An earnest attempt at simulating early-00s internet communities that nails the presentation but stumbles in developing a world outside the fraught interpersonal drama of its four-piece cast. The first half is a goofy high-school comedy that excels at small moments in online relationships (doing a virtual new years toast is an early highlight), and only occasionally gets bogged down by overwritten fantasy fics. There is little sense of an internet beyond your AIM window and the blogs of your friends, but the limited focus works when your character's only concern is roleplaying and understanding new acronyms.

The second half, however, goes hard into relationship drama, LGBTQ+ identities, and eating disorders, little of which is handled well and some is actively distasteful. There's clearly a desire to wrestle with the contradictions and confusions so many isolated and/or marginalized teens feel, but neither the systems nor narrative offer the space to actually speak to those experiences in meaningful ways.

As time accelerates in the second half and there are fewer and fewer interactions with individual characters, the game lurches towards a "good" ending that actively undoes the game's emotional arc. I really enjoy Terranova's conceit, but watching it bulldoze its characters for the sake of a more dramatic and "meaningful" end left a gross taste in my mouth.

CWs for Terranova: eating disorders, gaslighting, homophobia, child abuse

A narrative game deeply committed to simulation of chat clients and RP communities in the mid-aughts, Terranova is often landing the bit at the expense of delivering cohesive character arcs. Reading chats and drafting my blog posts are really sublime at the writing and especially the interface level, but there's a common route you're forced onto that really runs in the face of most expression choices available. The top half of this game (which is all I speak to because I ended with the game in an unplayable state) feels like actual personal memories of the he/him lesbian RPers I knew in high school ripped from my brain before forcing an abrupt turn to make everyone hate each other like it's a CLAMP doujin. This is a really interesting project and I'd love to see this engine refined for something else, but this game is missing tact in design and writing that YA fiction direly needs.

Overall this game was pretty good! The use of roleplaying to show the characters projecting their emotions is very interesting and it works well, though I'd say I'd have liked for it to be a bit more on the nose on Effie and Sendaria's threads since they're usually the lengthiest.

Speaking of the latter though, my biggest issues with the game are related to her and how the game wants you to view and treat her to get the best ending. It's a matter of opinion at the end of the day but it really didn't sit well with me and soured the ending of the game for me a bit.