@AaronMk
From what I gather, the rules are: 1. Be consistent, 2. Explain stuff, 3. Third person is sometimes better. Am I reading it right?
If you want to take away what I said as being firm rules, sure. But you don’t necessarily have to explain things, and first-person is still an open option. But you can’t really use third-person rules in a first-person story.
Like to a point I can buy into core Fallout’s first-person presentation because it’s LittlePip dictating the story as she remembers it at the end of her journey, if perhaps edited and worked on for clarity. But in the case of Project Horizons this framework is never established, it’s told in First Person for the sake of it and I feel a whole meta element or even an element of irony was lost throughout by Somber not establishing to himself exactly why it’s in first person.
The story could still have been told in first person and worked well, if Somber remembered it might have been best to drop a lot of the gratuitous detail in it. I don’t want to spoil anything in particular, but there could have been a point in the story where he could have stopped the first person narrative towards the end, under the pretense that the entire story up until that point had been Blackjack recounting her story before she disappears to fight the antagonist, and the way it’s related could mean she gets side-tracked or forgets things until they become important and she has to talk about how that is. In the narrative this already done but to the most absolutely minimal effort, quirky asides that just sort of fall flat. And because it’s first person, told from the perspective of someone who might lack it by virtue of being a person who can only see it through one way and trying to rationalize it all at the end, it’d all be an excuse to just simplify and minimize the text. After the hundredth gun fight it becomes boring, and I unironically believe there would have had more impact if she just starts listing gun fights.
Somber’s lack of consistency also blows up its own metaphysical foundations I suppose. Souls are important to FoE, they’re literally a thing that can be used. But he changes what a soul means so often I can’t help but get angry, vs him developing out a single idea of what a soul is and using it.