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Review
I was curious as to why this one wasn’t just a prose story, then I checked the author’s website and saw that the bulk of it already *was* a prose story. It seemed not-quite-interesting-enough to be a prose story by itself but much too long to be a book within a proper game…unfortunately I skimmed a lot of it wondering when choices would actually happen in the IF game, whereas if it were presented to me as a short static fiction I would’ve read more carefully and enjoyed it as it was clearly intended, i.e. a novella.
It felt like that prose story with 0 choices was The Point of the game with the other history books being backstory and the choices being somewhat window dressing to wrap up that story. Even at the end of the game when choices ostensibly come back, it’s pretty much “click to progress” which was functionally the same as the “turn page” button in the book parts. I think the crucial branching choice was basically deciding whether Anhah (or whatever the spelling was) would stay in the library or we would take her with us.
At first I was confused as to why the East was pretty 1:1 with actual Chinese history, locations, and mythology and the West was really fantastical and not really grounded in actual history (at least as far as I could tell?), but upon writing this review I realized that it’s what Europe *always does* to China so maybe they need a taste of their own medicine!
In short, if I wanted to read a short story I would’ve just read a short story, not tried to play an IFComp game.
