I can see a lot of potential in the various stories in Interactive Horror Stories. They have interesting premises and have a few good optionsI can see a lot of potential in the various stories in Interactive Horror Stories. They have interesting premises and have a few good options but overall they need a lot of work. The writing lacks emotion feeling very clinical and by the numbers. Descriptions feel like a grocery list more than a description. Many of the choices aren’t real choices either. For instance if you choose not to take the crystal skull or buy a ouija board then the respective stories end right there. So is the choice not to get them really a choice if it ends the story right there ? Each story has at least one such choice. Now that being said each story also does have several choices that branch the story off properly. One thing I noticed is that most of the stories have common themes of a deceased mother and an evil spirit. When the stories are as short as they are having a common theme can make it feel overused quite fast.
I played Interactive Horror Stories on Linux. The game never crashed on me. It uses the Unity engine. Alt-Tab doesn’t work. There is no save system at all. This means if you want to see how a different choice effects the story you have to replay the whole thing. While the stories are short a manual save system would make the game feel more professional as well as offer a feature that is a staple of the genre. While playing my GPU usage was between 7-14%; my VRAM usage was 521-646MB; my CPU usage was 2-5%; and my system RAM usage was 2.6-3.2GB. I didn’t notice any spelling errors at all.
I think if the developer continues to work at their storytelling they will produce good work. The bones are there they just need more meat on them. The visual novel genre is a tough one to stand out in though because even though the game is free it is hard to recommend as there are lots of high quality free visual novels out there already. I finished all the stories in 67 minutes and that includes playing through certain ones multiple times.