I’m currently rating a work of fiction about rating a work of fiction. I’m not sure how I feel about that, so let’s just jump directly to the review.

Gameplay: The game is about a young girl who’s writing short stories as her world (seemingly Earth in the not-too-distant future) is under threat of annihilation by a meteor shower. It’s highly meta, as the interaction includes rating those stories and offering occasional prompts to “get on with it” as the narrator describes Alix’s life. The work is primarily-choice based, aside from rating some of the protagonist’s stories on a scale from 1 to 10. It feels odd to interrupt a story a large, epic story with those bursts of short fiction, or to have a character dealing with literally earth-shattering events to spend her time writing short stories. On the other hand, I played and am currently reviewing this game around the time of the 2018 midterms in the United States. So yeah, highly meta. 6/10.

Mechanics: The choices taken do affect the game, though it’s not entirely clear even in retrospect which choices lead to which endings. The protagonist does react directly to the ratings, and those responses are entertaining. 6/10.

Presentation: The game is well-written throughout, and the characters are detailed and realistic. I had a bit of trouble identifying with the protagonist, though. I have no problem with stories that contain characters, even protagonists, I dislike; rather, the difficulty I had I didn’t have much sympathy for her goals. Low scores resulted in her complaining with self-indulgent, middle-school-style lazy sarcasm; high scores resulted in breezy, overwrought praise. (That’s not a complaint about the author; those two passages were brilliantly written.) I was more interested in the frame story and didn’t have much sympathy toward the protagonist’s escapism, and that’s part of the point of the game. 7/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You’ve ever written a creative work and posted it online for reviews.

Score: 6