Blister review

A kinetic novel by Clannadman - 2012.

Genre: dystopian

Synopsis - from here.

"Based on Til' A The Seas by H.P. Lovecraft, a short dystopian kinetic novel about the last remnants of mankind living in a world experiencing heat death. A young boy collapses only to be captured by bandits and taken to meet a storyteller - a man with knowledge far exceeding their own. And all the while the Syrene watches over them..."

~*----------*~

A nice short story about various shorter stories. 

Characters

The cast: the main character (boy), the storytelling old man (Ull), and the bandits (Aamil and Aamir).

The main characters don't really have a distinct personality as the story mainly focuses on events which happen to them. However, it works for this story since it's so short and you learn to sympathise with them through what they experience and their understandable reactions to those events (this goes mainly for Ull). 

Strangely, the side characters do have personalities, but they barely play a role in the story. They only serve one purpose. It's a bit sad since you basically have two people with the same purpose for the story, so perhaps using only one would have been better.

Another gripe I have about the characters is that their names (except for Ull) aren't very great. The main character is called 'Boy', which is stupid, but which I can still kind of tolerate since there are so few people in his group. However, the other characters are named Aamil and Aamir. It's really a good thing they have those different personalities, or I really wouldn't have been able to keep them apart and just see them as one person.

Story

I enjoyed the story! It was a bit sad, but that didn't come as much of a surprise and it fit the story well too.

One of the first things you read about is a Syrene, which may seem weird, but I loved the role it played; it raises questions in the beginning and by the end you understand why the story started that way and what this object meant to the characters.

Other than that this tale has a strange but interesting shape. The structure of the story will be easier to understand once you read it yourself, but I'll try to explain it somewhat. It starts with the Syrene, then continues with the main character who is a lost boy and ends up collapsing, then quickly moves on to a story about the history and the future of mankind, then again moves on to a story about the past of Ull and then ends back with the main character and finally the Syrene. I didn't mind this actually, as it was a nice way to explain some things, kept it interesting, and I really liked Ull's story.

Ull or the old man, is a man whom I can only call pitiful. In his incredibly short tale, a pretty cool connection is made between when you meet the old man as the Boy and the middle of Ull's story; it was sad to see nothing much had changed at all, but made the impact of the circumstances in this world much greater. Ull's story in general is very sad; looking and hoping for something he can't find. I pitied him.

The only disappointments were that I'd liked to learn a little more about the other two characters, plus the foreshadowing and writing weren't too great at times. I still had no clue why there seemed to be all this foreshadowing about 'evil people picked you up and now something terrible will happen to you' and then it turned out they (spoiler) just saved you because story time is awesome and should be shared. Perhaps that was intentional though, but the dagger and evil cult sprites didn't help. Also... why are they bandits? What bandit-ish thingy did they do? They saved a kid and keep an old man company... not bad for bandits! 

As for the writing, it was disappointing when now and then the passage of time was indicated by:

......................... *next*

.............*next*

...*next*

That's just annoying and doesn't add much.

Visuals

I didn't care much for the visuals. In general they weren't anything special, though I kind of liked the strange looking backgrounds. The colours are nice, they told you plenty about the environment and they set the mood well. The quality is a bit shitty though, as they're mostly blobs of colours and a bit pixelated.

Character sprites weren't very good looking or special, but not too bad either. They were however a little strange when it came to placement and changed... I mean... this is how the characters first look like, 

Now, join our cult of Red Eyes Black cloaked People!

Then this:

I wish I could shape-shift too :(...

Also, I feel like the main character is two meters tall (even though he's a young boy) because these sprites are placed so low.

Music

Now this... this is... uh... the not so good part. I don't want to be mean, but my jaw dropped when the title screen music was basically someone doing his best to say 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah' for a very long time with nothing else. The rest of the music was also either strange or so bad and annoying that I had to turn it off to not go insane.

Though on the plus side, there was a pretty cool use of sound when the old man asked the main character to listen to the wind. I turned the music back on when I read this just to hear it too :D.

In conclusion

It was too short to really get into the world or characters much and the music and art could definitely have been better, but the story and the characters were pretty enjoyable.

Score: 6.5 out of 10

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