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this level just isn't nearly as interesting with its theming or comflict as it thimks itself to be — wuth the idea of an endless dead plain. you could explore the origin or the wanderers' folklore/reactions to it or even try to just characterize to any real extent the person trapped. this doesn't take any interesting roads, it's just a pathos-less description of someone dying, which fails to tug at m heartstrings or my upvote.
And I'm sorry to say I liked the original more. It had a genuinely interesting format-screw-y format. It was more subtle in its horror, not directly portraying the character dying but instead having lines with ominous implications. The rewrite was predictable, and you could tell how it was going to from the start. There were no interesting twists like the original had. I also cannot say the rewrite had better prose. Feels bad writing something this harsh, but this is a contest and in fact one where existing pages get replaced, so my standards are higher.
The page plays out exactly like how you expect it to. Pacing is too fast to really be meaningful, though.
I don’t really have any comment, other than, "It exists." It takes away the mystique of the original page for something that’s played straight, and not all that well, either.
Whoa, it’s a forum signature. Ain’t that cool?
I’m waking up to ash and dust
I wipe my brow and I sweat my rust
Echoing the previous comments. This page, in my opinion, unfortunately fails to actually be better than the original, and I cannot in good faith up or novote it with the knowledge that it will replace the original if it survives, so apologies if this comes off harshly.
I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding here of minimalism and how to make it work, as well as the merits of the original and how it made its own minimalism work. This rewrite is quite short, relatively speaking, a little over 800 words long, but it really drags; I find the prose to be quite clunky as well. It's just a description of someone dying, with no characterization of neither the character themselves, the narrrator, nor the environment in a compelling way. The second person perspective here is used in such a way that it does away with the personality of the main character in the original but fails to have something else in its place. The way this is written is reminiscent of either Level 965 (a commentary on the absurdity of human persistence) or one of Sky's experimental short pages (Level 405, The Open Mouth, The Hadal Zone) but fails to deliver the thematic elements of the former and the personality & succintness of the latter.
The original page may appear as a straight nothing burger but it does have its merits. The length is intentional, as is the abruptness of its ending. Despite this length, the main character of the piece has character—their franticness causing them to choose the wrong template, their sense of duty in writing the report and encouraging potential readers to do the same, their persistence and optimism ("Don'ts: Give up"). An optimism that is immediately shot down by its ending. The horror is ambiguous and open-ended but overtly tragic.
This is just hopeless. Wanderer goes, wanderer dies. That's it. Nothing special here that makes me go wow. I don't know, it's a bit pointless. Maybe with a backstory, or expressing his feelings better will this be better.
No vote. You can do better.
So this was hard for me. I like what it brings to the table, but to me I feel like the original feels like a rewrite of *this.*
I think the most productive thing I can say is "If this page and the original fused together, I'd give it a confident upvote"
This solves the problems of the original, but then introduces new ones.
Definitely not a downvote from me. Perhaps I'll change my mind later and upvote, but right now, this feels a tad dry
get it
b
because deser- *gets shot*
Our third article is… oh. It's this one.
This article's greatest strength is that it's a dead end that just kills you and there's nothing else there.
This article's greatest weakness is that it's a dead end that just kills you and there's nothing else there.
A while ago, on the discord, there was a Suggestions and Feedback post that talked about how it feels like modern levels don't really have that "mundane" liminal vibe anymore; everything is trying to be super abstract or littered with worldbuilding details or have a lengthy narrative or something. Where are the smaller pages, the base ideas that those more complex pieces can be a spin on?
In a sense this article feels like a response to that post: a "mundane" liminal level in a vast sea of intricate rewrites. Of course, it is not the only page which tried this approach - Entity 37 did a similar thing - but it is perhaps the most unapologetic in its stance.
But, as others pointed out on that discord post, there's a pretty big issue with with writing a page that's supposed to be unoriginal: it can easily stray into boredom. This page is really no exception to that rule; there's quite a lot of dead end levels on this site, enough to warrant a whole tag for them, and this rewrite doesn't really do much with the concept that hasn't already been done before. Issues like the above are typically circumvented with proper characterisation of the wanderers involved, which this page also doesn't really do. This ends up leaving the page kind of… hollow? I suppose would be a good term, which could be seen as problematic.
But, on the other hand, isn't that the point of this level? It's just a dead end, it's not supposed to be interesting. It's supposed to be a thing that kills you™ to show the heartlessness of the Backrooms. But is that idea good enough to justify the writing? I'm not really sure myself.
As for the prose in the article, it's fine. There's much worse, but there's also much better, just in this contest alone. The most annoying thing to me is that a lot of it feels very redundant (for instance, the third sentence is "This combo of sameness stretches indefinitely, with no end in sight.", which is really just saying the same thing twice), but since repetition can be a useful writing technique I can't say for certain that this isn't intentional. Ending with the name of the article also feels a little cheesy, but I don't outright hate it either.
Overall, I'm really conflicted about this one. I'm going for a novote for now, but that might change soon enough.
You took the page, all the things it was trying to do, and… did them again but differently. Yeah, I mean that's a rewrite, congratulations I think? This feels like a story connected to the first page, it doesn't feel like its trying to do something new. Is that because you can't do something new with the page? maybe because it was silly to trim it in the first place? I dunno. Like it works, but it's not interesting.
It's a detailed description of a guy guying in the desert, cool. Is it a good description? Yes, very good, the image it puts in your head is vivid and why this isn't a downvote. But like I said, it's just a redo of the okay, novote page that came before it. It's fine, but it does nothing special. If that's what you set out to do, that's fine, but the most dictionary definition of a 'rewrite' isn't gonna be stellar writing in my eyes.
Eyy.. i just typed a loada garrbagge
