Ashes of War

Quite a suprise gem of a game - not that regular H visual novel you see Steam flooded these days. First of all, the strongest point of this game is writing followed by good story and world building. Dialogues are written very well, suprisingly deep and characters are likable. You could really tell someone put a lot of work to create well made chemistry between characters and crew. Story and dialogues made me laugh more than 3 dozen times and the jokes/humor is really good (not the usuall shallow tropes). Oh and when you read manga/novels there are often situations where characters are dense for no reason other than crappy story and tropes - here it's complete opposite - characters are smart, smooth, usually open minded and intelligent. For low price, the story is suprisingly long 15 hours + 3-4 hours of skippable combat). The animation while sparse, are nice. Last, but not least, the soundtrack and music selection is very good for story situations and dialogues. There is only one weak point - the devs seems to have very clear fetish for muscles and don't even try to hide it. Still, don't let it distract you from overall good story, the good point clearly outweight (no pun indented) this muscle issue. I'd compare this to Sunrider series: Sunrider has better combat and progression (especially the Sunrider 4), but Ashes of War have much better writing.