I'd much rather read a VN where a char comes to the conclusion "Your problems are of your own doing. But that's okay, because we're all flawed and we all make mistakes. And in the end, we grow from them" (4/4)

I think the height of this self-centeredness is that most of these VNs come to the conclusion that "Your problems are not your fault! They're the fault of society/your parents/someone who's not you!" It does not endear me to that char, or their creator, for that matter (3/

It's just that most of them have such a self-centered worldview. You have a protagonist who talks to themself about 99% of the time, only for someone to finally come along and declare that yes, the protagonist does have worth as a person (2/

For the record, I am everybody's best friend

Apart from that, even though not a lot happens in this first build, I still want to stick with it, for the important fact that this is a personal project that clearly means something to the creator, a quality that is distressingly absent in a lot of VNs I've read lately

Somebody's been listening to a lot of King Crimson, it seems

There's also the matter of the MC's friend dying in the intro that never really seems to play much of a role thereafter and just seemed like a wasted opportunity

(also, the other char's weird resemblance to Adrius from Lyre is kinda offputting)

I have to disagree. It felt very lacking in plot, where most of the dialogue consists of the MC complaining about how the corporations don't care about the sport or the competitors. By the end, nothing changes; the MC regains his love for racing even though he never lost it in the first place

All in all, I would say that Camp Ash is definitely worth a look and I'll be reading it once it's complete, which will probably be soon (10/10)
hiredzombie.itch.io/camp-ash-vn

A demerit, however, for the grammatical errors. Never enough for it to hinder understanding, but frequent enough to be annoying. This VN needs a pass-through by an editor, but fortunately, the mistakes are easily fixable (9/

Another thing that I appreciated was that we get the rare FVN char (several, actually) who's unambiguously bisexual, not just one who mentions having a girlfriend in the past, but otherwise shows no interest in women in any way (8/

That said, I can't help but be intrigued by Duke. Much like Flynn from Echo, despite the fact that he's an asshole, he also seems to have the most internal conflict that explains why he acts the way he does (7/

This leaves the other chars to basically end up as fairly simplistic slasher movie tropes (Trisha=the good girl, Duke=the asshole jock, and so on) (6/

However, one thing that annoys me is that, like a lot of other VNs, it's easy to tell when the author is especially invested in one char (in this case, it's Dale and to a lesser extent Janice) and only seemed to add other routes out of a sense of obligation (5/

In fact, I think it would be better if it weren't a fanfic at all and were its own original universe (4/

However, Camp Ash, apart from a few references and its elevation of Echo side chars to main chars, isn't really that connected to its source material. Instead, it's more of an homage to slasher flicks, especially those like Friday the 13th (3/