The House in Fata Morgana
Nov. 16th, 2022 07:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThe House in Fata Morgana describes itself as "a gothic suspense tale set in a cursed mansion," but I would describe it as 600k+ words of torture porn. It's so bad. It is so so bad.
The idea is that you wake up in an abandoned mansion with no memories, and a creepy maid guides you through the house while telling you the tragic stories of the people who once lived there. It turns out that the maid was present in all eras of history, and that you were too - albeit not in the form you expect. Along the way there are a lot of stupid anime tropes, as well as an embarrassingly hamfisted mistreatment of transgender issues. And did I mention torture? There's a lot of torture.
One of the many reasons I dislike amateur writing communities is because they tend to be filled with people who go through manic phases and then won't shut up about how they wrote 5k words in one night, and how they think these words are the most brilliant thing that's ever been written, and how all of these words are perfect and should never be edited, and how this is now your problem because you need to read and appreciate every single one of those words.
The House in Fata Morgana wrote 5k words in one night, and it shows. The ideas behind the story aren't bad, but the writing is godawful. There was clearly no editing, and the pacing is a miserable mess. Characters repeat themselves endlessly in a way that goes far beyond "demonstrating the theme of a cycle of abuse," and each of the sub-stories drags on forever before ending in a bloodbath of screams that just go "AaAAAAggHHH" and "NnnGGggGG uuuUrrhhh" for literally twenty minutes of clicking through text.
The art is pretty but extremely limited, and the character art is more for the player to masturbate to than to convey any sort of mood. There's no good horror art, or even any interesting visual imagery. The story's giant gothic mansion has like five rooms maybe, and they're all just boring stock photos run through different filters.
About two-thirds of the way through, I finally got to the point where I was just holding down the skip button to speed-read through the text as quickly as possible, and I still gave up at some point during the next-to-last chapter. Towards the end, the story's pace slows down instead of quickens, making this game feel even more tedious as it offers revelations that would be surprising if the writing weren't so mind-numbingly boring.
The House in Fata Morgana would have had the potential to be unique and interesting if its writing had been properly edited. At perhaps 200k words, the player would still have been able to spend a significant amount of time in this creepy mansion with these unfortunate characters, and the writer still would have been able to convey a sense of feeling trapped in a web of words.
I think most players will run up against the question of "why don't the characters just get up and leave," and the same frustration applies to the game in a meta sense. Namely, you don't need to be trapped by this poorly-written and poorly-edited and poorly-paced game. You can just quit! So that's what I did.
The idea is that you wake up in an abandoned mansion with no memories, and a creepy maid guides you through the house while telling you the tragic stories of the people who once lived there. It turns out that the maid was present in all eras of history, and that you were too - albeit not in the form you expect. Along the way there are a lot of stupid anime tropes, as well as an embarrassingly hamfisted mistreatment of transgender issues. And did I mention torture? There's a lot of torture.
One of the many reasons I dislike amateur writing communities is because they tend to be filled with people who go through manic phases and then won't shut up about how they wrote 5k words in one night, and how they think these words are the most brilliant thing that's ever been written, and how all of these words are perfect and should never be edited, and how this is now your problem because you need to read and appreciate every single one of those words.
The House in Fata Morgana wrote 5k words in one night, and it shows. The ideas behind the story aren't bad, but the writing is godawful. There was clearly no editing, and the pacing is a miserable mess. Characters repeat themselves endlessly in a way that goes far beyond "demonstrating the theme of a cycle of abuse," and each of the sub-stories drags on forever before ending in a bloodbath of screams that just go "AaAAAAggHHH" and "NnnGGggGG uuuUrrhhh" for literally twenty minutes of clicking through text.
The art is pretty but extremely limited, and the character art is more for the player to masturbate to than to convey any sort of mood. There's no good horror art, or even any interesting visual imagery. The story's giant gothic mansion has like five rooms maybe, and they're all just boring stock photos run through different filters.
About two-thirds of the way through, I finally got to the point where I was just holding down the skip button to speed-read through the text as quickly as possible, and I still gave up at some point during the next-to-last chapter. Towards the end, the story's pace slows down instead of quickens, making this game feel even more tedious as it offers revelations that would be surprising if the writing weren't so mind-numbingly boring.
The House in Fata Morgana would have had the potential to be unique and interesting if its writing had been properly edited. At perhaps 200k words, the player would still have been able to spend a significant amount of time in this creepy mansion with these unfortunate characters, and the writer still would have been able to convey a sense of feeling trapped in a web of words.
I think most players will run up against the question of "why don't the characters just get up and leave," and the same frustration applies to the game in a meta sense. Namely, you don't need to be trapped by this poorly-written and poorly-edited and poorly-paced game. You can just quit! So that's what I did.
