This ended up without many spoilers, so I'll put it here. First of all, I enjoyed it and I am eager to find out about the mystery at the end. I didn’t see any inconsistencies in the plot. I thought there were a few dangling plot points but those ended up being resolved, which made them foreshadowing, which is great. What follows is all my opinion, of course!
I think the writer made the right choice by turning it into a cult story. A commune would have been the more sophisticated choice, but a cult is going to get more downloads. It’s a good hook. Few people know what a commune is, but everyone has preconceived ideas of cults. The player will go into the game with expectations, and that’s what you want to play with. To create ambiguity, you need to affirm those expectations, then disrupt them, and that is just what you’ve done. Keep doing that. As the story goes on, as the protagonist gets deeper into it, continue increasing that ambiguity, make the positives and negatives of the cult more extreme, the decision of choosing sides harder.
You have a strong protagonist. Her curiosity, in addition to getting across her youth, makes her involvement with the cult believable, because she’s not just getting talked at by a bunch of adults, but rather she’s seeking knowledge and that means she’s really internalizing and absorbing it, taking it to heart.
That last line in the demo? Wow! Powerful. I think that should be the last line of the game after the rest is written, because it answers the question at the heart of the story.
I do have some non-plot related advice: Right now this is a good story, and it needs to be turned into a script.
Visual novels are as much a visual medium as they are written, and they need a different approach than simple prose. The game has some great vivid descriptions that make it easy to read and imagine without visuals, but that same description will come across as tedious once the visuals are added. Rely more on dialogue and sound. Music and sound effects have been called “the invisible actor.” They can carry a lot of weight, so when it comes time to put them in, make sure you don’t just tack them on -- make some room in the story to exert their presence. With the right music, you won’t need to explicitly describe the tone of a conversation. With well timed sound effects, you can cut back on description of the physical movements of characters. That’s not to say you should cut all description, not at all. There are some brilliantly written images here, like a man moving like a grasshopper, syrupy liquid, a head shaken like an angry owl.
Because visual novels are scripts and not stories, rely on name tags to identify speaking characters. The sentence fragments of “She said sternly” are unsuited for VNs and come across as awkward. If you need to get the speaking character’s tone across, there are other methods.
One is dialogue. Take plays, for example. They almost never provide description of tone or the actor’s emotional state, yet they get those across with dialogue alone. Cutting other characters off and talking over them, speaking tersely, expressing excitement with exclamation marks (but not too many), speaking in an exaggerated fashion, or with sarcasm, are some examples of how to express tone without explicit description and adverbs.
Or, you could use physical description. Instead of saying “She said sternly,” for example, you could write, “Her arms were crossed and her mouth drawn into a thin line.”
Partially related to all of this, you might consider reducing the amount that is telegraphed in the story, and instead trust the player to make the connections rather than have the protagonist make them for them with internal narration. For example, when the kids
question her about the outside world and are horrified to learn about parents abandoning children
, the player is identifying with her, so they get the message. They are already thinking what she is thinking, which is, “They’ve got a point, maybe this place isn’t so bad,” so you don’t need to have the protagonist say that explicitly. Just give us enough information to affirm that she is indeed thinking that, which can be as simple as her saying something like, “Yeah…” or “Huh.”
Good luck, and I am looking forward to finding out how it ends!
Because I do after all want people to always look beyond labels and prejudice...
