Setting aside the style, I think you asked for more output — 5,000 words — than your prompt supports, so the model repeated the same details over and over to stretch out the story after it hits the major notes.

Obvious tells are repetitive numeric details: the number of lines of code (mentioned six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.

It has a particular style I’ve seen lately using more short confident sentences as professional writers do. But it lacks the professional writer’s sense of when to add an anecdote and when to leave out a detail. And it is this juxtaposition that gives it a distinctive LLM feel of being written in the style of a professional writer, yet something is off.

Please don't feel the need to be defensive about this. People are reacting in a predictable way to a shift in how effort is perceived.

Where one formerly could use a certain way of writing as a heuristic for effort put into content they are spending time ingesting, now that heuristic is meaningless and a new one must replace it.

At this point some people have decided 'has markers of AI writing' is the heuristic to match 'no/low effort' on, and are trying to use shame in order to start a system of self-policing against it. Unfortunately that isn't going to work, because

1. the heuristic is flawed

2. most people are going to end up using AI tools for writing, since writing well is difficult

I don't, because I stopped reading after I recognized LLM output. You could basically take all the comments you wrote in this thread verbatim and it would still be better, even if there are some grammar errors here or there. Please give yourself more credit.