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Review
The UI in this game is fantastic. The effort to recreate Discord's interface, right down to the typing indicators, is incredible. Also love how it switches around depending on which character you're typing as. This is exactly the kind of thing I love to see Twine games do, recreating existing websites and playing with the medium in a way that makes full use of Twine's HTML capabilities and the potential of web fiction in general. Great stuff.
The plot, however, I have some quibbles with. The topic is dark, it's interesting, and it's treated with the gravity it deserves. But as a person who's been in a few close-knit Discord servers, I feel like what the story is missing is a real sense of community with more fleshed-out characters. Since the game is so short, we don't have time to get a sense of who any of the characters are. Name, age, gender, and some vague descriptors is pretty much it. None of them have the time to feel like real people. We don't get to see how the community works and what things were like before the revelations came out, which deadens the impact of it all. We're told that Cornelius is admired and respected more than we're shown that. We only see him (Spoiler - click to show)being a creep, and I guessed that he was a predator almost immediately. It wasn't a surprise at all. I think if there was more detail on the specifics of these people and more on what things were like before it all went down, more of a gradual reveal that there's something wrong with this guy, it would make the revelations and the decision to dissolve the group at the end much more impactful.
Also wish there was more choice involved, though I'm not sure how. I only played once, but there doesn't seem to be a broad range of choices. It's either (Spoiler - click to show)"tell everyone what Cornelius did" or "don't", and what sane person wouldn't pick the first option? I get that in real life there are various reasons people wouldn't want to, but as a reader choosing not to tell just strips you from being able to see the full narrative.
Also, and this may just be a pet peeve of mine, some of the character voices feel slightly off. The older characters especially. Their inclusion is odd in the first place because I rarely see mixed-age groups online and especially people older than 30 or 40, although this might just be a side effects of the communities I'm in. I can see it making sense here with the history of the group, though some more history and notes on how the younger members ended up joining might help. Anyway. A lot of the older characters' dialogue came across as old people talk for the sake of making them look old, i.e. dropping 'boy', and 'dear' all the time. Basically, the older characters rang the least true to me. But as I just said I have no idea how older people act in chatrooms, so who am I to talk?
It's still an interesting game, though. I liked how the flashbacks slowly revealed more of the story over time. And the escalation from (Spoiler - click to show)"Cornelius is acting off here" to "Cornelius is a straight-up predator", coupled with the drama of the car accident, unfolds well. I think if it was longer, and gave us more time to get attached to the characters, I'd feel the vibes more.
[Review written April 2023, edited April 2024]
