A somewhat sad, somewhat violent, somewhat powerful visual novel. The plot doesn't spend much time introducing characters, or setting, or building up the atmosphere much before things start going wrong (not many choices either), yet it's easy to get into the story; easy to explore different endings. Like the zombie series, this was a simple; engaging visual novel, with a much darker tone than the previous. Not bad!
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Well it's a Visual Novel, and so there are only 4 things I can talk about:
Story
Writing
Sound
Character design/Visuals
So that's what I'll do, but in inverse order because I have least to comment on about character design and most on story. So here we go!
NOTE: SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW
Character Design/Visuals:
I personally liked the empty faces and sketchy style, but that's ultimately a personal choice. I'll admit, I mostly like it because I find a lot of hand drawn 'complete' art in games (e.g. one's where faces are completely put in and we see the characters) to be a bit off-putting and amateurish. Beyond that, there isn't a lot of background to work with, but what there is works decently enough: they look like the places they're supposed to be.
In overall: the art is solid.
Sound:
For me the music made the game as worth it as anything else. Kudos to you for matching this music to the story you wanted to tell. Part creepy, part soothing and melancholic. Though, admittedly I would like a mute button, because as I'm writing this, it's probably gone over 50 loops of the theme music and as much as I like it, without me playing the game it feels tedious.
In overall: The sound is the reason why I'm writing this review, for the choices made where excellent.
Writing:
I know this might be confusing, but by writing I'm sticking as strictly as I can towards the actual written words and not the story being told. I find it a useful tool to analyze them separately, because a good story can be hidden behind bad writing, or a bad story can be shined by great writing.
While there are several points of grammatical and spelling mistakes, the individual sentences were fine. At the beginning you admittedly seemed toward purple prose, but once it gets a lot more into the dialogue and choices, the prose tones down a bit, and it comes out fine. Also, at least it doesn't bog me down in text, unlike the usual Visual Novel trend. And the characters have unique voices; at least it wasn't one person's dialogue distributed over several characters (but this'll be covered more in the Story section).
In overall: the spelling and grammar could use a little work, and while the descriptions can come a little heavy, it does it's job well and doesn't overwhelm me. So another thing done solidly.
Story:
This is both the strongest and weakest point of the game. It's the strongest because of it's short and focused length, as well as making my choices feel meaningful. It does help that each ending aligns to only one set of choices. And with your addition of the intro screen go to choice buttons, it made seeing each ending easy, which is a good thing: it's hard for me to get excited to go through an experience four times just to see every ending.
However, it's also the weakest for it's short length and the fact that in each play through I only make a maximum of two choices, it makes me feel removed from the story. Nor does it help that the first choice gives no indication of which I might prefer (though if any ending is necessarily better than any other... well I'll let others decide for that). The short length also that there's no room for character development, or even writing multi-dimensional characters: the protagonist helped this girl because she was nice and... ??? Like maybe there was more, but it seems more like the classical trope: Guy steps in to save girl and then magical adventure. Ami hinted that she was fearful of everyone besides myself. The bullies were just bullies who apparently knew exactly who ratted them out. Ash was my best friend who apparently had a gun and may have known more but also may have just seen things at the beginning, yet used some of the same language that Ami uses to describe herself? And the cop was just a cop.
But even if you don't want to make a significantly longer game, there was room for more choices and development in this game: Why am I following this lady who killed people but doesn't show any interest in me? Why do I follow her after she kills my best friend? At least give us a chance to say no and have her kill us, if the thought was that fear motivated us. I was never afraid of Ami because she never showed us ill intent, and the narrative reinforced how she cared about me to the point of exception. Ash's actions made no impact to me because I never got any indication of our history beyond: we are friends for a bit.
However, to end on a positive note: as with the music, I love the atmosphere created. I want to know more about Ami, about what was happening, but sort of don't because the atmosphere was really nice, and any explanation might ruin it. The things that my story brain interpreted as clues, such as my question of whether or not she was a 'Witch'. The people chasing her. But even beyond that, I liked how there was no really happy ending. It's very personal, but while I like happy, I like non-scary bleak a lot, and I think that these endings made sense. It was a nice touch to win me over.
In overall: This was, for me, the deciding factor between a 3.5 and a 4. And while I liked the framework you were working with, the finished product, sadly, does not quite make it in my mind. Even so, I'd like to see a sequel, as long as the sequel expands on what is going on.
IN OVERALL OVERALL (or the TL;DR):
I give this game a 3.5 out of 5, or 7 out of 10. While the story gets quite shaky at some points, and impressed me more on paper than in practice, the functionality of the writing and the character design, as well the nice atmosphere created by the writing and music makes me feel fondly enough about it to check out any potential sequel, in the hopes it'll be more fleshed out.
Hope this is any help.
awsome story wish it was longer also got every medal
This is Pretty Awesome Good Job 08jackt :)
it was a good story