A Dark and Stormy Entry

A Dark and Stormy Entry
by Emily Short profile

Slice of life
2001

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Reviews and Ratings

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

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Number of Ratings: 22
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- penguincascadia (Puget Sound), March 24, 2022

- Stas, April 2, 2018

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

A clever exploration of the creative process, July 1, 2017

by MathBrush
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

In this game, you create a story by choosing from menus. This game has a time cave structure, where every chance branches widely into more choices.

This usually is not effective, but the branches are short, the game meant to be replayed often, and you have a general idea of what effect your choices will have.

Options include choosing a setting for your short story, choosing characters, choosing motivations or objects, and so on.

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- Sobol (Russia), November 20, 2014

- DJ (Olalla, Washington), May 9, 2013

- E.K., May 3, 2013

- verityvirtue (London), October 18, 2012

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Fun, Funny, and Accurate, August 14, 2012

by Petrichor

To be honest, playing this reminds me of all those days I've sat at my desk (or anywhere else), notebook and pencil in hand/laptop buzzing and ready to go--and then nothing happens at first. This game reminds me of a more humorous version of my own mental process as I wait for genius to come. Genius, however, arrives right on time for this game.
The controls are simple as you choose the options by number, selecting the next step in your creative process as you venture forth into the lands of creativity, looking for the ever-elusive Great Idea. Every option opens up new choices, until you either write your idea or lose it.
So, while it's neither a long game nor a profound one, it's a lot of fun to see just what sort of ideas come along.

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- Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle), August 23, 2011

- flamingoboots, May 24, 2011

- Iris Wood (Vancouver), May 12, 2011

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

Writers block, January 30, 2011

by Aintelligence (Canada)

Ok, I'll admit right now that I'm not a huge fan of cyoa adventures at all. I my opinion they ask you to do two things, and then you end up doing something completely different than you wanted. Unlike traditional cyoa, this one is likeably different because instead of dying when you choose a wrong path, you just restart and can easily get back to the same place. Another thing the story was fairly good at representing was the difficulty of writing your first few sentences or paragraphs, and how frustrating it can sometimes be.

However, the game seemed to me lacking in several respects. For one, I thought that the humor all throughout the game was at times forced. There were some places where I found the writing funny, but others just didn't work where they were. The 'writer's block' joke was a little bit overused in this case. Another fault in the game was how similar all of the paths you took were. They consisted of "sentence, problem, resolution, sentence, problem, resolution, etc." and indeed sometimes a ***the end*** came before the first resolution. It was a little too repetitive in the who story structure for my sake, and got quite repetitive after a while. Especially the endings were mainly the same.

Ok, at the beginning of the review I was poised to give a 2 star, but looking back I think it deserves a three star. 'a dark and stormy entry' was not bad, but just average for even a cyoa game.

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- Divide (Wroclaw, Poland), October 12, 2009

- rainbow_fish_953 (Kansas), August 3, 2009

- gruelove (UK), April 25, 2009

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

An interesting experiment in CYOA style IF, January 3, 2009

by Molly (USA)

In this game you play as a budding writer trying to think up ideas for a story. You use a CYOA style interface to choose between different story ideas. It's not among the best of Emily Short's work, but it makes for an amusing game.

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- Adam Biltcliffe (Cambridge, UK), December 29, 2008

- Ghalev (Colorado, United States), December 28, 2008

- googoogjoob, August 4, 2008

- perching path (near Philadelphia, PA, US), July 22, 2008

- Rose (New Zealand), July 6, 2008

- anj tuesday, November 18, 2007

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