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Review
Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review
Style: Visual Novel without pictures
Played: 7/16/26
Playtime: 30m, finished
“isn’t it freeing
to be unwanted?”
I need a word for stream-of-consciousness that doesn’t actually try to capture the reality of thoughts and impressions but generate the IDEA of it. Ok, we have the word POETRY that general aspires to this general effect - of capturing emotion through idea indirection. Long time readers will note with trepidation that this word is loaded if not pejorative for this particular reviewer. I was hoping there was a word SPECIFICALLY for stream of consciousness musings, to let me run at this review without having to endlessly apologize for my unaccountable blind spot.
This is a tale of a vampire’s night, rendered in stylized text and grammar. Its seeming goal, which it honestly succeeds admirably at, is to convey an OFF kind of mindset for these predators, to put the reader in their perspective and through their eyes paint a skewed picture of familiar reality. I actually found it quite good at this. It felt less like a narrative than a slice-of-unlife, its ultimate goal being a hallucinogenic experience of life adjacent to our own.
The formatting of the piece helped this. Organized into three columns, each with their own font and color palette, we are given narration, environmental/sensory grounding, and internal dialogue. We continually bounce among the three, their inputs playing off each other to convey the whole of the experience. The internal dialogue in particular stands out, as the font is just slightly blurry, its lack of clarity contrasting to the sharper inputs to the left to really sell the murky consciousness of the protagonist. There are links to follow, though to my experience they inevitably loop around so the intended narrative is a consume-all-the-words one. But, by allowing the player some small latitude to pursue one thread over another it reinforces and aligns the player with the protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness POV. Our thoughts go where they pull us, unless forced by external stimuli or task focus. I found this to be an extremely effective use of interactivity to underscore and reinforce the narrative aims.
Because I invoked the word POETRY above, I put a big ol’ Damoclean Sword above this review, didn’t I? Sike! Here’s some sample quotes that landed square for me:
“and the stronger people believe
that washing liquid means forgiveness”
“I wonder now: is Female a brand?”
Poetry in the idea abstraction sense, not the rhyming sense, and more often than not really working for me. So you don’t suddenly picture me with beret and bongo drums, let me equivocate that it wasn’t 100% successful.
“A paradox:
the space for which no-one longs
is a space in which nobody looks.”
Is it a paradox? IS IT? (It is not.) Still kinda evocative though. Notwithstanding that face-saving example, the spell this work cast, as the sum of its presentation, interactivity and evocative phrasing, really worked for me. Not a vampire-stan. Dislike poetry. Yet this poetic, impressionistic Nosfera-tale totally landed the plane. I CONTAIN MULTITUDES.
