Across the Grooves

Безумно красивая игра, художественные арты, уникальный стиль, приятная музыка. Это то, что на поверхности и сразу же бросается в глаза. В глубине же - крепкий сюжет, повороты и выборы, смена имиджа в зависимости от реплик - есть где разгуляться. Это не симулятор свиданий, это полноценная история. Насыщенное красками, пусть и не самое долгое приключение. Однозначно стоит того, чтобы заценить, если вам нравятся необычные визуальные новеллы. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3793114985

Across the Grooves is the third choice-based visual novel by Nova-box. In this game, you play as Alice, a young woman whose life is turned upside down when she listens to a record that allows her to make changes to her past that will have unforeseen effects on her present. Alice has a normal life. She lives with her fiancé and works as a banker. That changes one day when she receives a package from her ex-boyfriend Ulysse containing an unmarked record. When Alice listens to the record, she finds herself in a vision of her past. When she comes back to the present, she realizes that as far as the rest of the world is concerned, she and her fiancé have never met. This sets her off on a journey to track down Ulysse, uncover the secrets of the record, and get back to a version of her life similar to the one she left. For a choice-based game, the story follows a fairly linear track. Most of the choices you make correspond to one or occasionally two of four symbols, and the biggest changes to the game are determined not by specific choices you make, but by how many of specific symbols you've chosen by certain key points of the game. During the game, the only major changes I noticed based on my choices in the moment were whether or not I got to talk to certain characters, or the general tone of certain interactions. Your character’s appearance and some background information change somewhat at different points in the game based on your accumulated symbols so far, but they don’t influence the overall flow of the story in a big way. The biggest changes happen in the epilogue. My experience with this feels pretty typical of the Nova-box games. The art was beautiful and the music stood out to me more than in the other games. The game doesn't skip dialogue you've already viewed and there are long sections that don't change between playthroughs, so it gets a bit cumbersome to skip to new parts after you've played a couple of times. This was especially true in this one, which felt like it didn't have a lot of hugely story-changing choices in the middle of the game. There are a number of places where you can cut a conversation short, but those choices typically have symbols and might affect the ending you get. Although the main story doesn’t vary as much as I’d like in a choice-based game, I did enjoy following along with it and figuring out the history of the record along with Alice. It was interesting how a number of the side characters in her life showed up again in multiple versions of her reality, even though she only met them when she started her quest. I didn’t love the romance options in this one. [spoiler] I liked Ulysse and was rooting for Alice to get back to him, but Alan and Patrizia, the other two options, both didn’t connect with me, and in one of my playthroughs it felt like the person Alice was hanging out with at the end of the game was not the person I had been focusing on earlier. It also kinda bugged me that she starts off motivated to get her fiancé back and is just.. okay with losing him pretty quickly no matter what you do, even if you play her so that she isn’t pining for Ulysse or pursuing her other options. [/spoiler] Across the Grooves was an interesting visual novel, though it did not branch as much as I would like for a game about the consequences of different choices. The art and music were good and the main story was very compelling. However, I felt like many of the different paths were same-y and playing the game over again felt very repetitive. I liked it a little more than Seer’s Isle but not as much as Along the Edge. 6/10