Aspiring Light

I really enjoyed playing this. It's a rather short VN, but the story premise is interesting and had me on the edge of my seat most of the time. The writing at the start was rather stiff and with full honesty was hard to read through, but as I continued the writing got better and better. The backgrounds are very nice, although at times they do look mismatched. The character sprites have a big difference in quality, for example the difference between Damien, Kaira and Aiden, Nathan. At times these differences were pretty immersion breaking. The ending felt a bit rushed as we don't know about the aftermath of Damien, and most importantly Kaira and Aiden. I'd like to see perhaps a second game showing what happened to everyone after the two returned. The BGM at times felt like it didn't fit with the scene. And lastly there are some bugs here and there. Despite all of this I really enjoyed this game. Definitely above most others here on steam. Especially for free.

4/10 Не помню уже, что именно подвигло меня установить эту новеллу. Наверное бесплатность в сочетании с исключительно положительными (и подробными) отзывами. Но прохождение оказалось реально мучительным. Я все ждал, когда будут интересные события или неожиданные сюжетные повороты, но перед нами просто предстают картины бессмысленного подросткового бунта в благополучной стране. Просто потому что. Удивительное. И ведь никаких серьезных претензий автору не предъявишь. Видно, что игра делалась с большой любовью и тщательностью. Очень много детальных фонов, спрайтов персонажей - как дебютная работа, игра достойная. Автор показал владение игровым движком и сочетание визуального мастерства с самоотдачей. Но у игры, на мой взгляд, фатальный недостаток в главном аспекте, так важном для визуальных новелл. Она скучная. Герои либо страдают фигней, либо просто страдают. Поводом для печали становится неумение раскрыть скобки у многочлена (фейспалм, остатки моей эмпатии испарились в этот момент). Или что родители ожидают от них успеваемости в то время как герои те еще хлебушки в плане учебы. Или просто то, что из-за недопонимания не состоялась одна непримечательная встреча. Есть там факторы и посерьезнее, но все можно свести к фразе "с жиру бесятся" - когда у детей из благополучных семей сносит крышу в пубертатный период, и они начинают делать всякие глупости. Когда я читал "Над пропастью во ржи", тоже недоумевал, почему книгу считают культовой и почему я должен сопереживать ее герою вместо того, чтобы зевать. Плюсы. - Красивая и тщательно сделанная визуальная составляющая. Хотя попытки сделать персонажей немного 2.5D делают их странноватыми. - Нет багов. - Хотя крупная концовка у игры единая, есть опции на выбор, добавляющие отдельные течения в общей реке сюжета и даже влияющие на финальные отношения героев. Минусы. - Раскрыты выше. Я реально читал минут по десять-пятнадцать, больше не выдерживал. И под конец читал наискосок. - Английский с игре несложный, но знать его нужно. Локализации нет. В общем, внес свою ложку дегтя, высказав ворчливое мнение человека, чей подростковый бунт давно прошел. Если вы из моей страты, это антирекомендация для вас. Если же вы целевая аудитория, даже эта негативная рецензия послужит вам скорее рекламой. А автору желаю создать новую игру с таким же старанием, но более вдумчивым подходом к сюжету и диалогам.

Dünya berbat bir yer. Ama kendi dertleri olan Aiden'ın gözünden kaçan bir şey bu. Son matematik probleminin cevabı neydi gibi şeyler. Çok geç olmadan arkadaşlıklarını ayakta tutmaya çalışıyor. Ve geleceğin onu ne beklediğini merak ediyorum...

Decent slice-of-life read if you don't mind teen drama. -[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43914013-Free-Game-Amasser/]Free Game Amasser[/url]

Another fun little visual novel and I penultimately enjoyed the journey of our main characters even if one of them got the short end of the stick for lack of better terms. It's a beautiful journey that even I can find myself sometimes sympathizing for their situation, some points wishing that I could maybe trade places. Especially on any days where you just feel lost with out a direction. I highly recommend this to anyone who is remotely interested in visual novels. This was a great experience

Ive been searching thru this obscure part of steam looking for games like these. Free to play and less than 100 reviews. Alot of games in this category are pretty bad but this is definitely a memorable experience. What a beautiful story!! A great way to end a day let me tell ya!

"Aspiring Light" isn't a game. It's an e-book dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual novel/e-book/fan-fiction, this has no notable gameplay. It's just clicking through badly written dialogue that would never be accepted in print by an actual professional publisher. How did something this badly written end up on Steam? When someone can't get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam Direct under the guise of a game. This e-book is exactly what gamers expect from garbage non-game e-books self published on Steam Direct. It's pure, weaponized cringe... a high school anime club dropout fanfiction all about the author and his imaginary relationship with his imaginary anime girlfriend. It's so cringey you might throw up if you try to read this poorly written, dribbling cringe. Because this was put together with the Ren'Py construction kit, it didn't require any actual coding or development. It's a tool for failed authors to push their garbage high school anime club dropout fanfictions as games. Just like there's no professional writing here, there isn't any professional software development either. Visual novels/e-books are the worst way to try read a book (and they're always written far worse than real books too). Imagine reading your favorite book, be that War and Peace or The Davinci Code (are you ok??), but you have to click the mouse for every single sentence that appears. You'd hate it. It's a garbage way to try read a book... and even if it wasn't, this still isn't a game. Now take that annoying clicking and add utterly cringey high-school anime club dropout writing to it. Real authors are published in print and found on bookshelves. This garbage only ended up on Steam because they paid $100 to self-publish, because let's face it, professional publishers would not only reject this garbage they saw it, they'd take out restraining orders. E-books are technically simple, and don't require any of the heavy features that actual cutting edge PC games need... in fact, the whole thing can be done in a web browser. There's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't buy gaming rigs to spend money on something Chrome or Firefox could do. Even as a free e-book, this couldn't find an audience, not just because this is Steam, for PC games, not garbage e-books. With a peak of only 5 concurrent readers, it's clear nobody wanted this. They literally couldn't pay people to read it. Even more comical, to satisfy the global demand for this book, you'd only ever need to print 5 copies. And that's probably too many. While this garbage cringe e-book has no up-front cost, you can find genuinely professionally written novels and comics at a public library or through websites like Project Gutenberg. Your PC isn't a Kindle, and I can't recommend non-game e-book visual novels to people looking for PC games. It's good that this was removed from Steam.