Review #5: Press Start to Die - JackRipper · 3:29pm Jan 5th, 2020
I read: Completed at 1 chapter, 2.7k words
I rate: 8/10
I recommend: Read it.
For me, it was my father who taught me the way of the vidya. We used to spend hours playing Age of Empires together. Good times. My attention span has been plummeting ever since and I still can’t beat the AI on Hard. 21 bloody years and that thing is still unbeatable. But enough about that, we aren’t talking Real Time Strategy here. No, we’re talking Metroidvania.
Specifically, we’re talking about the game our hapless protagonist and neckbeard to be, Button Mash, finds in the attic. He plays it and, oddly enough, if you die in the game you die in real life. This discovering is, of course, met with a combination of disgust and total awe. So far so good. Then what? Well, that’s where we run into our problem. Yesterday it was me rear-ending a truck. Today its the fact that this story’s tone and pacing don’t exactly manage to thrill. Basically, the story starts out piling on the dark humor and it stays like that throughout - nothing gets funnier or darker the longer you read, which has it end very abruptly and without any sort of meaningful conclusion because keeping the atmosphere consistent throughout means you don’t build tension, comedic or otherwise. Is it still funny though? Yes. Am I perhaps overanalyzing these two thousand words of pony fanfiction? Also, yes.
Moving on. Characters. Button Mash is particularly well written here and his personality comes off a lot like that of Wimpy Kid’s Greg - he’s an obnoxious brat, but you can’t help but like him in spite of that. His mother, Cream Heart, acts as a good foil for this and their dynamic makes for a lot of good back and forth banter. Twilggles and the CMC also get one or two good quips each and this all comes together to make a deeply amusing story.
In terms of style, things are of much the same quality. JackRipper is a good writer and that’s no different here. His comedic timing is on point and he breaks up an otherwise dialogue-heavy story with an appropriate of narration and description that properly add to both the absurdity of the cursed game and the personality of his characters. The narration itself also has a good bit of humour to it, and almost acts as an additional character commenting on the events of the story - nice work if pulled off and it is here.
Plot: 2/5. Button finds a cursed video game and a few people comment on this. That’s about it and it doesn’t end with a conclusion worth what build up it had.
Characters: 5/5. The dynamic between Button and his mother works well and all others get a few good lines in too.
Style: 5/5. I’m surprised how much I laughed during this, and I don’t even game that much anymore.
Execution: 4/5. It's a good comedy fic, as JackRipper’s tend to be.
Overall Rating: 16/20 = 8/10
To JackRipper: Keep it up, mate. If you are looking to improve this, I really would recommend tweaking the tone a little so that it varies throughout the story; without any breaks in the humour, as you have here, it reads quite quickly and comes to a rather sharp and disappointing stop. I’d say to maybe add another 300 words or so of filler, the good kind, just to stretch out the story and build up the ending to something less underwhelming - as ominous as the ending is, it doesn’t fit thematically with the rest of the story without some kind of joke to go with it.
For something like this: Life is a Game also has Button Mash as the protagonist with a heavy video game theme.
As always, thank you for reading. If you like my writing, why not check out my take on story with a cursed object in it here: Biography of a Hikikomori.
