Title: The Case Of Notre Dame Cathedral Story by Evolution-500
Source: ELGANZA, INC. | AWARDS by TheCieloCommunity
Category: Science Fiction
Mature: N (abduction, alcohol, blood, death, gore, guns, moderate profanity, occult, religion, sexual references, smoking, violence)
LGBTQIAP+: N
Status: Complete
Special note (judging): I had three books in this category, and the other judges (TJDW1989 and SSears90) had three books each.
Result: 94/100

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*****

Rubric:
- Title: 5
- Book cover: 5
- Description (blurb): 5
- Plot & storytelling: 15
- Character development: 10
- Writing style: 10
- Grammar: 10
- Originality & creativity: 10
- Emotional impact: 10
- Pacing & structure: 5
- Accuracy (if non-fiction): 5
- Overall enjoyment & engagement: 10
Total: 100

*****

Total: 94/100

Title: 5/5
This title has an old-fashioned mystery feel to me, with maybe some historical undertones, and the addition of the game fandom definitely adds to the time/history concept. And if there's time splitting, or time travel, then there must be Sci Fi! Probably. Anyway, I like the title.

Cover: 2/5
It looks like you're using an image from the game as your background image, which is fine. That's what I did for my fanfictions for a while until I forced myself to make covers from scratch in Canva. Adding some sort of frame or border wouldn't be a bad idea, but the biggest area for improvement here is the text. Right now, it doesn't feel like it's part of the cover. It's text typed on the cover, and blending it more into the image would help to create a more cohesive feel. I'd definitely remove the underline, and probably move the title up to the top and your name down to the bottom, maybe in a corner. Then, you could experiment with different font colors and maybe accents. I don't know if you made this in Canva or not, but if you didn't, you can upload the image in the Canva editor and use that as your background, and the editor will pick out a color palette that matches the image. Using those colors as a starting point for text has been really helpful for me. Canva also has different accents you can add to the text, like highlighting and shading, and you can often pick a secondary color to use when you're doing that, too. It's something to play with, if you're interested in doing that. And if you're not, I totally understand. Graphics aren't my thing.

Blurb: 5/5
I would like to give you a 10/5 here, because this is by far the best blurb I've ever read. I only wish I could write a blurb this well! Do you teach classes? Take students? One-on-one mentoring? Because I've been using resources like justwriteit and trying to pick up tips from reading well-written blurbs, and I'd love to write a blurb this good.

Anyway, moving on to actual feedback about the content of your blurb...

Character intro? Check. Setting? Check. Time period? Plot conflict? Thought-provoking questions and zero answers? Check, check, check, and check. Full disclosure, another author told me this is a really good book when she found out I'd be judging it, and if that didn't excite me enough, this blurb hooked me like a big-mouth bass and reeled me in to the fisherman's net with absolutely no protest on my part. I really don't care about the estimated reading time of this book anymore. I need to get into it now!

Plot & storytelling: 15/15
This is an amazing story. Anybody who doesn't know video games could read this and love it for the story it is. The pictures are a nice addition, but they're not necessary to imagine all the details. Your descriptions can easily stand on their own. And the plot twist at the end where we get an explanation that turns everything we thought we knew on its head feels bizarre but natural. I know what you're doing there. You're incorporating the cut-screen end-of-game sequences into your story, and you do it so well. Actually—and I have trouble explaining this, but I'll give it a shot—even though I've never played this particular game, I could convert the story into a video game as I read it, if that makes sense. And that made me appreciate the story all the more. You maintain the original feel of dungeon crawling, monitoring ammo and health, reloading, leveled baddies, bosses of increasing difficulty, etc., all while creating a true literary narrative. 

Also, I loved the reveal in the epilogue that you've taken side characters in the game and put them center stage here. There are always good side characters with intricate, interesting backstories that are potentially more intriguing to me than the main storyline, so seeing you give Underwood and Viola their own story made me really happy.

I noticed three minor flaws or inconsistencies I wanted to point out, but they're really not that big of a deal. In the prologue, de la Morte is carrying the woman bridal-style, and then he grabs her wrists and turns her to face him. There's a gap in physical actions there. Carrying a woman that way and then grabbing her wrists doesn't work. I'm pretty sure you mean he puts her on that crucifix first, but I just wanted to point out that disconnect.

The next issue is Kortez' lack of an accent. That's not possible. It's easy to think I don't have an accent, and everybody else does, but we all have accents. I recall a phone conversation I had with a cousin who lived in North Dakota where she insisted in a very Canadian accent that she didn't have an accent. It was very amusing.

Lastly, in the epilogue, the paragraph starting with "When he awoke" sounds like he just got knocked out or something, like it just happened right then and there, and now he's waking up. I know it's referring to the events of chapter five, but I'd recommend altering the wording slightly to show that, because for a moment, I thought he was under attack all over again.

Character development: 10/10
I love your characters. They're so, so deep, so complex, and they change! Underwood is not the same person in the epilogue that he was at the beginning of chapter one. I love his "British-ness" in thoughts, dialogue, and actions, and you've done all of his inner conflict so well: battling his suspicion of Viola and eventually growing to trust and respect her; struggling to reconcile all the supernatural things around him with his firm belief in science; dealing with guilt and shame for not saving the maidens sooner...it's a lot. And he's having to face a lot, so it makes sense. I especially love how he jumps to Viola's defense in chapter five, and his longing to reconcile with her and just be her friend in the epilogue is rather sweet for a gruff old British detective.

Viola is a very interesting character. She's so enigmatic, displaying a vicious battle lust and deep hatred of the occult; showing kindness and a soothing gentleness to the maidens they rescue; sharing a fond friendship with Father Marcus and Phillipe, even though she hasn't known them for long; and then crumbling under the pressure of Szakal's words, but still holding firm to her beliefs and standing against him. She's a great character, and I'd be very interested in reading more about her (hint, hint).

Father Marcus and Phillipe are interesting characters, more than just names on a page, and de la Morte is suitably creepy. The Scourge Splitters are...yuck. I assume they're the underlying bad guys throughout the game series, and Kortez is the main character opposing them? Or he's one of the main characters, anyway, since this concept spans many worlds and periods of time. If I weren't a scaredy cat, you would have sold me on playing this game via the characters, honestly.

Writing style: 9/10
Overall, I love your writing style. It's very descriptive, with a heavy focus on character development that doesn't drag the pace down, and your action sequences are fantastic. That being said, you do have a tendency toward repetition within sentences. One sentence may have multiple phrases beginning with "as," for instance, or "on" and "onto," "stole" and "stealing," that kind of thing. Varying your sentence structure a bit more would help eliminate that repetition. You also have a lot of single-sentence paragraphs, but since you have plenty of full paragraphs, they're not as bothersome as I find them sometimes. Still, there are large sections of just single-sentence paragraphs, and too many can get clunky, I think, because they introduce a pause in the reader's mind that interrupts the flow of the story. Also, while setting a sentence apart in its own paragraph can pack a lot of punch by emphasizing a point, that effect is dulled if there are too many single-sentence paragraphs. It's one in a sea of many, so it doesn't stand out as much.

Grammar: 8/10
Your grammar is generally pretty solid, but there are mistakes, and although some are consistent, they all feel to me like proofreading misses, because you do all of it right most of the time. I'll go through the most common issues I saw, but in general, I think you'd probably catch most of it if you did another round of proofreading.

Awkward phrasing created by excess wordiness is fairly common, sometimes with grammatical errors, sometimes without. For instance, "casting his gaze to over to a puddle near his feet" should be "casting his gaze over to a puddle near his feet." Most of these errors feel to me like you were playing with wording and you just forgot to delete a word or two when you settled on a phrase.

There are some occasional odd prepositions as well, such as in this phrase: "was a testament of his success as a detective and author." Usually, the phrase would be "a testament to." Many of these prepositions are stylistic choices more than hard rules, though, so they're up to you.

I noted a place where you missed a paired hyphen, but I don't think you did it anywhere else, so I don't know if you even need me to point this out. It's this: "based on facts - hard, tangible facts, and this new assignment." There should be a second hyphen after the second "facts."

Verb tense slip-ups are a rare issue, and not just simple past tense slipping into present tense. For instance, this sentence is in past tense, but it's not the correct form of past tense: "For the past few weeks, a growing number of young maidens were reported missing..." The verb should be "had been" reported missing. This kind of thing pops up sometimes in dialogue, too, especially slipping into past tense where it should be present tense.

There are some other mismatches here and there. In "the most credible yet stranger of the bunch," the word should be "strangest" to match "most." Sometimes, there are plural/singular errors with noun/verb agreement, and there are occasional pronoun issues, too, where "it" is used for a plural noun and "they" is used for a singular noun.

When your dialogue ends in question marks or exclamation marks, you tend to forget to make the first word of the dialogue tag lowercase, but you do this correctly when the dialogue ends in a period (which you convert into a comma correctly). Spelling/grammar checkers look at it and say it's right, but it's actually wrong, so it's rather annoying, actually. 

"You there!" He called out in English. → "You there!" he called out in English.

I'm not a fan of using all uppercase letters to show shouting or screaming, as it's not the easiest to read, especially when it's done too often, and I think it's better to describe the dialogue in the dialogue tags. Exclamation marks carry a lot of weight if you don't use them too often, which you don't. And in the section where Underwood and Viola are shouting to be heard over the storm, it feels very strange when the full uppercase conversation turns back into normal lowercase text following the usual capitalization rules. The weather didn't change, nor did the way they're shouting at each other. I'm glad you did go back to normal text, but I'd recommend doing that throughout. Similarly, I'm not a fan of double punctuation (?!), again because I think it's better to show that in the dialogue tags. Which, again, you do.

When you're doing quotes within quotes, you sometimes put the inner quote in single quotation marks, sometimes in double quotation marks. I'd stick with single quotation marks so it's easier to distinguish where dialogue truly begins and ends. Also, when you're doing extended dialogue, like Szakal's dialogue in chapter five, the general rule for that is to have an opening quotation mark at the start of each paragraph and a closing quotation mark only at the end of the last paragraph of dialogue. Not sure why, but there you go.

Lastly, there are some rare incomplete sentences ("Knitting his brow together, giving the jester a confused look."), and there are a few times where you use the adverb form of a word when it should be the adjective form.

Originality & creativity: 10/10
Yep. Even though this is a fanfiction, you can't take a video game and turn it into a good story without injecting it with plenty of originality and creativity. Simply putting images from the game into your own descriptive words shows your writing style and how your mind works, and I know the game doesn't have elaborate descriptions of the architecture or character interactions. It's a first-person shooter. Yes, it has a good story and good characters, but the emphasis on the game will always be on the action, and you've turned it around to emphasize the characters.

Emotional impact: 10/10
The key to this is characterization, because believable, relatable characters draw the reader into themselves and the story, allowing for full reader immersion. You accomplished this immediately with your characters.

Pacing & structure: 5/5
The chapters are really long, but they're really good, so I didn't mind. The blurb and the prologue pull the reader in enough to make the time matter less than the content. Nothing was too fast; nothing was too slow; and the places where you chose to end and start new chapters were perfect. I assume those divisions have something to do with the game? But even if they didn't, they're good places to stop and start.

Accuracy (if non-fiction): 5/5
Free points. Yay! 🙂

Overall enjoyment & engagement: 10/10
Hello. I'm a scaredy cat with a weak stomach. I've never been a big fan of first-person shooter games, and I don't like undead anything or themes of the occult. But I loved this story from the start. Your writing is more typical of gothic horror than immediate slasher horror, emphasizing a slow build-up in tone and foreboding, and that is the type of horror I actually enjoy. I knew I was in for good things when I saw quotes from Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker. If anybody knew how to write horror, those two certainly did, and they're great examples to follow. And, as I said earlier, I could convert this story into a video game as I read, and for whatever reason, that triggered nostalgic memories of childhood (and teenage and adult gaming), which is a comfortable place for me. If I ever stop writing, judging, and reviewing so much, I need to get back into my all-time favorite, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Which has undead and the occult, but it also has deep lore and amazing main and side storylines.