'The Fountain: Prelude' is a horror story/experience with mysterious lore and a disorienting psychological aspect to get a few chills down your spine. The best part I would praise in this visual novel is the presentation and the use of the UI to instill a sense of normalcy, only to then break through that preconception and give the reader a shock. The UI work, the sprite art, and the background art is just low quality enough to evoke a familiar sense of retro graphics in a video game, but that also gets played around with, as more horror elements get introduced to the experience. I say experience, because I'm guessing that this story is a "story-within a story-within a story", at least in the way that it's presented. The visual novel is presented like watching an old VHS tape, so the characters in the main story are all just characters in a movie and reader is supposed to be a separate entity actually only watching the movie. Thus, the story is disjointed and characters don't act logically because it really does appear to be just a scripted story, and that's on purpose to mess with the reader's head and get some scares in. There's even an additional layer of meta-horror by incorporating the visual novel page and a 'Dev-Blog' to make the game itself feel like it's a cursed media that contains a cursed entity called 'the fountain man'. The dev blog-element does feel like it doesn't hit the right tone or voice that a dev log should have when trying to ground this horror, adding in a bit too much 'fiction on top of fiction', if that makes sense (would've been neat if the game files had some unused assets or developer comments that could've tied the dev log to the game more). I think the cursed cryptid element also is a bit too vague, when it's essentially a generic boogeyman that takes recognizable phrases and twists them like "I scream but have no mouth", I would've appreciated a bit more set up of the titular fountain and how that ties into everything or maybe a cryptid that had a more distinct aesthetic. The 'stick to the script' angle was cool, especially as it alludes to a horror film specific cryptid. That being said, the OOC message does explain that this is all a prelude to a larger project, so I imagine that these details and questions will be expanded upon and developed in the future project. Overall, surprisingly chilling experience, fans of horror will appreciate the tropes and references, but since it's meant to be a lead in to the bigger project, the story does end up being a bit shallow and non-conclusive.