Underground Utopia

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.

I really liked this story. Especially the different characters were well-designed and I particularly enjoyed the interactions between characters. However, I’m not a fan of the AI voices. The narrator is fine but the others felt out of place. Still, I’d highly recommend this story!

The main character moves to a new, quite strange town, notices that they are watched constantly and their parents and all adults start to act weirdly as well. I really like that the only ones noticing that something fishy is going on are the children, so it is up to them to solve that mystery. By the way it’s written, the story is easy to follow, as the author has a very detailed style of writing but keeps the storyline focused on one goal, it just keeps you engaged. The world the author created is very imaginative as well and I played multiple times, just because I wanted to explore more of it. If you like distopian stories with a good mystery to solve and with a struggle for escape and survival, this is definetly for you 🙂