Hey, roast mine. My friend roasted me, so let's see what a stranger will do.
In a world torn apart by war and shrouded in fog, Arkam, a seasoned supersoldier, descends into an abandoned bunker to complete a mission. Haunted by visions of a violent past, his biting sarcasm conceals a tired heart.
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I read three chapters of your webnovel, and I’ve got to be honest—it was like being gently euthanized by boredom. I had this opened for a week on my tab on my new PC, and playing video games I had missed for four years were more fullfilling than to revive this thread from no PC induced hiatus. This wasn't just a dull read, hell no, this was the literary equivalent of watching paint dry in grayscale while someone whispers sci-fi nouns in your ear and asks you to feel something while my mind was saying "play Yakuza 7 instead, at least it has better idiots than this thread". I read a lot of bad stories—I eat wattpad-tier flops for breakfast when I have will to suffer—but this one? This one deserves its own flavor of sedation. You don’t read
The Pristine so much as you lapse into it, like falling into coma after overworking and sleeping late because of a new PC after a week.
Let’s start with the obvious: yes, all the "elements" of a story are present. There’s a guy. There’s a mission. There’s fog, a bunker, some alleged trauma, and a future so generically dystopian it might as well be a setting template called "CyberGrimePunky_003." But here’s the thing—those elements aren’t a story, they’re props. They sit there like set pieces in a half assed ARG some high schooler made in his spare time. Your webnovel reads less like a narrative and more like a speculative thought experiment that got lost on the way to becoming a plot.
Just reading the synopsis alone is like watching someone Google "how to write cool sci-fi" and then refusing to scroll past the first result. It’s that dry. "In a world torn by war and shrouded in fog…" I swear I’ve read that line six thousand times and every single one was just as disposable. What’s your angle? What’s your twist? What separates this from a high school creative writing prompt handed in by a guy who accidentally signed up for the wrong class? Absolutely nothing.
And then there’s Arkam, the so-called protagonist, who has all the depth of a cereal box and half the charisma. He’s supposed to be sarcastic, I guess, but "sarcastic" here is just code for "vaguely annoyed and barely coherent." His idea of biting wit is grumbling into his specs like a guy who just found out his VPN expired. I kept waiting for the sarcasm to arrive, but all I got was lousy emotionally sedated muttering between tech instructions t-shirt. At best, he’s a dull cop with a back brace. At worst, he’s a blank slate wrapped in tactical gear who exists to walk down corridors and occasionally toss children off a bridge—literally.
And that’s another thing—what is it with this story and people slowly opening doors and walking into rooms full of absolutely fucking nothing? I have never read a more committed sequence of box-checking. Arkam enters a room. He looks around. He sighs. He fiddles with his gear. He mutters about jammers. Repeat for 1100 words. This is less a sci-fi thriller and more a gameplay description made by an AI just by looking at 1 360x240 cropped screenshot. We’ve got entire chapters where the most dramatic tension is "I wonder if the keypad will work" or "this crate is empty, too." My guy, if this is what you’re bringing to the narrative table, at least let a rat jump scare someone or a drone malfunction and kill a child.
Something. Anything. I would’ve paid for that bunker to detonate and end this plot right there, starting actual story of some actual OP MC investigating why that brat had died in that easy mission.
Second chapter tries to yank the emergency brake and drop some trauma. Sure, a pregnant woman in a bunker, some children, sexual violence, a warcrime’s worth of "feel bad now" vibes. But, it’s like watching an actor break into sobs before recording has even started. It’s all cue and no build-up. You want me to feel something about that someone and her kids? Try writing her as a person first, not as a live-action plot device dumped into the bunker like a DLC backstory pack. "Please, sir, help us" is not dialogue—it’s the cheapest moral bait you can throw on the page, and it has the narrative nutrition of dry cereal.
And also, Arkam’s reaction? I can’t tell if he’s traumatized, constipated, or just vaguely inconvenienced. He’s not wrestling with morality. He’s not affected. He’s not
anything. He sighs. He thinks "huh, that’s weird", like a Skyrim NPC. Then he walks out and continues doing literally nothing of consequence. If this were a video game, Arkam would be the AI-controlled tutorial guy you follow for five minutes before he dies in a scripted cutscene and you never think of him again.
Chapter 3? Chapter 3 is where the story
should escalate, but given the quality of a snowball (that needs to become an avalanche for a good story) those two chapters before, it doesn't. That's reality. Instead, it pivots to
bridge logistics. Children are assigned to squads like it’s
Cyberpunk Babysitter Simulator 2079. The only real twist is that Arkam suddenly becomes Olympic-level child-yeeter, hurling them off ledges with no warning. Why? Because it’s more efficient, apparently. Because the author thought action was needed but forgot what tension feels like. And then after all the jumping, all the planning, all the exposition, they open another door... to nothing. Again. More empty crates. More silence. More artificial mystery stretched thinner than a mood in an elevator.
There’s no antagonist. No thing called urgency. No ticking clock that's about to explode. No goal beyond "explore this rust-covered void and think some thoughts about it." The stakes are always theoretical. The conflict is "might exist later." And somehow,
somehow, the story has the gall to end each chapter with what I assume are supposed to be cliffhangers, like "we need to talk," or "what’s beyond the door?" Spoiler: the answer is always
nothing.
This entire novel reads like someone wanted to write a cyberpunk story but forgot why. There’s no
intent. There’s no theme. There’s not even an
attempt at an idea beyond "man in bunker with gadgets meets some NPCs and walks around." It’s a shooter game script without the shooter. Just corridors, jammers, tech babble, and cold canned dialogue recycled from every post-apocalypse sloppile ever written.
If this were a writing prompt in a class, and I were your overly smug, heavily caffeinated English teacher, I’d slap a
C- on the front page, write "some effort here, but no vision," and then go drink whiskey under my desk. Because that’s what this story demands—not critique. Not encouragement. Just a tired sigh and the slow realization that you wrote 10,789 words about a man walking through hallways.
Look. If you want to improve this, there’s one question you need to ask:
what’s your twist? Because "sarcastic soldier goes into bunker" is not a story. "Sarcastic" isn’t a twist. "Fog" isn’t mood. "War" isn’t depth. Pick something—anything—and
do something with it. Blow up the setting. Turn the rebels into clones. Make the AI go rogue. Give Arkam a secret. Hell, make the bunker a spaceship.
Something.
But as it stands,
The Pristine isn’t pristine. It’s
sterile. Clean, quiet, and absolutely lifeless.
