The Diary

honestly my original review was hyper-critical sorta as a knee jerk reaction to the positive comments vs my personal experience so I’ll try to explain myself more rationally this time, sorry if I was way too rude and somewhat deliberately obtuse. 

The reason I claimed your game was “too short” was because i felt after finishing that there was no time for:

a) the “gender swap” part of the game, 

b) the characters being fleshed out individually, and

c) the core gameplay loop of the story to kick in (as much as it is I presume a linear game, I moreso am referring to like the point where you’ve been through a few days and understand what you’re doing)

I was being kinda annoying on purpose because I get that it’s something you spent a long time on and wish to get it out, at least as a way of spreading the word for people to pick it up later when it’s more developed. I also didn’t do enough research into the development of the game before just slandering you my bad.

In terms of the writing quality, I think the reason I viewed it as ai was due to the overuse and misuse of —the sacred—em—dash. It seemed like every paragraph had multiple em dashes — even when a different form of punctuation could’ve been used — which also served to break up the story for me.

The character writing might just be not my cup of tea, but I personally didn’t really see any traits in the characters which I could suspend my disbelief for and get myself involved in the story, because it felt like when they spoke I was talking to a robot who was trying to imitate normal speech, e.g.

“Got it! I’m at my laptop screen, school map open. If you show up between the laundry room and biology wing I’ll dispatch a drone. Or more realistically: I’ll send you the GPS coordinates of the snack machine. Solid landmark, I’d say 😉” - Frank

It just reads to me like a thing that nobody would ever say, but again maybe it’s who I surround myself with. 

Anyway the story’s undoubtedly better than anything I could cook up, and you really don’t have to consider taking me seriously at all, but this is what I felt while playing.

Also I always get scared writing these long messages because I probably messed up something but I don’t wanna proofread a reply online so ignore any mistakes.