Reviews by leechykeen

There were many times during my playthrough of Thalassaphilia when I was deeply, pleasantly surprised. What I thought would be a fun and flirty fix for my Mass Effect addiction has an engaging mystery at its heart, one that manages to pack in several twists despite its short length. The characters are engaging, and I felt personally torn between being drawn into their friendly group or maintaining my professional detachment. (Spoiler - click to show)One, or all, of them might be murderers, after all.

On a nitty-gritty level, the story is well-paced and the choices are engaging; I would maybe have liked some more close-calls and potentially "wrong" choices to add to the tension and feeling like I was trying to get the crew to like me. The character portraits, while good, are a little bit more sexualized than necessarily fits the tone and setting, which is part of what led to my surprise when the story revealed itself to be a fairly tense mystery.

Overall, the game is exceedingly well-written and well-presented. I'm playing the next chapter the moment it comes out.

I'm reminded of the memes about your average BL story ("b-but, we're both boys!") versus WLW/yuri stories ("i will kill us both before I admit my feelings to myself").

This story is dramatic and very emotional -- the set-up and the three branching endings are very affecting and even verge on the gothic in all the best ways. Some of the branching bits of exposition were less effective, which was unfortunately undergirded by the frequent lines referencing how the digressions weren't relevant to the task at hand as the protagonists brought themselves back to the reality of the scene. I understand from the author's notes that some of these worldbuilding details are meant to tie the story back to a larger shared universe, but here they mostly diluted the very intense conflict at the heart of the story.

That said, the story is a riveting bit of drama. I played through all 3 endings beginning with the most grotesque and tragic and then moving to the happy ending, which I would recommend to other readers (it will be obvious which ending is the worst outcome for the characters).

Some visual styling, music, and more interactive elements would be a great addition to this piece, but I appreciate that the author mentioned being new to Twine. I look forward to seeing other works as the author continues their Twine learning journey!