Prism

In this choice-based game you play as a former street kid turned courier, scraping out an existence delivering packages to those much more well-off than you. The world you live in is a strange walled city in the middle of a desert, with a rainless storm permanently hovering above a garden at the city's center. Outside of that protected greenspace though, life is bleak and always a struggle.

My favorite thing about this piece was the world building that took place quickly and effortlessly as the beginning of the story unfolded. Think steampunk, but without the steam. Yes, there are robots and elaborate machinery, but their workings are more mystery and magic than steam and pressure. The main currency is electricity stored in a personal battery/wallet. The weaponry is blades and spears, rather than guns.

The author did an amazing job setting the scene, throwing you into a strange new world without much explanation, but almost always with enough context that you could figure out what was going on. I didn't feel like (at least in the first half, more on that later) that any aspect of the world or culture was brought up just for the author to show-off. Even if it was only tangentially important to the scene at the time, it always seemed to keep with the flow of the story while also hinting at undiscovered depths to the world. This piece could have easily been a much longer game or even a novel. And the writing was really good (at least in the first half), slow enough to let you take in all the strangeness, but fast enough to keep the action moving; flowery enough that it felt like poetry at times, without being ostentatious.

The first half of the story was near perfect. Everything was working for me. The second half didn't quite keep me locked in as much as I would have hoped though. All the things that the author got an A+ on in the first half slid down to a B in the second half. The world got deeper and stranger to the point where I couldn't keep up any more. I think the game should have either been longer, to help flesh out and explain the new concepts and characters, or shorter, with some of the story trimmed to lower confusion and keep the plot moving. The writing got a little too flowery and philosophical, and there were a few digressions to make certain points that I thought could have been just as powerful if addressed in subtler ways (as they were in the first half of the story). Finally, the ending was a bit disappointing. Perhaps I will find a better one after more replays, but for all the build-up of the first half, I just felt like it ended weirdly.

I came very, very close to giving this one four stars, and I still might as I think about it some more and play it another time or two, but I'm very stingy with my ratings and I just couldn't get there on this one.

Bottom line though, this is a very enjoyable work and I would encourage everyone to play it. I hope to see more from this author. Would even love to see another story set in this world!