I cannot recommend this game due to many issues in the opening minutes of writing. These issues are detailed below and are concerning both because writing is important in a game like this and because they occur so clustered and early into the game as to cause concern that they recur throughout.
-The writing suffers from cliche or trite imagery, metaphor, or word association. Examples like "A flaming wall collapses with a roar", "the ceiling groans, releasing a rain of ash", and "a cry, raw with pure rage" draw from the most immediate, accessible, and dull word pairings and associations. The opening prose is bereft of interesting or thought-provoking metaphor or simile.
-The writing suffers from lines that appear to have not been read aloud by the writer. Sentences like "Screams and the crackle of flames surround you, spreading the sound of death" come off clunky and awkward because of the repeated "s" sounds which do not seem to follow any particular rhythm and are not a device employed for intentional effect, such as alliteration.
-The writing contains lines which are clear authorial tells, breaking any sense of voice to simply inform the audience of something. Lines like "You miraculously escaped unharmed and the cat seems to be fine." break the tension because they are too on-the-nose and devoid of interesting imagery or texture.
-The writing contains strange continuity/believability issues that act as reading roadblocks. The work details the roaring sound of a collapsing wall, but then somehow you can hear echoing footsteps above the cacophony of a housefire?
-The writing seems to have a rhythm of adding a descriptor that weakens rather than strengthening the line. For example, "This hiding place proves precarious...The knight finds you with ease". "finds you with ease" could be replaced with something much more impactful and tension-provoking. In this same vein, there are some really weak adverb inclusions that might point to an author not trusting their material, such as "Your maneuver paid off and your attacker collapses heavily". That adverb does not help the sentence; it weakens the entire line. A few prompts later, there is "you run away into the darkness", which is a very weak construction.
