The Haze Under Windbrooke
By Jesse Freeman
In fact, the city is still choking on it. The atmosphere of the police station was dealt with well enough, but things still feel bad.
Nostalgia can often fight with format in a title. Something that you have every feeling you should like can end up becoming a slog when there are typos or if it is formatted in a way that limits readability. I realize I’ve used that word multiple times in my Format and Typos section with the assumption that most people would understand what I was implying, but I’d like to talk a bit about it here.
Typos are easy to understand, but format readability can sometimes have the following problems:
- Dialogue cannot be followed easily, and it is difficult to ascribe text to an entity
- Sentences don’t flow into one another, so it creates… a… halting… tempo. (You can imagine clap emojis if you want)
- Actual format sometimes can hurt readability as well, such as writing in screenplay format.
General Story:
You are a young teenager who finds out they have powers and can fight a war against unseen opponents plaguing your city. Use your training and find out what happened to the world and your parents, after a mysterious haze settled on the city of Windbrooke.
The story starts post ‘in media res’, with you fleeing an attack that has left you injured. You make one of the few choices in the title at this point. Was it a vampire, a werewolf, or a mob of humans that injured you? You flee to a guardians home, sans parents, and learn that there was a somewhat under-described ‘night of rage’ that caused some massive riots the night your parents went missing. Shortly after, you find out ‘something’ has given you powers to fight back!
The simplest paired concept I can describe this story with is Persona meets Ghostbusters II. This is where I was talking about how the nostalgia of the themes made me truly want to like this title, but I could not get into it. Negative feeling energy haze pervades the area, and you find out you have powers when you shift to an alternate dimension. Shin Megami Slimer.
Format and Typos:
If you thought this might not be the kindest section after my introduction, you could win a cookie redeemable on February 31st.
This is a personal bias, so weigh what I’m about to complain about against that.
I do not like when paragraph breaks are made between sentences constantly.
As in, each sentence is in its own paragraph.
It reads haltingly and for some reason my brain drops all knowledge of the sentence that came before it, so I find myself having to reread the previous lines multiple times.
Readability is extremely low, in my opinion, but even objectively, there are many typos and capitalization errors.
Game Mechanics and Stats:
Early on, you choose what caused your injury (suggesting that you might become a vampire, werewolf or ‘something else’) and what a friend of the family has trained you in, either archery or swordplay. These choices are, as far as I can tell, the only choices you specifically make that alter your character’s stats. You get a rank of ‘3’ in whichever one you choose, but I saw no choices that tested any of them. Mostly you are choosing your combat flavor during the first few chapters.
Replayability:
Pretty low. Two sets of combat flavor, but I don’t think I’ve hit ‘Next Page’ without a choice breaking it up in the past three titles as I did in this title alone. It makes me assume that there was a strong idea for the opening of the title, but the last few chapters were created only to have a ‘complete’ story.
Dislikes:
- I could not get into the groove of reading this title. Each page was written as halting thoughts from the MC.
- Variability is super low. There are a few instances of choice, but often they are ‘one and done’ and all you’ve accomplished is flavoring how the rest of the novel is presented to you.
- Typos were pervasive. Some of the egregious ones I reported were that the ending screen asking me to rate the title said “We hope you’ve enjoyed playing GAME NAME” and that there were multiple typos in the splash page announcement screen.
Likes:
- Theme was strong and could carry a title.
- The haunted descriptions of the other dimensions are one of the few things that work very well with the halted thought writing style. It breaks up the flow, makes the world feel lopsided and wrong.
- The demo is long enough to understand whether my issues with formatting would also affect you.