Give me purple paragraphs, sleek minimalism, steady workmanlike prose, and anything and everything between–as long as it’s good. What’s good seems natural. It flows, leading you along its many passages. A story with good writing will drag you along to explore its nooks and crannies no matter how many syllables in its sentences.
Of course, there are more limits in interactive fiction compared to standard fiction. COG titles seem a hybrid of things like the Choose Your Own Adventure series and traditional IF, with game stats/mechanics thrown in. A creator must adjust to the medium. As much as I’d enjoy reading an IF game in the style of, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it couldn’t meander quite as much as a novel could. The writing would need to be pared down, to the level of a novella, perhaps–economical in its dispensing of big words and rich detail, but still needing some splashes of color amongst the streamlined decor.
If those splashes of color suit the whole, they’ll fit in like they’ve always been there. (Writers know better, lol.) It’s the same of all good writing, really. It seems effortlessly formed when reading it.
The spectrum’s a funny thing–I’m autistic and I’m the complete opposite when it comes to books. Although I love other styles of writing, I’ll always adore lush, dense, or complex prose the most. The more “visual” the better, too. It’s like being wrapped in a lovely labyrinth of words that I need to explore every twist of, and after I’ve finished I’ll go back, in a day, a year, whenever, and find something I missed the first go around.