For Ever Melancholia

A visual novel that doesn’t try to hide what it is. The plot is drama and appropriate for an indie film. As a matter of fact, it revolves around movies, as you and your buddies form a movie club to watch and discuss old classics. This is to take a break from your archaeology studies. So you study and dig throughout the day, and you dive deep into movies at the club. It is not just classics; you also discuss modern films. The club is even more fascinating because you are the only guy among several lovely girls. When you decide to make your own film, things become a little hot. A simple concept is gradually overtaken by the history of the archeological dig site, which directs the entire thing towards eroticism. The first thing you will notice is the game's engine and presentation. Instead of advancing the story line by line like in almost all visual novels, things are a bit different here. While the right panel displays a complete novel page that reads like a script, the left side and the majority of the middle are reserved for location shots and character portraits. Characters have only one portrait and do not change their facial expressions. Only reading the script allows you to see all of the emotions and movements. The final feature is a player at the bottom of the screen. It already gives you the novel's length, which is a bit less than three hours, although this depends on your reading speed. You can let the novel progress on its own by clicking the play button or on the novel page. To avoid getting lost, the current paragraph or line will be highlighted in black. Lines separate chapters, and each is accompanied by its own music. Although you can skip to any chapter by clicking on it, you can only move to the chapter’s beginning and cannot move the marker somewhere in the middle. You can also use a mouse wheel to go back and forward quickly, but you must read through the novel at least once. Obviously, skipping ahead makes no sense because you won’t know the story. There are no achievements or extras, except for a few short clips after chapters. This is exactly what it says on the box: a novel with graphic elements.

It's crazy to see the ingenuity of Ren'Py. If you didn't know already, this is a 3-hour visual novel presented as a film. You have text you can read presented on the right side of the screen and images presented on the left side, with a movie interface at the bottom, you use to play the story automatically, fast forward or skip to any scene you want with no problem. You can even bookmark different film sections as as well to save it for later. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3462931747 I'm surprised more games don't do this if it were possible. Has Ikuku cracked the code? I really like this as a concept for storytelling. It is especially suited or this game in particular, as it is all about movie discussions, in relation to talking about things like why films are made and what it tell us about the director's inner thoughts. We play as Dottore (code name Doctor), a student attending a university studying archaeology. There, he digs up tomb sites. Later in the story, he and 3 other female students form a film club and are assigned to make their own movie. The content of the film shouldn't be a surprise if you played any of the Ikuku games. But the purpose of it is the reimagine Queen Ateh and Khazar, who are part of Greek mythology, I believe. I'm not well read on the subject, as you can see. It looks like this game was made in a whole new era before, with the dated music choice and the black and white real-life clip shows, which enhance the gameplay experience to feel relaxing and soothing. To understand this game cryptic messaging is to know the differences between the day and night people which, funny enough, I think I've gotten a better understanding of this game when I played The Soul Box and Phantom, or at least I believe I've become more confident with what I think this game was trying to convey. If you want to know, you have to play the games yourself.