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Dingo rated Our Shared Lie

Dingo rated a Visual Novel 1 year ago
A downloadable Visual Novel for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.

*Inhales deeply*

So, this is a beautiful VN. But something feels deeply askew, leading to complete uninterest in this story. I will try to tell you what I mean:


The conflict seems to be "Man vs Man". There are themes of survival, power feuds, and maybe identity, dysphoria, or some type of psychosis. The tone is apprehensive and perhaps anxious.


Storytelling is typically an oral skill, but it can apply to written stories as well. It all has to do with what you choose to reveal as the plot unfolds, and what you hold back, and the reasons for doing so. You have no reasons... Youre relaying a series of events in a slightly descriptive way. This is not storytelling. You fail to immerse readers into your world, connect with them, and thus ultimately failed the theme because we aren't invested; You cant expect us to be in your MC's shoes and feel what he feels with weak writing like this. So in a sense you do not even have a story here.


The biggest gripe is being in the MC's perspective. When I saw their naming methods, I thought there was some clever trick to it. Nope. None that I can decipher. It's just random? Like a shuffling of cards? Is that your idea of being born into a word, not being able to relate to something as simple as your own name? I decided to suspend this belief; there is no way that a writer was going to tackle something so heavy... And I was proven right (so far). Rather than it being more serious to the theme of identity, it is just an accidental plot device or motif, to make the reader not know/care about your characters or to point out at the randomness of being born. This goes contrary to what you are supposed to do. I feel no urge to keep "AL-blahblahblah" or "LC-yaddayadda" alive unless you can give us a hint from the start that these arent random, otherwise youre just killing your own story for the sake of "oh, letters and numbers are cool!".


It felt like I was in an autism simulator. Once again, your writing skills don't seem to indicate that level of thoughtfulness, rather, it is more likely the writer is autistic and doesn't understand normal (as normal as you can get it in their circumstances) reactions. Im not saying this to be disparaging, I think it can be a legitimate perspective that critiques and educates the reader, but you don't show any hint of planning that far ahead.

Motives and personality mix together to create emotions and actions your character to act out. Im not saying you lack the descriptiveness to make an enemy sound/act aggressive. Im saying where is the logic to make them react that way in the first place???

You know how we get those thoughts about our pets? "We need to go to work, to get money, to buy their pet food". Logic. Reason. But the animal does not understand work or money. All it understands is you bring the food, because they are quite dumb.... I know I am not a dimwit, but I felt like a dumb animal that has no idea what is going on, why they are reacting like that, or why aren't they civil? Born-Ruffians dont organize or wear uniforms and behave when they have a weapon in their hand. They seemed too tempered to have what they have, and yet they act like savages??? These dont match unless they are paid actors doing a bad job, but a good enough job to trick the MC.


The writer and storyboard director really need to go back to the drawing board and start over. For starters, if you want to keep these random name tags as their name, at least have the characters call them out as dumb and let them give each other actual english nicknames, this makes their robot nicknames have a bigger impact due to some plot point where they come into actual play. If there is no purpose and it is meant as some kind of motif for the randomness of being born, then use their nicknames when it is appropriate to bring up that motif. Was identity/purpose not the theme you are going for? THEN DITCH THOSE WEIRD ROBOT NICKNAMES! NO ONE EVEN READS THE FULL VERSION WITH THE NUMBERS!

And please work out their true/inner personalities. Yes, your characters can forget their personalities too until they rediscover them, but please come up with some logic for their reactions if it's going to be this discombobulating! It is HELL being in the MC or even in that hell pit of a world were no one has normal reactions!


So far, the writing is not only bad, from what I can tell, I'd have to say it is a troll wasting the rest of the team's time, or someone with a lot of problems who badly wants to write something and yet isn't skilled enough. There are very important ingredients that goes into writing well besides grammar, punctuation, and descriptiveness. In essence, all stories try to answer a question by entertaining you with some fantasy. What is your question? How do you want to answer it? What elements of fantasy are you willing to entertain? The more deeper/profound/tasteful, then the more you actually have a story worth putting out to the world. Forget all that technical stuff about writing! So far, the true essence in this VN is missing, or at least confusing/contradictory. Maybe dont be a pantser if that's the way youve been doing this so far. Or really put the pen down if youve intentionally planned this, and that's the best you've got. It's not a bad thing to spend more time learning and reading from the pros. Speaking of prose (pun intended) I think the style of Daniel Mannix, he wrote a wonderful book called The Fox and the Hound. I couldn't find a single paragraph in that book that was lacking, plus it will really fit well into your VN if you can copy some of its style. Here is a free version: https://pdfcoffee.com/the-fox-and-the-hound-pdf-free.html