Elsinore: After Hamlet

“We aren’t in Denmark! This is not Hamlet!”

“We are in Denmark,” Horatio speaks up stonily, meeting your irate gaze. “I have lived in Elsinore’s arms my entire life, and I will die in them.”

“How could we be in Denmark?! None of us are speaking Danish!” you retort, ticking off your arguments on your fingers. “We’re all speaking modern English, with American accents! You’re experiencing a...a mass hallucination, or something.”

“How else would we speak?”

Mild unmarked spoilers ahead. Bigger spoilers will be marked.

This story is unhinged in a good way. It is, as my title says, technically a self-insert fanfiction of Hamlet, but with much more tragic gravitas than that description implies. You play as an Asian-American college student in the middle of Covid (not a great situation to be in), writing an English essay about Hamlet at your parents' home during quarantine. Then you get isekai'd. You're now in the world of Hamlet, with a twist: it's after the ending of the play. Everyone is dead and there's only Horatio and Fortinbras to talk to, at least initially. But the political situation keeps developing, and to make matters worse, (Spoiler - click to show)there's a strange sickness afoot...

The execution blends reality and fantasy well. In particular I thought the (Spoiler - click to show)addition of Covid into the story worked really well, partly because it activates the part of me that likes to read historical/fictional isekai stories on Spacebattles and think about the disastrous results of outside context problems, but also because it's genuinely an intriguing idea and well-handled. The ambiguity of the scenario, and the complexity of (Spoiler - click to show)you working to cure the plague while being the person who brought it back in the first place, creating conditions just like the ones you "escaped" from, which contributes to the burgeoning civil war... all great morally grey stuff to chew on.

The main downside for me was that the story wrapped up far quicker than I was expecting. From scene-by-scene gameplay with dialogue, I was suddenly moved to a summary of my later life in the world of Hamlet and then an ending: (Spoiler - click to show)I got the "True Good Ending" where I created penicilin and devoted myself to medical work, but was never able to return home. It was a well-written ending, don't get me wrong, and I love when isekais dwell on (Spoiler - click to show)how the protagonist begins to forget their old home, but all the same, what I got felt a bit like the opening of something longer that got cut short.

I still really liked it anyway, and gave it four stars because I have a soft spot for isekais. Don't ask me how many trashy RoyalRoad stories I've read.

Side notes:

1 - I like that the protagonist's last name is randomly selected from a list of Asian-American last names. I gave the protagonist my own first name, for that classic self-insert flair, and seeing that first name paired with a variety of last names made me think about all the other versions of me fate could have created and that kinda thing. It works well with the character creation in general, emphasizing that not just one but many people lived through situations like this, terrified about their families' safety and frightened at the racial violence and harassment suffered by many innocents for something outside their control. The line quoted below, where the protagonist is terrified of being the victim of a racist assault, sticks with me:

I don’t want to clutch some stranger’s hand while I bleed out on a supermarket floor and beg them to get my grandparents to safety and tell the cop everything that happened—to swear on God (the capital G for Jesus one, not the lowercase one we throw around for emphasis at home) in my most perfect English that I didn’t do anything but exist between the oranges and apples and maybe glance the wrong way with my chinky eyes, and please, officer, we’re just out getting groceries and our parents are waiting at home and our grandparents don’t speak English very well, I’ll translate for them—

2 - The protagonist is similar to and different from me in interesting ways. I also had to write an essay on Hamlet in a college English class, though it wasn't during Covid quarantine. For the record, I got a B on that essay and was salty about it for a while. I'm not a very big fan of Hamlet to this day.

One of the biggest differences is that the protagonist knew people who died from Covid and is thereby much more affected by it, while I was privileged enough to never get the illness, never be threatened by it, and never know anyone who died from it. I personally don't have many negative memories of quarantine, but only because I'm lucky enough to not be among those who were severely hurt or killed.

3 - There's timed text in this game, but on my replay I ran into some issues. Once after the first "Act Five, Scene Two." appeared, the next line didn't appear even after I waited for minutes. I figured out you could avoid that issue by not clicking anything while you wait for the timed text to show up. Annoying, but not the end of the world.

After that, I decided to ignore the Call to Adventure this time and was eventually presented with a blue link that made the words "Go, bid the soldiers shoot," flash onto the screen. No matter how many times I clicked the link, it just made the same text flash over and over, and I couldn't fix it. I eventually realized you had to click a link in the diagonal red text that appears several paragraphs before the blue link to progress, which is counterintuitive.

I got the Bad End in my second playthrough. The other review here says that at least one of the endings lets you return to reality, but since I don't feel like playing another time, I guess my character is just stuck in Hamlet forever.