really creative way to tie the seemingly random paths and give an explanation for why the most random things happen in this story. But even that explanation still doesn’t tie back to the imprisoned animals. But it does give the story more resolution than the previous endings. And at least I can appreciate the randomness of the story a lot more, since there’s at least an answer provided for why the story is so random.

OVERALL IMPRESSION

Overall, the imagination of this setting is commendable, and I do think that the author had a really clear picture of his mind of the ambitious world he wanted to bring us in. But he fails on that front because there’s no unifying purpose to the story. Clearly, from the description, this story is about a strange magical dimension where magical creatures are imprisoned, and you’re thrown into a series of mazes, but all I really got from this story was a series of random encounters and interestingly imagined endings. On the imagination and creativity front, I’m impressed with you, but this could have been so much better. It’s actually a little sad, because you clearly put time and effort into writing a 26k story, and there are cool parts, don’t get me wrong! It’s just that, writing cool scenes does not make an enjoyable story, you have to be able to construct and layer the narrative to support those scenes. But I think the fact that Ending 39 reveals that all of these different versions of you running around are parallel universe versions of you in this experiment does make the randomness somewhat justified, and perhaps mollifies my severe dislike of the Wooden Door Path.

Essentially, the story suffers a lot from the random nature in the Wooden Door Path, but the Golden Door Path actually manages to provide a justification for the events, even if that justification isn’t fully fleshed out. We get more questions than answers, but at least there’s a sense of resolution.

I definitely think I would have enjoyed the story more had I begun with the golden door path, because starting with the wooden door path dampened my enthusiasm for the story, meaning that I only picked up the golden door path for the sake of giving a clear and fair review. But once I read it, I actually liked it. If I could split the story in 2 and give each path a rating, the wooden door path gets a 4/8, and the golden door path gets a 6/8.

So, I’ll give this one a 5/8. You clearly have a great imagination, and a wonderfully designed concept. Plus, you actually put a good amount of effort into the worldbuilding, because I didn’t see too many contradicting elements and the world does feel like it has a soul and energy of its own, with a large and expansive canvas for readers to traipse through, and reach a variety of endings. There were so many endings, and I liked that. I mean, there’s 30+, and out of those, I looked at 10 or so. So this work has a lot of potential, and I do think if the storytelling and writing issues were ironed out, this would be pretty great. But as it is, it’s not the best.

What an interesting story! Although I've only completed one storyline, the one with Mary the wolf, I look forward to finding all the endings. You guys did a fine job on it!
Now, a little constructive criticism if you may... I suggest going back and checking for spelling errors. There were few as I played, but I believe it will help your story greatly!
Also, I'd suggest breaks in the paragraphs. One large block o' text is a bit tedious to get through, and as a person who often accidentally skips lines, or re-reads lines, it would be a nice relief to have these.
All in all, the story was cool! I'd love to see more like it! :)

I rather enjoyed playing this game! It was well worth the time to explore the different endings.

This story does a good job of branching and including different storylines based upon choices that you make. In some of these, however, I thought they ended too fast and wish there was more narrative after the choice. There was a great variety of endings based upon choices, and it was fun to see where each path would lead.

The story itself seems decently written. There were a couple places where paragraph breaks and structuring would have made it a better read. However, this did not distract from the story for me.

The main disappointment that was that I never found out exactly why I was placed in the VANVID in the first place. At the start, this seemed like something I was on a quest for (along with escaping), but I never found the answer. I wish the narrative answered this in the storylines.

Overall, this is a good game with a solid story. As far as CYA it has defined branches of story based upon character choices and has a variety of endings. I enjoyed my time with this story.

Good and short.

A pretty fun, neat little game. There's nothing major, as far as I see, to critique here. I wish I learned some more about Vanvid though.

OKAAAAYY... that was good and I give it a 6/8.

That was a VERY good adventure. It was kinda long though. That might be because I played through all the possible outcomes though.

Loved it! I loved that you could choose to help people and to lie, and everything! This is one of my favorite games! I rated it 8/8! If you look at my rating system on my profile, you will see that this game is perfect! There's sort of a mystery in it, and I love that!

Awesome!

I reckon it was pretty kool and different XD
Keep up the good work =)