Lacuna Urbis, reviewed by DJay32

For reference, Lacuna Urbis was written by Funden and can be found here.

Lacuna Urbis was a 43-post blog(ella?) about "Benzene," a character who sets up an idle blog to talk about life and Team Fortress 2 only to shortly wind up in the hospital, where the story takes a significant turn down the rabbit hole, becoming a mystery/adventure story about exploring this strange new empty city and learning about a medical conspiracy. Benzene is a subject in what seems to be an experiment with "Herr Doctor's" eldritch medicine and an organization focusing on him. The blog ends as Benzene finds an exit to the city and uncovers information about the organization before being apprehended.

Admittedly, I don't know all there is to know about this plot. The medical experiments were detailed in textdumps throughout the latter half of the blog, and definitive answers were rarely given. This, coupled with Benzene's capture at the end of the story, leads me to suspect Lacuna Urbis to be either incomplete or to be expanded upon in a later blog. The current story is.. well, it works for what it's worth, but it's not particularly compelling. Personally, I found the most interesting and memorable part of the story to be the former half of the story, wherein Benzene explores the surreal and empty city. The idea of exploring an odd location, never sure of what or who you'll find, appeals to me. But I feel this section of the story didn't last long enough before switching to a lot of letters and documents with deliberately vague and cryptic messages.

There was a subplot regarding Benzene entering the city with a group of other travelers, but he leaves them early on and finds them dead later. This could have worked with a bit more effort; the story didn't give us much reason to care for these characters, especially not considering Benzene was so quick to leave them. Their deaths had no significant impact on the story, which doesn't say much when they're the only characters who aren't antagonists or the narrator.

Regarding the antagonists, there was a "Beakman" character who was seen from time to time and actually provided a nice antagonist for the early posts. He seemed just ambiguous enough to pose a threat to the group of protagonists, but then Benzene left and the threat of being in close quarters with an ambiguous menace was dropped. The rest of the story didn't even have much of an impact, as the antagonists were almost entirely conveyed through letters and documents left behind.

There wasn't that much of a conflict here, I suppose is what I'm trying to say. Benzene is lost in a strange city, but we find out that the city he's in isn't even much of a threat; it's the doctors experimenting on him who are. But he doesn't seem that threatened by them for most of the story; the focus is on exploring and reading documents that have been left behind. The ending of the story, where Benzene finds himself in a facility of the antagonist doctors, probably has the most suspense of the whole story, as he is legitimately threatened and in enemy territory there. But he's apprehended in a matter of a few posts, ending the entire blog.

This sort of exploration-focused story can definitely work, but Lacuna Urbis didn't feel as if it was written to work that way. I think it needed to be longer, to spend more time on the exploration and the antagonists. Where there's no conflict, spend some time using descriptive imagery to immerse the reader in the mysterious environment. Where there's a conflict, keep it going.

On the positive side, the blog's design is very easy to follow and the background is creative enough to make the blog stand out on its own. I felt almost compelled to keep reading simply because it looked original and accessible! Funden did a great job with that.

I did not dislike Lacuna Urbis. Funden seemed to have been trying for some interesting things that he simply fell short on. Writing isn't the kind of thing you get perfectly every time; it takes patience and persistence, so I have faith in him as a writer. Hopefully we can see more from him in the future, and hell, I'd love to see him work more with the "exploring mysterious locales" concept, where the focus of the story is on the location rather than anything else.