Shackles of Control

It's a promising start. We're running to our next class, which is at the other end of the school (college?) complex, but the hallways are surprisingly deserted. So too are the rooms you pass by, and everything seems spotless. There's a note of anxiety in the writing that puts us in the protagonist's shoes, and I remember thinking, "Oh, this is not bad at all."

And then it all unravelled.

It seems the author has a specific railroad track of a plot that they want you to follow, and choices that take you out of it exist only so they can berate you for spoiling his efforts. If you persist, they're liable to get huffy or passive-aggressive. Needless to say, the fourth wall is gone by this point. The game isn't about discovering what's really going on in this world: it's about negotiating a gameworld with the sort of gamemaster who loves stream-of-consciousness absurdist humour.

The quality of writing didn't quite live up to the promise of the opening, either. As things went on, I began to be more certain that the author really didn't care, and had simply thrown this together for the heck of it. It's like getting a cheese omelette for breakfast, enjoying the first bite, and then discovering enough eggshell fragments in there to constitute a whole egg. Also, there's no cheese, and this wasn't supposed to be an omelette.