Wow. What an incredibly tense build up to nothing. The first 20 or so episodes are spectacular. I've genuinely never been more scared in my life. The writers just have an incredible way of getting you to buy into the story world and a way of making it feel like YOU as the listener are not safe from whatever horrors they've concocted. I've never seen anything like it, and I couldn't listen after lunch because it would give me nightmares, and that almost never happens to me. Genuinely chilling.
And then it was only downhill from there. Very very far downhill. The first 20 episodes were just so good, it kept me going through the entire 200 episode series hoping that maybe I missed something, that maybe it was all about to come together to answer all my burning questions, and tie up all the loose ends it left emphasized and left gaping throughout the story. But it never does.
The writers shy further and further away from their bread and better as the story progresses. Like the vaguely creepy story from an unreliable narrator with just a shred of evidence to grant a tiny bit of credibility? Don't get used to it. The story transitions more and more into a format incredibly ill suited for the podcast medium. An incredibly overcrowded roster of recurring characters who each barely get voice time or character development. The expectation to be able to be able to identify side characters by voice to make sense of the story, despite them having only spoken is a social setting a grand total of 3 minutes previously. Live action, shown through ... deep breathing for running, the occasional loud effect, and a a healthy does of the bad guy stopping in the middle of the fight to explain their whole evil scheme unasked. Like what? Podcast simply is not the medium for that. Stick to the slightly unsettling stories and leave the real complex time action sequences for the big screen. The podcast was so good at what it was doing and slowly changed directions entirely.
Most of my pressing questions were never answered. Themes that come up in 50+ episodes are never answered, and sometimes dropped from the story entirely without so much as a note. There's a recurring type of presumably manmade object that has incredible plot significance. Do we ever find out if they were made? Who made them? Why they supposedly work the way they do? Heck no to all 3. In fact, the writers decided to just pretend they never existed starting from the last season. WHAT?! That was one of the things I wanted to know the answer to most, what were they thinking.
Almost everything in the series has no answer nor payoff. The writers seem to confuse the unknown or hard to understand with horror. There is an extreme overcrowding of evil force antagonist groups, and to top it off each one has 5+ names used to describe the exact same group. Finally you thought you began to understand something the protagonist is up against? Nope because the next time year hear about it, it will be another name for the exact same evil force and you will have no idea they are the same thing. Whenever a character meets or hears from someone who might actually know what is going on, they inexplicably and without fail speak only in riddles and metaphors. I'm not kidding. That's just terrible writing. You're dangling the carrot of finally getting an answer over the listener the entire time to just essentially never give it. Plus it isn't even scary, it's just confusing. Confusing hard to understand worlds aren't scary, they're just confusing. And if this was an intentional style choice to keep the listener in the dark the entire time in this manner, I'd say it was an incredibly poor one.
And when something does pay off or get answered, which is rare, it is almost aways suddenly set up, explained, and delivered on in the same episode. The rules of the universe are never well defined, and the bad guy's master plan, along with the story world reason it is possible are all delivered and acted upon all at once. It's like the villain suddenly being able to fly and then flying into the bank to steam the jewel, when we didn't know he could even fly until he started the heist. What?! There's no way anyone listening could have seen that coming, and it makes for an unsatisfying climax and makes it hard to invest as a listener because you're not even sure what is possible, or what is possible to stop it if anything.
Characters are underdeveloped, tend to not grow in any way that makes sense as the story progresses. Character motivation usually just boils down to something akin to "they are controlled by evil, so they do evil things." Why do they enact their form of evil in the specific way they do? That is a question too far to answer for the writers of this podcast. They're just evil, and you should just accept it. The rare characters strengths the writers gave our not applied consistently. They suggest the main character might have the ability to do something which would actually be really cool for the podcast format. But we can almost never really tell if / when they are doing it, and no sooner do we get introduced that they might be able to do it then we go up against a foe which is simply does not work on. Why doesn't it work there? Unclear. Was the main character ever able to do it at all? Very unclear.
Overall, very disappointing. First 20 episodes are worth the listen, but don't expect satisfying answers to any burning questions.
