Underground Utopia

It was a good story but I felt like it didn’t quite commit fully at times. The characters were a bit flat and there wasn’t details that could have helped flesh out the why of the story that wasn’t otherwise explained.

Interesting concept, fun execution!

I do feel like for a puppet-replacement utopia compound, it felt strange that running through it was just “empty plazas.”

[spoilers]

Not sure if this was a bug, but I chose to “leave everything as-is” and the characters bashed the control panel apart anyway.

Continuing my thought from above the spoiler tag, I also would have liked to know more about what purpose the place served. Why go through the effort of building the place and replacing everyone with puppets? Maybe this is a short proof of concept or intro chapter, and maybe other choices would’ve revealed more in that vein, but I did feel like the characters were more “trapped in the story’s concept” than anything else.

Still, like I said, fun!

This sci-fi dystopian mystery was an interesting story, but it leaves more on the table than what is actually discovered. It plays to the overall questions surrounding the world, but Theo and Hana (in my play through) don’t feel like they were fleshed out as individual characters. This story could be explored by a set of different teens and the plot wouldn’t be different for it.

In this, the AI was not great. I ended up playing the story by just reading it in silence as the line delivery hurt some vital moments.

It has potential in the groundwork it has made, but needs some more time to be built into a fully engaging experience.

The story itself is fine, I’d say 3.5 stars for me. The premise is a classical dystopia with the “big brother is watching you” vibes. But it isn’t fleshed out enough — the things that the kids uncovered left me with more questions. I think it would benefit from another episode (or more) to allow the kids to really get to the bottom of what’s going on and *why*, and also save their loved ones. Of course, there might be a branch here where they do that, but I think that the story has a potential for exploring the lore in depth with some fun mechanics.

What truly ruined the experience for me were the AI voices. They were so out of place. The characters’ voices had different volume and quality than the main narrator’s voice, and, more importantly, their tone was often completely off and unfitting for the situation. Like, there is a tense, scary moment, and the text says that the girl whispers, but her AI voice is chipper. It just completely ruined the immersion for me. The most basic narrator who wouldn’t do any voices and would just read the story in a flat tone would have been so much better than this.

A well-written dystopian world, where only the children realize something is wrong, and have to find their way out. Interesting story, with nice interaction between the characters.