AIDENTHALL
AIDENTHALL. It represents something very, very special. It represents…the first non-MSPA comic in a loooooooong time. Like, seriously, I have just done 41 MSPA-Adjacent webcomics in a row. And what a comic to break the streak! AIDENTHALL has me sold already by the creepy, daunting tone of the Title Screen, setting up that THIS MSPFA really wants to become a simulacrum of like, an old adventure game. Or atleast, that’s the vibes.
Like, the pixel art…the fact that the enter name screen pops up with a satisfying animation and then there’s an actual input keyboard-thingy that doesn’t NEED to be there, but it adds to the simulacrum of it all…it’s all good, is what I’m saying.
Ooooooohhhhh it’s such a GOOD simulacrum too. I’ve never seen somebody so intricately go “If we’re doing an adventure role-playing game pastiche, we are doing it WELL. We are IMMERSING our readers into it.” There’s like, an UI element that never changes, the smiling, creepy face of our main character looking at us, the animations, the pixel art, the deliberately chosen color pallet…I’ve never experienced something like this before and it is…kind of breathtakingly impressive? Like, what the heck.
That being said, it’s not exactly a good medium for a story to be in, yeah? Like, it’s cool in old adventure games when like, YOU get to make the decisions. But here, I’m just watching the phantoms of past readers make decisions for me. However, it *is* making me have thoughts about what exactly you *can* do with the panel layout of a MSPFA, and that is worth something, at least.
