Show HN: LockedAway – A unique text experience

Show HN: LockedAway – A unique text experience
lockedaway.online

Personally i think the typos add to the realism.

- Maybe I'm just dense, but it took somebody else mentioning the twist before I caught it. In retrospect, the picture should've been a pretty obvious clue. But perhaps the story could do more to make clear what's going on. It's tricky to write first-person and have it be clear that what the character sees isn't the same as what the reader does, but the payoff is amply worth it.

- I might hesitate to cast a character's unique perception of reality in terms of a specific mental illness with defined traits. Two reasons: First, it opens you up to nitpicks around differences between what you name and what you portray, or conversely constrains the story to fit the disorder. Second, it's a bit disrespectful of both character and reader. "Here," you seem to say, "this person's inner life is interesting enough to share, something of which it's worth your while to partake." And that's great! I love that. But when you kind of turn around and go "I got you good, you were reading the DSM this whole time!", it feels like I've wasted my interest and that's just no fun for anybody.

- Have you seen Twine? It's a platform for authoring static web-hosted interactive fiction. Basically lets you not have to build your own tooling, which it's great that you can and did, but that's time not spent on the story. Not sure if Twine would suit your needs, but it might be worth a look.

- Telling a story in reverse chronological is hardmode. You have to develop a narrative that makes sense and rewards the reader in both directions. Totally doable and this is not a bad first cut at it, but I kind of feel like another style might better reward this story. I mean, the essential tension here is between the character's reality and the reader's assumptions, and there might be other ways to let that tension build and resolve itself. Maybe an epistolary hypertext style where the reader follows her own path through the contents of a web diary, with some progress flags or similar to trigger "new post"-style stuff at points where it will make sense to the individual reader. That's not easy to pull off either, but I think maybe more so than reverse chronological, and it also offers the reader a sense of discovery that I think could be more present here.

Just some thoughts I had. I hope they're of some use to you. And for heaven's sake don't stop writing! I'm really looking forward to finding out what you come up with next.