I have just released a fully complete choice-based story titled Continuity of Care.
It’s free.
No login is required to play.
Would you be willing to try it and provide feedback? Did you feel it was interactive enough? Did you feel it was engaging? How did you feel about the pacing? What did you like/dislike about the story? How can I make the gameplay mechanics more compelling for you as the reader?
Length: 15 chapters, with about 3-4 “pages” per chapter (with some exceptions)
I incorporated as much of the feedback as I could from my last post: make it more interactive, improve prose-to-choice ratio, make the choices actually matter, do not require a login for players to play, and more.
Thank you to everyone that made suggestions.
There are 5 anchor endings with the possibility of alternate endings for 3 of them, depending on how you played.
Your choices DO matter to the outcome of the game, both plot-wise and via gameplay mechanics. I believe it will be obvious immediately from page 1.
Your progress is saved even if you don’t log in, as long as you use the same browser. So, you can freely navigate back and forth through the story, and re-read previous chapters - just like a normal book - even after you’ve made a choices.
Fair enough. It just seemed like a weird detail to add, especially considering that 98% of users here are adults. Thank you for indulging my admittedly blunt questioning.
Hello. I played the game. I thought the story was very good. I liked the writing too.
Feedback:
Interactivity was about right for these kind of games. Personally i prefer a slightly higher cadence, but that’s probably because I’m used to a parser background.
It was definitely engaging. I wanted to know what will happen and to discover what was really going on. Pacing wise, there’s perhaps a slight “sagging middle”, but not serious.
The story was good though, i don’t tend to prefer psychological thrillers. That’s because in many the author “cheats” by putting in clues then, later turning round saying, “it was all in your mind”. I always find that technique quite weak. But this story doesn’t seem to do that (much?). Although I’d like to know how the letter became under the sofa.
Compelling? For me it’s always how strong the support characters are. In this game, i think, you’re meant to run with a preferred confidant, which obviously means you’re bypassing interaction with the others. Toward the end, you don’t get to interact with the others at all. Although i know it needs that for the story.
Other points:
The locked choices work well. Although when it says, “your choice will have consequences”, I tend to think, “hey, do the others make no difference?” Obviously they do, but it’s just a sensation after reading that. I’m wondering if there’s an alternative way to put that; “important choice” or something? Not sure. what do other systems do?
Presentation good, worked fine on mobile. no issues.
That’s a solid blurb as far as I’m concerned! Putting it here so others can see what kind of story we’re talking about.
Edited to add my spoiler-filled thoughts after two playthroughs:
The prose and the themes are indeed befitting a psychological thriller. I was on the edge of my seat wondering how everything would be resolved. The stress and tension of the protagonist’s situation is clearly conveyed. The idea of a principled person coming up against an uncaring, dysfunctional apparatus, and having to decide how much can be sacrificed for the sake of getting along within the system, is a modern classic for a reason.
On the other hand, my feeling is that the overarching plot isn’t a match for the quality of those vibes. I cared about why the protagonist was ousted from his job, whether he’d be able to land another one, whether the people around him were deliberately gaslighting him and if so what motive they might have, but those plot threads didn’t go very far. I didn’t care nearly as much whether he’d be able to keep getting his drugs from the clinic in question (can’t he just tell them to kiss his ass and go to a different clinic?), nor whether he’d ever figure out the clinic’s annoying automated system. I thought that I was going to start caring about those things at some point when the story would inevitably up the stakes and show us that actually there’s some tremendous plot afoot, or actually our guy has been mistaken about half of what happened all along, or some other bombshell revelation that would finally bring the mundane-on-paper conflict up to the level of the protagonist’s intense feelings about it. But that never happened.
Maybe that’s part of the point? The story could be read as one where the bulk of the tension is in fact coming from the protagonist’s anxiety medication not being quite right. But I feel like there ought to be more. There are tons of threads that suggest something deeper but then never seem to go anywhere.
Also, I’m 51% sure that Celeste’s path mistakenly leads to Aiden’s ending.
