Visual novels I played in January
I started this year playing short visual novels on Steam.
Stella of the End
I started reading this visual novel last year around August. It was developed by Key and published by Visual Arts. It tells the story of Jude – a courier – and Philia – an android – in a post-apocalyptic world. Philia was created with human traits and dreamed of becoming a human being. Jude found her while fulfilling a request from a mysterious man who asked him to deliver the little girl to a place in exchange for payment. The story follows their journey and the dangers they faced together. It’s a very profound story of love, companionship, and empathy. In a world where people benefit more from superficial relationships than anything truly meaningful, this story is a good reminder that things can be different.
Misericorde Volume Two: White Wool & Snow
This is the second volume of the Misericorde series created by XeeCee. I previously wrote about it. I enjoyed the first volume a bit more because of the novelty. There aren’t any video games where our main character is an anchoress even if only for a short while. I think it was an extremely original starting point. Also, murder investigations inside religious communities (let’s use the term ‘religious’ very loosely here) offer a great deal of intrigue and the developer/writer created a very immersive world with interesting albeit extremely weird characters. In the second volume, we get more from Angela and that is a very good thing. That is a very… very, very good thing. Our Hedwig had to face a lot of challenges and everything turned out a bit spicier than in the first volume, to put it mildly, but also more tragic. Some events circled back to the first volume whilst other story elements and cliffhangers will, hopefully, be weaved together on a third volume. We’re still working on the murder investigation but it didn’t feel like much progress was made on that front whereas everything else descended into chaos.
Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!
This is a dating sim and visual novel from Team Salvato, and was a big success when it came out. The element of surprise was the focal point here. I’ve read on Steam that the game is a psychological horror but I couldn’t connect that idea with the pastel pink graphics and welcoming cast of characters. We play as a boy who was invited by his best friend Sayori to join a high school literature club . The club members were only girls and the objective was to write poems with specific words to grab the attention of our love interest. However, not everything was as it seemed, and the girls would soon show their mental health struggles by taking actions without warning. There’s much more going on, though, because the game is in itself a meta game.
Planetarian HD
I was looking forward to this visual novel from Visual Arts/Key. It tells the story of an android – Hoshino Yumemi – working in an abandoned pre-war city flooded by endless rain. The android was still functional and convinced that she’d get more visitors to see the stars inside a planetarium. Our character, a ‘junker’ looking for goods to loot, couldn’t make any sense of why an android would be active 30 years after a nuclear war eradicated almost the entire human race. Apparently unaware of the fact that no more visitors would show up, the android followed our character into the city. This short story was endearing and tragic, following the special signature of Key visual novels.
Synergia
This was a short indie visual novel developed by Radi Art and published by Top Hat Studios and Eastasiasoft, with two endings and an epilogue. The art was gorgeous and the sci-fi narrative was the perfect match for the cyberpunk aesthetic and the presence of androids and cyborgs in a society under the rule of an empire. It tells the story of Cila, a special human, and Mara, a biodroid with singularity. Building androids with singularity was strictly prohibited in the empire and the presence of Mara and a mysterious hacker named Sal would bring a lot of trouble to Cila’s monotonous life, but also much discovery and hope. The game comes with a separate free DLC that should be downloaded via Steam store.
Loopers
Another visual novel from Visual Arts/Key featuring a very short story about saving someone’s life through the power of friendship. Without giving too much away, an overarching theme explores the lengths people can go to creating realities adjusted to their expectations and hopes as a means to avoid confronting tragic and imminent life situations. It’s a story about love, alternate realities, Geocaching, and resilience. The art was good, and the humorous scenes made me chuckle, but I think it could have been a better story if the writers had added more layers to the mystery.
I don’t know which visual novel I’m going to read next. I still have a couple of short stories to read, but my VN backlog isn’t so big anymore, at least on PC.
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