Spoiler Alert!
A melancholic and slightly depressing story at it’s core, though diluted by many other plot points the felt forcibly drove in instead of resolving the conflict. For one, the first scene with the random nerd thoughts (+ the random morbid thoughts) was kind of unnecessary (it felt like spending too much effort to make MC feel unique but with no real relevance on the story). The MC was wallowing in his sadness and melancholy, then instantly turns horny when there’s a hot furry old men that is also a trucker? (…honestly based) But still, I’d hoped the emotions of the MC was handled a bit more clear, since it seems like that switch was jarring. The conversation about God was sudden, perhaps could be a bit better if there was a brief talk beforehand in the shower scene.
Final thing about the plot is MC’s choice to just…keep walking. Well, with all the emotional arcs MC and Cassidy is going through, I fully believed that they’d stay together at the end, but that’s not the case. Maybe MC was still too unsure, perhaps afraid of being dependent. However that (somewhat) invalidates the build up and the change within MC that was shown in the entire story. It reads more like a prologue to a story than the story itself.
I’m not American but I’m pretty sure it isn’t easy to just walk that distance, it felt like maybe MC would just leave Cassidy on wait forever, never calling back, never anything. Since I don’t think he packed enough food…nor even care enough to survive. The final song painted a different picture, but I really still don’t think it has any feasibility at all.
Let’s move on to the presentation. Apparently it’s already been streamed on the FVN server, so you probably have known of the background display error somewhere before the middle of the story. The fonts change helped the text, but not the character names and well…everything else I think. There’s still a lot of accessibility features though, and my favorite was the textbox opacity.
The ending sequence was beautiful with the second lyrical song, but the first one is wayyy worse. I can’t hear the words properly because the singer sounds like he’s trying to scream while having a cold, and the lyrics + the narration still running splits my attention in two (in a bad way). And since I can’t hear, I could barely understand what it was about (except that one part about gay and straight at the end, which probably mirrors the relationship w/ his best friend). Overall, could have integrated that one better in the story
Theme-wise, it felt like MC got some type of hope for the future which would be his ‘Light in the Dark’, but then again with the feasibility thing and MC’s final choice to leave, it does felt rather unfulfilled as a whole.
P.S That comment about the truck engine and MC’s engineering degree really got my hopes up that they’ll just depend on each other in the job in the future, but it’s just bait in the end, kinda wasted opportunity I’m ngl :(
Rating: 2234
Edit: Rebalancing of rating to 2333