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KinGoliard rated The Fountain: Prelude

KinGoliard rated a furry visual novel 160 days ago
A browser furry visual novel made in HTML5.

The art style was so interesting and works with what you're going for! I really liked Snow's voice, her talk about the journey they could take through the stars was lovely, it was quite poetic. The eerie scene after they retire to the tent was very cool too. I also like the way it blends into reality with the dev log that's posted, and the central mystery of where they end up was a nice starting point.

The music did a good job setting the tone! I liked the beeps effect for their voices too.

It would have been nice for more of the characters to have unique voices, at first I thought Jenn was unique for using 'like' a lot but then most of the girls did. The 'hellas' definitely put me in the mind of California, and obviously the whole thing had a good slasher, 'scared teens in the woods' vibe to it, but it was strange to have Boris there- Russians hanging out in America in the 80s/90s is a very strange occurrence and I would have loved to know more about why he was there.

I feel like some editing would have helped. There were some issues where capitalization or punctuation was missing ('harvard', 'fountain man'), and some spelling issues ('to' instead of 'too', 'cheeped' v 'cheaped). Some of the sentences could have been split up or used emphasis or pauses to work better (for example, 'Figured, it sounded like something a nerd would come up with' feels like a long, flat sentence; something like 'Figured. It sounded like something a nerd would come up with." might feel more impactful).

There was a bit of a pacing issue, the campfire scene was very long. It was a good while before we got to the first eerie thing (barring them telling ghost stories, which wasn't too scary because there were so many of them together and Trent's silly jokes kept breaking the tension). Most horrors establish that something IS wrong a bit faster than that, even if not with bloodshed or gore but by showing something watching them from the woods for example. Similarly inside the 'labyrinth' there was a lot of just wandering around being confused, and even when Trent was trying to kill them they found time to sit together and discuss university.

I'm not clear on if Jenn's transformation from the tents on into a vile character who attacks them with a flashlight or pushes them into pits was supernatural or not, it felt like she was just a really bad person they were hanging around with for some reason- and after she does attack them it never quite feels like the cast are taking it seriously. Same with Trent tying Boris up and marching them through the woods, it would be one thing if they were already 'possessed' but it wasn't clear to me personally that anything had to changed, particularly given how confused they all seemed when they first entered the house.

Perhaps the biggest thing I'd say is that the characters felt like people who are vaguely aware of being in a horror movie or something but it seems to make them flatter rather than more interesting, like they're all depressed slightly by it. Snow in particularly was a little infuriating to play as because she sees Trent take Boris off and I'm sure has a line about thinking she won't see him again, but she doesn't do anything; and similarly she just lets Ashley run off to distract Trent without really much of a fight.

Finally, some of the meta stuff didn't quite work for me. The dev log is a fun idea but making a separate document is tough going, I didn't know whether to read it first or last and it was pretty long too. If the creator of it is making/porting a visual novel, I think it would be really easy to intersperse it INTO the game itself, like cut out of the action after a big moment and have the creator comment on it like 'wow, that was crazy, I programmed this whilst something weird was going on with me too', a bit House of Leaves with it's footnotes/the man who finds the manuscript. This game made me think a lot of House of Leaves actually, which is a good thing!

I hope this isn't too much criticism, because I think all of this is solvable with a good edit, and you have a really interesting concept here! Best of luck!