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Review
My view on this game seesawed wildly over time.
I played it while going through the short game showcase in fairly rapid order. I felt dismay at seeing the large chunk of text in the first passage. Then I clicked through as fast as I could without reading to estimate the size of the game (since most choice-based games lack such indications, although this one turned out to be in acts). I found out that it was essentially 'click to move forward', and I sighed; the sigh deepened when I realized each page had many 'aside' links that went to several-page long linear texts.
So this, in the end, is just a long story, with mild nonlinearity. That means that, rather than judging it against all interactive fiction, where bad writing can be made up for by clever mechanics, I would instead be comparing it to all written stories.
And in that vein, it is good, getting better as it goes on, due to its slow buildup. But I feel like the narrators could have been more strongly differentiated in voice (all felt pretty refined, educated, resigned and frank, despite describing very different events) and that more of a plot arc could have been built up; the climax seemed sudden with no denouement.
I do believe this is just a matter of taste; I prefer more pulpy/genre fiction than literary fiction, and I can think of several people I could recommend this to who would deeply enjoy it. For me, I don't think my time was wasted and I'm glad the author has made it, but I missed the things mentioned above and, as a work of IF, I would have loved more involvement.
On a side note, the 'restart' button is in the lower right corner, and the 'move on' button was right next to it, and sometimes the way to move on was clicking a word, so I ended up clicking 'restart' on accident several times, often when the passages were most exciting. I feel like this is more my fault than the author's fault, so I'm only mentioning this so that others can avoid being dumb like me.
