There's an interesting story online called Ruby Quest that I recommend you read.

[DanielEricIverson]

There's an interesting story online called Ruby Quest that I recommend you read.

Ruby Quest is really impressive and very unique. The format in which it exists as a story available online is a little different and takes some getting used to, but it is well worth it. It's a really wild ride with thrills and scares and emotional feels.

 

It's something that was recommended to me a little over two or three months ago around... November of 2015. I didn't really know what it was about.

 

Basically what it is is a somewhat crudely-drawn graphic novel of sorts, told one panel per page, for basically 856 pages. It can be read through in one day, maybe in several hours.

 

The main character is a sorta-stick-figure anthropomorphic... "rabbit" I guess wearing what looks like long clothes, named Ruby, crudely drawn with nothing but black MSPaint lineart on white background.

 

She wakes up in a mysterious room, and we don't really know anything about her.

 

Things get weirder from there.

 

http://mozai.com/quests/RubyQuest/

The chapter links have mild spoilers next to them, so you might wanna, after reading the basic description, just manually enter the links: Here's the first one to copy-paste into the address bar:

 

http ://mozai.com/quests/RubyQuest/RubyQuest_01.swf (.swf URLs actually get embedded on these forums, but really small so you have to zoom the Web page at least 300% to even be able to comforably read the text on the images, so I broke up the URL with a space at the beginning)

 

and when you are done with that chapter, manually change the 1 into a 2 and so on.

 

The way the story was created is that one guy would post one drawing at a time on an imageboard messageboard and describe the scene, and an assortment of upwards of a few dozen people on that board would suggest what the main character should do next, or ask questions about what is going on.

 

They were mostly just suggestions, and the artist/author pretty much was taking the story in a certain direction anyway. It took about two months to bring the story to a conclusion.

 

The archived message board posts still exist,but that above link compiles the experience rather well, only including the suggestions that the artist actually went through that moved the story forward (but also sometimes including a few choice weird/funny/insightful questions as well)

 

If you do go about reading it, the above links are by far the best way to experience the story, but if you don't care for that formatting or if it doesn't work on your browser, there's another version:

 

http://evilcorporation.com.br/rubyquest/scene-001.html

 

There's actually a one-page epilogue page of sorts that the mozai.com upload failed to include:

 

http://evilcorporation.com.br/rubyquest/scene-855.html

If you do the Mozai version, try saving this link above and going to it immediately after finishing the core story, and then go two pages forward. It's a small cryptic detail.

 

I'm very much not into these types of stories, or this type of art style, or the genre or subject matter. I went into it on a total whim and never looked back. it was totally worthwhile and more people should be aware of Ruby Quest.

 

Basically there was no precedent for me ever liking a crudely-drawn MSPaint comic-book-version of a choose-your-own-adventure-story that you can't even "play" because a bunch of people already did it back when it was created, where the main characters are stick-figure anthro furry animals with simplistic names, and the whole story initially seems like 2spooky4me creepypasta, sprinkled with dark humor and a feeew sex jokes...

 

None of those things appeal to me, and they seem even more weird when mixed together, but it turns out to be really impressive. The quality of the drawings also gets more impressive pixel-art detail as the story continues. The characters are more or less drawn the same, but little details in the pixel art get really impressive. Some segments are even animated.

 

I highly recommend that anyone with an open mind about adventure stories and spooky stories with emotional themes reads it.