Realtyloading774

+ Small Town With A Dark Secret is a little cliché at this point but it’s a cliché I like. The atmosphere works pretty well, for the most part. It feels lonesome and isolated, which is good. Actually using Akira Yamaoka music is a little on the nose, but it fits.
+ I get that this is segment 1, which implies there is a segment 2 to come. But I’m pretty interested in what actually happened and what is going to happen. I’m assuming some of the dangling plot threads are going to be addressed there. I look forward to it.
+ I also like that you don’t get too caught up in explaining jargon or concepts the audience understands by osmosis. That’s a common problem in horror, so I’m glad you stayed clear of it.
- That being said, infodumps are bad, and they tend to completely deflate tension. In the beginning, you might just want to jump into the action directly and have these details be revealed gradually. Just up and stating 'hey, this town is famous for disappearances!' isn't scary, really. Likewise, if the protagonist keeps warning us about how scared we'll be, people will instinctively not allow themselves to be scared. It’s especially a problem for the more dramatic reveals, which mostly involve your protagonist plainly telling us about someone else telling a story, instead of direct actions. Just relaying information. It’s very detached, which can work to your advantage sometimes but not in this particular scenario.
- A lot of the text seems to be contained in huge run-on sentences. Give your prose a rhythm. Sometimes, it seems like you just replaced a word or phrase with an equivalent one that is just considered more advanced. That’s a really awkward and superficial way of getting your character to appear high-class.
- Do another proofread check. Lots of spelling mistakes. For example, “I” is written as “i” a bunch.
- Even though you're writing in the past-tense, you still need to keep things punchy and flowing. For example, 'If I began to come close to running out of tape...' is pretty unwieldy. I understand you want to stress how important it is that he keep rolling at all times, but you'll want to convey that with word choice or dialogue, not with all this framework. Or 'I suppose he suddenly felt the need to start to slowly explaining things.' By the time you end that sentence, how many conditions and pauses have you inserted? Which part of that is the most important? The fact that the speaker is unsure? The fact that the subject felt the need to suddenly do it? The fact that he’s only starting? The fact that it’s slow? Pick one, and focus on that. Focus on other elements of the dynamic later. There’s another one later where you’re describing a motive, but you switch subjects a bunch of times; from the police guessing, to the suspects’s case history, to the victim’s relationship to the suspect, to the suspect’s personal hobbies
- Japanese VNs tend to over-emphasize and re-explain, but you don't need to emulate that. Telling us that the characters didn't speak a word to each other, and also that they walked in silence is pretty redundant. A lot of translated VNs tend to fall into that same trap of redundant run-on sentences. Try not to emulate them. Or how you re-explain how Cording’s movements are erratic and how he avoids the townsfolk multiple times. Emphasizing something is fine when you want to build upon earlier behaviour, but just stating the same thing over and over is tiresome. I know that’s a common thing in Japanese VNs, but it’s pretty awkward in English, so try to avoid it.
- Your protagonist acts pretty erratically. First, he tells us that all his childhood memories of the town are happy ones, and he’s totally unaware of the crazy happenings. But over the course of the story, he gradually reveals his fucked up memories and his knowledge of all these crazy rumours/horrific tragedies. It’s not like these memories were repressed or anything, so the disconnect doesn’t make much sense.
In all, I enjoyed my time with it. Nice change of pace from fake Japanese higschool romance. Needs some polish, sure, but you have a good base to build off of.
-Anonymous

Overall, I'd give it a 7/10, with 5/10 being 'Decent' and 10/10 being legendary.
There are no 10/10 EVN. Not yet.
-Hexer

SAE Indonesia's Content Writer