The aspect I really like about this story is
the tone. Always somber and mostly dreary. David carries with him a constant sense of defeat, constantly ruminating and ruminating over his grisly memories, trying to look for an angle that'd let him grasp a piece of where Avery's unwavering purpose and confidence comes from. It does this dreariness very well, but never falls into drudgery... never allows
the prose itself to be boring or passed over.
Unfortunately,
the writing style alone wasn't enough to captivate me. David excluded, I felt
the characters to be a little flat.
Elena is only shown in a state of inaction. As can be gleamed from the story and mentioned in the Q&A, she's in this state of hesitation throughout the game, and this conflict of hers is never truly resolved since the game ends before telling us what results from those first steps she takes in the last minute. We only ever see this one side. That flash of something more at the end isn't enough to create any real opinions or observations. This seems like more of a side effect of setting up a twist ending than anything else, and I certainly can't proffer any remedies for it, but it still leaves a tinge of dissatisfaction, ultimately.
As for Avery McMillian, he struck me as the latest iteration out of the old and typical psychopathic mold we're all acquainted with. I kept anticipating something more out of him, given David's absolute obsession over the case, but I felt like he never reached beyond the bounds of the archetype. Less objectively, something just really rubbed at me the wrong way, when Avery suggested his god keeps a tally sheet with actual quantitative values of misdeeds and good deeds. Personally, it just struck me as an odd thing to say. Though I understood immediately after why it was used, it still didn't wash the taste out of my mouth.
I found
the fact that David is absolutely consumed and haunted by
the one real memory of adult life he has to be
the most fascinating element. So much so, I ended up hoping that this would be
the whole story, and found
the elevator and other scenes to be almost distracting. There's just so much here, and you definitely explore it well for
the length you have for
the story, but every other event personally felt no more than peripheral. This probably contributes
the most to
the lack of fulfillment I had at
the end of my reading, but a lot of it is also me wanting more of what just wasn't there. This is all really subjective though, as this is
the one element I'd take furthest if I had written this piece. But alas, I didn't, and I can't fault you too much for telling *your* story.
Ultimately, I certainly didn't hate it, and it certainly wasn't a waste of time... but there's this incompleteness I can't shake. There just wasn't enough, somewhere. Suspense pieces like this are very tough to do in short lengths. I can never fault a story for having been written though. They are all stepping stones to getting better and more practiced. I feel I might've even been a bit too harsh, but I hold you to a higher standard and expect quite a bit from you, as much undue pressure as that is. And I'll always be anticipating what's gonna come next from you.