The Left Right Game

Caveat: There are very few (if any) fiction podcasts that I consider good all the way through. This one had a pretty decent story for 3-4 episodes. Rob is a good character (Blue Jay is a terrible one), and I'm fine with the 'two ends' structure, with one thread moving forward and the other occurring after the events are over. Let's see where they meet.

But the ending is a dud. No spoilers from (other than suggesting there's nothing to spoil). It's stereotypical podcast stuff. Just as Hollywood movies tend to force happy endings, supernatural podcasts tend to..., well, I won't say. But this does pretty much what they all do.

Also, there are numerous action sequences that don't play in podcast form. You hear sounds.. "What's going on there? I can't see!" And many characters have two names, making it hard to follow.

The first few episodes pulled me in, however as they went along everything became very confusing. The use of sound effects might have made things more immersive, but the podcast seemed to forget the medium it was in and expected the listener to discern a lot from similar sounding noises. There are many important plot points towards the end that are extremely confusing because the sound design doesn't indicate clearly what is happening. A lot of smushing / crashing noises sound too similar to other sound effects and you can't tell if someone is getting injured. The first time someone is majorly hurt, Alice is narrating what happened so it makes sense. This falls apart when she's more involved in the action. The voice acting is pretty good, some characters better than others. Unfortunately to get the full context, you will have to read the nosleep story. This had a lot of potential, but they should have thought about how it should sound to carry the narrative in an audio only format.

Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, especially towards the end, the story becomes muddled in key parts because there's just...*noise*. And it all sounds the same. Without reading the original story, there's a huge amount of the story that a new listener is missing out on.

So much more needed to be added to get the full experience of the original story, and I'm not sure that it's an issue of talent, I think it's more a matter of this story not being adaptable as a radio play. It's a good idea and a great story, but it's only a mediocre and somewhat disappointing and confusing radio play.