Countdown to SilenceRecommendation/review: https://disearnestlydisearnest.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/countdown-to-silence-a-vn-recommendation-review/
2020-03-26
4
Dropped
Dark NightsI got one good ending of uhh transforms-into-an-animal-kun. The pacing is bizarrely fast at the weirdest moments, the prose is bad (whose fucking idea was it for the main heroine to never ever use contractions? it doesn't WORK holy shit), the plotting is not particularly great either, the music use is weird, overall it just has a lot of craft problems. The setting is fun but the execution is very, very amateur and I guess cute supernatural boys aren't enough to distract me from the weakness of every element but the art.
Double ExposureA kind of cool concept with some nice moments both cute and tense. But god, the prose for the viewpoint character Serena and her narration is really bad. When you try to write something flowery - with big words and all that jazz - you really need to be on the ball, and the frequent awkward phrasings and plain misuses of words on show here fall very short of the mark. This also spills over into Lizzie's dialogue, which at times feels unnatural. There are also multiple technical problems (no music volume slider, auto slider actually controls normal text speed, right click doesn't cancel out of settings, backlog always rolls back to start of scene and there's no text wrapping...). Polish is also lacking. Typos and weird points where the textbox just goes blank for no reason and you have to click again to get more text are frequent. The good ending just pops you unceremoniously back to the title screen, after 2(!) clicks on an empty textbox. It's also a bit rushed.
