This is another bit of bad break-up fiction, and I have to say the opening quote from Nick-fucking-Hornby makes an immediate bad impression. Also creating an immediate bad impression is the garden-path description of the first room:
"Between the ragged divide separating the scrub and the sea is a small dirt clearing atop a cliff face -- where you find yourself."
Does the divide separate the scrub and the sea? (In which case the sentence is nonsense -- where is the other noun phrase governed by 'between'?) Or does it separate the scrub, meaning that it's a path through the scrub, meaning the sentence is a confusing way of saying "You're in a clearing on the edge of a cliff, at the end of a path through some scrub." Doubtless it was a desire to avoid such pedestrian phraseology that led the author to the quoted three-headed hydra of a sentence. The same desire again leads him into vague and confusing territory a few sentences later:
"Above you a grey sky drifts wearily north, towards the city and people you left behind. A thin dirt path wends its way through the scrabble of trees, following the clouds."
So the path follows the clouds, and the sky is drifting north, so the path goes north, right? Wrong. >NORTH, I find out a few turns later, leads directly over the cliff. In attempting to avoid cliche, the author has led himself, or at least me, astray. Though any attempt to avoid cliches was ruined by ending the description like this:
"Peter stands on the cliff edge, staring out over the churning grey sea, lost in thought."
In general, the writing is mediocre and the game buggy. I was irritated by its initial coyness about my character's gender (maybe this was unintentional), and irritated by the boyfriend NPC, who was dull and unresponsive, and not in the way actual humans are dull and unresponsive. I got stuck in the second scene when I burnt the lasagne and the boyfriend was completely unaware of the smoke clogging his apartment. The walkthrough didn't help, and I quit.
I'm not sure about the mix tape idea to begin with, reminding me as it does of that tired cinematic device of leaning on some pop song to supply the emotion that isn't there otherwise. In freeware IF, it has the added disadvantage that said pop song can be there in title only.
Rating: 2