Dysfluent

Oh my god the timed text. Oh god. I’m not as big of a hater on timed text as some, having used it in many of my pieces, but this was really excruciating. I generally limit my timed text to 2 seconds at the most, with my average being half a second. Alas, that was not the case here.

I get that it’s thematic to some degree, to be forced to pause and wait while the protagonist forces their words out of their mouth, but jeez, a lot of the timed text for others speaking or for the prose itself was unnecessary and some of the pauses were extremely long for reasons I couldn’t discern, such as with the flashbacks being meted out sentence. By. Sentence.

Yes, it tried to put me in the head of someone who stutters. While I can see how annoyance at the timed text would bleed nicely into being annoyed at myself-as-protagonist (assuming the timed text was exclusive to stuttering-related sentences or effects), having the timed text *everywhere* just led to annoyance at the game in general. I considered quitting several times, including on the first screen, during what felt like 5-6 second pauses between phrases. The jittering animations didn’t really help either—at least, though, you could turn those off for accessibility…unlike with the timed text.

I think the story was okay, though I’m biased since I’m not super big on slice of life. The attempt at a heartwarming end felt like it came out of nowhere because I don’t remember Clementine being shown as a compassionate or close friend of the protagonist’s—or, really, being shown at all— until that scene. I didn’t really feel any connection or stirring emotion there.

I feel kind of bad for talking critically about this piece when it’s depicting a real disorder in a sympathetic and realistic light. I will say that I did gain more awareness of what it’s like to have a stutter, so on that merit alone I did appreciate it.