Ratings and Reviews by IFforL2

It's been a long time since I've seen a new genuinely interactive text in Mandarin Chinese. A lot of what is called 文字冒險遊戲 or 互動小說 is really just web novels with very little or no reader/player agency.

This CYOA actually offered a lot of choices. I didn't feel disappointed or railroaded with any of the bad endings even though I started out pessimistically trying to sabotage the PC.

It lost one star due to the simple writing style. (Though for beginning or low-intermediate Mandarin learners it's probably right on the money!) It was fun and entertaining for a little under an hour, but never really wowed me, so I couldn't give it a fourth star.

這正是文字冒險應該要有的樣子。
This game is exactly what a text adventure should be. Even if you don't like escape rooms, you should play just to see how East Asian IF is improving on language-based interactivity.

English: You can play in English, but you may not recognize the sheer genius of the interface as it works better in Chinese than in English.* I do think this concept could work marvelously in English, but an author might need to be a native speaker.
Interface: This is a parser hybrid. Instead of typing commands, the player can obtain action and object cards. Each is stored in a separate inventory. For example, if I "examine flowers" I might consequently obtain the ability to "smell flowers." (This is not a game example or spoiler.) You grab and drag the cards to a place in the sentence.
Game play: It's an escape room. This is not a ground-breaking concept but the author made the right decision here. (S)he's introducing a completely new kind of interface to the Chinese gaming community, after all. There simply were no parser games in Chinese until now.

*One of my Chinese professors thinks Chinese learners should abandon the western concept of individual adjectives, nouns, verbs, etc. Instead, she promotes thinking in terms of "subject phrases," "attributives," "predicate clauses," "adverbial adjuncts" and other parts of speech.

Although I enjoy many works of interactive literature just as well as text adventure puzzlers, I observe that puzzles help language learners to read IF with more focus, care, and investment. Therefore, I find it unfortunate that few East Asian visual novels include puzzles. Those that do tend to limit themselves to instant death by wrong choice. The Poisoned Soup is a rare piece in that the fluently bilingual author is well-read in a variety of IF genres. These range from parser-based puzzle games, to parser-based literature, to choice-based (and basically linear) East Asian visual novels.(Spoiler - click to show) Steven Dong intentionally makes it difficult to select all the right choices in the first play-through. However, wrong choices don't usually lead to instant death without clear warnings. Rather, most wrong choices cause trauma to the PC. As I made progress in the game/work, Dong's method caused, in me at least, a sense of desperation and increasing cautiousness, as well as personal investment in the PC's lot.

I would have to say that this is currently my second favorite Mandarin game after 逃出去 | Escape.

這段恐怖視覺小說設在台灣的大學校園。寫作風格是還可以的, 有點陳詞濫調。有很長的無選擇的敘事，特別是在前面。後來一些選擇導致突然失敗，雖然可能把故事帶到兩個不同的結局。

This horror CYOA is set at a particular university campus in Taiwan. For this reason, it may appeal only to a very specific audience. The quality of writing is not bad, but unremarkable. There are long stretches of narrative without options, especially at the beginning. Later, there are a couple of binary choices, one leading to sudden death, and the other continuing the narrative. A few consequential choices do exist, and it is possible to find two different endings.