Mastodawn

Now the good.

I adore the art design and music, but also there are some really fresh approach to this genre.

The tension didn't follow the typical episodic wax and wane. It opted to be less formulative regard to what happens when, if it happens at all. Which is super refreshing and even my faves like Danganronpa or Your Turn to Die lacked, without borderline trolling like Raging Loop (a good game, but wooooah the pacing.)

It also rapidly stopped being armchair detective in a manor, and progressed into a more environmentally interesting work.

The overall plot and the delivery are first equal at being the weakest, though each case itself also shown significant problems. The writer worships Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle: and unsurprisingly the mystery are also forced, non-sensual, sloppy, and utterly devoid of either earth logic or in-verse common sense.

It makes me want Isaac Asimov to be spiritually summoned to rescue us from this.

Now if it's presented in a clever way it's fine with me too, but the narrative design could've been about "Jim bought a horse and the horse needed surgery" and still utterly insufferable. Think of Atlas Shrugged level of word dump on Well The Moral Is You Should Be Happy, minus, dear god I'm sorry to say this, Rand at least had writing techniques.

It also doesn't help that the protagonist is a power fantasy, while soggier and weaker than a teabag that's been used more than ten times.

The core plot is an oddly preachy infantilising, pro-life, anti-autonomy, hyper-paternalistic over simplification of "Suicidal? You should just choose to be happy!". Which is bad enough as it is, but it also wanted to come across as more nuanced than it really is, by throwing out whole heaps of strawman arguments followed by "yeah but you should just be happy". It would've better if it just pretend systemic shitty life don't exist, instead of systemic oppression can be just resolved with more personal resilience.

I finished Process of Elimination. It's mostly bad, got worser and worser, but with some clever bits.

It's basically Concerned Troll: The Game.

Oct 3, 2023

I finished Chapter 5. While I found the narrative can be inconsistently interesting, the mystery cases are really really sloppy. I just don't think the narrative designer is that much of a mystery genre writer at all.

Oct 2, 2023

I'm at Chapter 5, and Process of Elimination is frustrating me now. It has some really fresh ideas into the genre, however not only it's swaying pretty hard into protagonist power fantasy, it's also ridiculously long because 80% of the game is protagonist making bad decisions, gets away with it himself, someone else suffers, and here's a new chapter so he had to fix his bad decisions with another set of bad decisions.

But he's never held accountable for any of them. Just being pandered about awwwww don't feel bad. Then he does it again.