The Warped Castle

Haven't beat the game...just played for a handful of pages...until the alien girl is about to kiss me and I stop her...but alas...this is what I think so far...

I came here cause of Ford recommending her and I just decided to try this game as a result. He said her sentence structure was bad but made up for it for a lot of other reasons. Its...interesting...to see such prose be excused due to English being a secondary language for her.

Like yeah it makes sense...but it makes me question how much prose actually matters as long as the story keeps itself going and you can understand what's going on. Makes me think how much of story reading is actually just trying to figure out the authorial intent...whether that be consciously or subconsciously...

Anyways there's a much longer comment on here explaining that the world doesn't feel very grounded due to jumping around so much and characters feeling like exposition dumps and I have to agree. Part of me feels like giving benefit of the doubt here...insofar as I don't think I've been exposed to a sci-fi story with magical elements this wacky before...insofar that characters just go around and do stuff and everything just...works somehow! Nothing is explained...but I don't necessarily feel that's a bad thing! It was only as I kept reading the story and a cohesive plot started to form...that I realized this snappy pace would fall apart if authorial intent was not codified in some sense. In other words...there needs to be a clear difference between scenes which are meant to establish narrative and scenes which establish theme...and its ironically when the plot becomes more cohesive that the illusion of this making sense as a whole starts to fall apart. Nobody wants to read a story that essentially goes on autopilot...especially if there's not much to soak in from the experience...

Anyways...someone reading this might notice I'm not directly writing this towards the author...and that's cause she hasn't done anything since 2022...making me believe she might have moved on from this site...which is fine obviously...

I suppose the best thing I can say about this game...despite it being very unique compared to most other fiction I've read (to the point I might come back to this) is that its given me ideas for my own stories in the future...as its wacky sci-fi ideas are essentially riffing with potential! Its just a shame not much of it seems to be explored in depth...but I see a spark here that's bigger than the sum of its parts...I like how in the beginning...even though it wasn't super clear what was happening...that all of the ideas were coming together to make an interesting progression of events...or at the very least a creative exercise in dynamically shifting world building...such as an in universe contest and the existence of a universal nexus and what not...so many of these ideas could all work together...

But again...at least from what I've read so far...it doesn't seem to stick the landing.

I mean sure...you could say that at the point of the story I'm at...we're focusing more on characters...but if that were the case when why even bother explaining parts of the world building that aren't important yet? Will they be important later? Its impossible to tell...

Cool idea...not perfect but then again...what story is right? ;)

OH MY FUCKING HELL! THIS IS AMAZING!

This shows a great effort, great tons of complex world building. Enjoyable read, indeed, would definitely not mind going back and diving deeper into this world created by Mara.

Unique, to say the least. One thing I can appreciate about Mara's stories is that it's never what you expect. As far as originality goes, she has the upper-hand on most users on the site. Also, I'm not sure if mostly due to the language barrier or Mara's creativity (perhaps both), but the descriptions are certainly one of a kind. Never a dull moment when reading one of Mara's stories...even if I often have to re-read paragraphs for their intended meaning.

I'm... really not sure what to make of this story.

At this point we all know Mara quite well, that English isn't her natural language, but that she has made great progress over the last year. Therefore I am not going to quibble over semantics and syntax (OMG! You used a comma instead of a period!). Mara is more fluent in English than I am in any other language.

However... this story loses me in its over-caffeinated world-building. Just within the first few pages alone we are introduced to worlds within worlds, characters who are controlling others as avatars, avatars who dream of alternate realities. Just as we get a feel for one reality, the reality shifts into a new one, just in time for a trans-dimensional portal. It is difficult to feel grounded in all this, because the rules seem to be constantly in flux.

And for that matter, the characters don't feel grounded, either. There are attempts at explaining backstory, although from what I can tell those backstories don't inform what happens later in the story. Britannia seems like something from an anime series, with lots of attitude but not too much substance. Her companions seem to exist only to discuss plot points and offer opportunities for exposition ("Let me explain to you, Tibba, about those bionic bees we're about to fight!").

So the shifting points of view (as well as the shifting universes) makes it difficult for me to orient myself in this story. But also, the story's internal rules don't always add up. For instance, Brittania is something of an atheist, which should by definition make her someone who doesn't believe in the existence of gods or the supernatural in general. (An atheist is someone who thinks the existence of the universe and everything in it can be explained entirely by natural phenomena.) Nevertheless, she gets excited at the prospect she might be the "chose one" -- chosen by whom, exactly? -- and she doesn't think twice at sacrificing the hapless turtle-men (who were not previously explained, unless I missed that part) to those same gods, just to enhance her own chances of winning a race, the stakes of which are somewhat inscrutable.

But hey, this is a fully realized storygame, right? Well... I did encounter bugs, including links that looped back to the top of the same page instead of advancing the story, as well as numerous instances of variable scripting appearing on-page, making me wonder if I was supposed to be reading certain passages, or if those had been intended for a different set of circumstances.

I can applaud the effort involved in writing this story, and my rating reflects this. But I'm walking away from it with a bad case of vertigo.