Rest in Peace, Emily Lockwood - A Perilous CYOA (7.1)
Added 2025-11-02 01:00:57 +0000 UTCComments
Hm… I hope you don’t take offense to this because I want to offer constructive criticism. While I enjoyed this chapter, I do think this might be one of the weakest CYOAs you’ve put out in a while. and I think it mainly comes down to the narrative butting heads with the structure of CYOA storytelling. To start with a compliment, I think the idea of Emily visiting diverging paths at different parts of her life is fantastic. I liked that each route had its own sort of structure to it, with paths like the Housewife being more restrictive while something like the Girlfriend has a more branches. It’s a great method of using the structure to emphasize the themes of each route. However, I fear the execution was somewhat underwhelming. We run into the common issue of the story lacking intricate branches, but it’s perhaps exacerbated here because of how self-contained each little vignette is. It feels less like I’m reading one whole narrative, and more like I’m reading 6 pieces of flash fiction that end before they can go anywhere interesting. That unfortunately breaks the exciting concept of exploring the lives of the alternate timeline Emilys. As a corollary of the shallower choices, I felt the various bad ends in this story were rather samey. Again, probably as a consequence of this structure, each scenario has pretty much the same set of perils. You can’t be certain what order readers will experience the routes nor whether they’ll read multiple times to check out all the bad endings. I found the Girlfriend route particularly egregious with this, as all three date options have the same bad end of Emily and Eliza stumbling upon some random hypnotist/chloroformer and being knocked out in pretty much the same way every time. Would have appreciated some more diversity on this end. That said, despite my harsh criticisms, I DID enjoy myself with this read, and I applaud the effort to try something so ambitious like this. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next chapter. Cheers.
tf
2025-11-07 06:34:04 +0000 UTCGald to see Emily made it through that last one, I was a bit worried.
Kyle
2025-11-02 03:41:36 +0000 UTC
