[You can get all of Nick Montfort's PrologueComp reviews through this link.]
Although the central conceit of this prologue -- introducing the Intentionally Undefined Science Fictional Thing You Will Learn About In The Course Of The Story Set in the Future -- is extremely hackneyed, the writing is deft. The colloquial description of Coffin D-83-b is accomplished well, giving a hint of who the PC is. This hint isn't interesting enough, by itself, but it signals that the rest of the descriptions will be done similarly and that we'll learn about the PC as a narrator, which increases interest. It's actually this, rather than The Hook, that makes me interested in seeing more. The quotes, although they hammer the main point a bit too much, are also fairly well-written and arranged well.
Perhaps the thing I like least -- aside from the unfortunate attribution of the first quote to 'General Ira Asimov' -- is the subtitle, which seems wry and mock-moralistic in a way that doesn't fit at all with the text. "Let me tell you 'a tale of choices' ... you're stuck here in a box which can hardly fit your sorry ass!" You could just call it "Compulsion." Or even "Choices," since the title doesn't need to reinforce what is obviously the main interesting entity in the story.
The other difficulties are that the Compulsion is attended to too much. Presumably there are enemies on the planet, about whom we would like to know something. Are you in infantry? Recon? If the main idea is to keep secret from the reader important information about the Compulsion -- so they can be brought into the story in an interesting way later -- it would be nice to fill the player in on some other important information. We don't know who Red is, either, and it's not particularly fair to have the PC reply to someone without telling the player who that person is -- even if the response was Compelled.
I'd certainly play on from here, but there is plenty of room to revise this, to good effect, before deploying it as an actual game prologue.
Email me at: katsaris@gmail.com
Last updated: 01 Apr 2002
