Fault - Milestone One stars Selphine and Ritona. Selphine is the kind-natured Princess of Rughzenhaide, while Ritona is her bodyguard. Rughzenhaide is a country whose people use mana to do everything from learning languages to crafting weapons. Mana-powered telepathy is considered perfectly normal and helps with everything from communicating a restaurant’s entire menu to its customers to long-distance communication. In fact, communication via mana is an integral part of the country’s monarchy. Rughzenhaide’s monarchs can use something called the Path-down to directly transmit their memories and knowledge to their heirs.

The Path-down must not be interrupted. When the palace is invaded and most of its inhabitants are killed, Ritona uses a special teleportation technique she’s spent years developing and escapes with Selphine at her side. Unfortunately, they end up someplace completely different from where Ritona planned: the Outer-Pole. The Outer-Pole is best known for its lack of mana. People from the Outer-Pole can’t travel to mana-rich areas without developing mana-sickness and dying, while people from mana-rich areas only have three to five days in the Outer-Pole before mana-sickness either robs them of their ability to use mana or kills them.

Selphine and Ritona have to get away from the Outer-Pole and back to Rughzenhaide. Before they leave, however, they want to help Rune, the first friend they made after arriving at the Outer-Pole. Although everyone keeps insisting that slavery has long since been abolished and that Rune is definitely not a slave, that’s certainly what she seems to be. In an effort to free and protect her, Selphine and Ritona learn more about life in the Outer-Pole, Rune, and the terrible history of the Zhevitz family.

First, a few things. Although I’ll be referring to this as a game, it’s really not - it’s kind of like a book with visuals and music, that comes in software form. All the other visual novels I’ve reviewed allowed you to make choices at various points in the narrative. Fault - Milestone One asks you to make a choice once during the entire thing, and the only difference your decision makes is a few lines of text right after the choice. I had the whole game play on Auto Skip just to make sure the other choice didn’t change the ending slightly or something. Two, this thing ends on a cliffhanger. I didn’t know that going in. I expected another hour or two of story and got “hey, this character’s personality has suddenly drastically changed, The End!” I finished the whole thing in maybe four and a half hours.

If this had been an actual novel, I couldn’t recommend it. The writing was terrible. The main reason it usually didn’t bug me was because I was zipping through it pretty quickly (my preferred method: keyboard on my lap and hand constantly on the Enter key). I did take the time to jot down some of the more painful sentences, though. For example:

“Concerned for Rune, our mother forced her frail, weak body as she tried to bring Rune to a hospital on the outskirts of town.”

Also:

“However, luckily, due to her weak body, her body had rejected the mana before her body had taken a lethal amount.”

I understood the text, but it definitely needed better editing. It bugged me that the author (or translator) couldn’t seem to keep their verb tenses straight. I also didn’t like the way the POV kept changing - usually first-person from Ritona’s POV, except when it was necessary to show scenes Ritona couldn’t be part of, at which time there either was no clear POV (just dialogue) or the story changed to first-person POV from another character’s perspective. Since the story was mostly dialogue, I honestly didn’t think that first-person POV contributed anything. Third-person POV throughout would have made things less confusing.

Gameplay-wise, I’m not sure why players (readers?) were asked to make only one choice throughout the entire game. Either there should have been more choices, or none. Also, the controls weren’t entirely intuitive. I had to google how to use the regular save spots - the only obvious options were Autosave and Quicksave. A note for other confused players: right-click on the screen while you’re reading and you’ll get an extra menu option, regular saves.

I haven’t said anything good about Fault - Milestone One yet, and you might have gotten the impression that I disliked it. You’d be wrong. It took me until Chapter 3 (maybe an hour and a half?) to really get sucked in, but from that point on I was hooked. I will say, however, that I’m glad I got it while Steam had it on sale for 66% off. The full price would have been a bit high considering how quickly I finished it. (FYI - the sale has two more days to go.)

The things that kept me reading until the story finally grabbed me were the artwork and the music. The game’s visuals were lovely, and I liked the way the camera occasionally zoomed in or out, adding movement. I loved almost all of the character sprites, and they all had a great range of emotions. The music was wonderful and usually helped enhance the mood of settings and scenes. I can only recall one scene where the music seemed very inappropriate, a character’s bouncy theme song that continued playing as that character met another character who was clearly near death.

The story was slow to get going and prone to massive infodumps (be prepared for occasional walls of text), but once I reached some of the bigger revelations I couldn’t stop reading. The world-building had some issues, but I enjoyed reading about the way the people at the Outer-Pole had adjusted to their mana limitations. While the mana-rich areas had access to something that was basically magic, the Outer-Pole had to rely on science. I was surprised when the story went from something I expected would be 100% fantasy to something with a little alternate history sci-fi (sort of) mixed in.

Rune’s story brought me to tears. I was glad that Selphine and Ritona were there to speak up for her, and I was glad that everything worked out in the end, but… I don’t know. This was one of those stories that would be a prime candidate for fix fic. Everything was resolved too easily for my tastes, especially considering how badly many of these characters had hurt each other, and how many years they’d been doing it. It should have taken more than a few words, some tears, and a hug to fix everything. And I kept thinking about that boy who got stabbed in the eye, and who had to continue living in the town and make nice with the family of the person who did it. I also had questions about whether Past Rune and Present Rune could still be considered to be the same person.

Although I had issues with the story, I enjoyed it overall (except for that cliffhanger, darn it). Also, like I said, the music and visuals were wonderful. I definitely plan on reading the next installment, Fault - Milestone Two Side: Above.

Extras:

There’s a gallery that allows you to access all of the game’s movie clips and event CGs once you’ve finished. There’s also an audio gallery where you can listen to the game’s music. While you’re reading the story, you have access to an encyclopedia explaining in-world terminology and concepts.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

John Wayne Cleaver thinks it's his fate to become a serial killer, and he's doing what he can to try to avoid it. He's attending his therapy sessions with Dr. Neblin, and he's made up all kinds of rules for himself, based on commonly recognized indicators that someone might become a serial killer. No paying too much attention to one particular person, no hurting animals (in fact, as little contact with animals as possible), etc.

He enjoys helping his mom and aunt out at their mortuary. The bodies and embalming process fascinate him, and he likes the quiet. However, something new going on in town has snagged his attention: murders that he thinks are the work of a real serial killer. As he looks into the deaths as much as possible without technically breaking his rules, he starts to believe that he's the only person in town who stands any chance of stopping the killer.

I should have reviewed this several weeks ago, but I needed time to make sense of my emotions. I'm still not quite sure how I feel.

This was on B&N's “5 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Books That Treat Mental Illness with Compassion” list. The comparison to Jeff Lindsay's Dexter intrigued me, but also made me raise an eyebrow about the book's inclusion on the list. Dexter was a child who witnessed terrible things and whose cop foster father then declared him broken beyond repair and began molding him in ways that he approved of more. If Dexter was destined to be a killer, then Harry was at least going to make sure that he chose the “right” victims. (I've enjoyed what I read of the Dexter series, but I'm also willing to admit that the series has issues.)

I do think this book handled John, a similar character, better in some ways. His mom signed him up for therapy sessions and didn't just give up on him, although there were definitely times when she was overwhelmed by his behavior and Antisocial Personality Disorder diagnosis. I've never personally been in therapy, but I thought that Dr. Neblin and his sessions seemed decent. And John certainly did the best he could to explain his emotions to Dr. Neblin and his mom, to behave appropriately, and to at least act like a good person even if a large part of him didn't think he really was one.

If I hadn't originally learned about I Am Not a Serial Killer via a list that specifically mentioned sci-fi and fantasy, the developments surrounding the murders probably would have surprised me even more. Up to a certain point, there were hardly any signs that this was anything more than a contemporary thriller/murder mystery. There was some foreshadowing, a few mentions of demons, but those could have been signs that John was maybe losing the ability to tell fantasy from reality. Anyway, the demon thing turned out to be very real.

One odd thing I'd like to mention, though, was that this demon thing was just assumed to be fact. No one ever told John that he was dealing with a demon, the being didn't call itself a demon, and John didn't do any research that told him it was a demon. It was just a demon, period.

The beginning of the book was pretty gross, with detailed descriptions of corpses and the embalming process. I found this stuff to be both interesting and a little stomach-turning, but I decided I could deal with it. I figured that this and the murders would be the worst that the book would throw at me, but I was wrong. John deciding to abandon his rules in order to deal with the killer turned out to be more disturbing than anything else.

As a character, John left me feeling torn. I felt like I could empathize with him if not always like him, and yet I also worried about a lot of the people around him, especially once he decided to ditch his rules. Being inside John's head was...uncomfortable. I was very unhappy with and horrified by one particular thing he decided to do in order to try to stop the killer, to the point where I had to stop reading for a bit. I could understand his reasoning, but I didn't agree with it. The moment near the end, when John's mom hugged him and told him he was a good boy who'd done a good thing would have been so much better without that earlier decision on John's part (that his mom didn't know about - she'd probably have been at least as horrified as I was).

Wells did a great job of writing John's POV. Probably the best moment was when I realized that some of the killer's actions were inspired by feelings and motivations that John wasn't able to see, because he didn't feel those things himself. Of course, that was also the moment when I became deeply worried about what he was going to do next. This book... It gave me mixed emotions for both John and the monster he was hunting.

It looks like this series has 5 works in it now. Although this first one was very good, I doubt I'll be reading more. The thought of reading more of John's POV after what happened at the end of this book makes me too anxious.

Although John is a teen, I don't know whether this qualifies as YA, and it looks like even the people marketing it aren't sure. According to Wikipedia, "in the UK it’s a YA horror, in Germany it’s an adult thriller, and in the US it’s being marketed to both audiences."

(Original review, including read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)