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All of the haunting majesty of its subject, and a must-read-thrice plot, July 23, 2019Perhaps it helps to be as intimately familiar with Preston Bus Station - in many ways, the subject of the piece - as the protagonist. This work lovingly and faithfully depicts the space and the architecture in a way that's hauntingly familiar to anybody who knows it personally: right down to the shape of the rubberised tiles near the phone booths, the forbidding shadows of the underpass, and the buildings that can be surveyed from its roof.
But even without such a deep recognition of the space... which, ultimately, soon comes to diverge from reality and take on a different - darker, otherworldly - feel... there's a magic to the writing of this story. The reader is teased with just enough backstory to provide a compelling narrative without breaking the first-person illusion. No matter how many times you play (and I've played quite a few!), you'll be left with a hole of unanswered questions, and you'll need to be comfortable with that to get the most out of the story, but that in itself is an important part of the adventure. This is a story of a young person who doesn't - who can't - know everything that they need to bring them comfort in the (literally and figuratively) cold and disquieting world that surrounds them, and it's a world that's presented with a touching and tragic beauty.
Through multiple playthroughs - or rewinds, which it took me a while to notice were an option! - you'll find yourself teased with more and more of the story. There are a few frankly-unfair moments where an unsatisfactory ending comes with little or no warning, and a handful of places where it feels like your choices are insignificant to the story, but these are few and far between. Altogether this is among the better pieces of hypertext fiction I've enjoyed, and I'd recommend that you give it a try (even if you don't share the love-hate relationship with Preston Bus Station that is so common among those who spent much of their youth sitting in it).