Head AS Code

Very fun to play through. I had to look up a guide to the only real puzzle (more of a riddle) lol.

Great game

I would recommend it to any 999/VLR/Dark VN fan. Miracle Moon did a good job recreating some of the magic from their obvious inspirations. High points: The setting/art style. This game was all around visually pleasing. The music is nice as well. Story. I won't get into it, but I was not expecting the story to be as well put together as it was. A genuine shocking twist. [spoiler]Admittedly, Smiley's revealed motivations are a little weak, but conceptually the plot is really interesting.[/spoiler] My biggest and pretty much sole complaint here is the writing. The story itself is good, but the dialogue can be distractingly bad content-wise. It feels like it got better the more I progressed, but near the start of the game, it was tough to get into. Also, the volume of text in places is confusing. There are too many long, drawn out, silly interactions and also too many "protag processed what should be an emotional event in 3 text boxes" moments. Mind you, these situations can both work just fine, but there's a balance between quality and quantity of the dialogue that is often not achieved here. All that being said, this game is good and absolutely worth seeing through to the end.

Train Subway + Death Game = Poggers!

Like others have said as well, this visual novel doesn't have a lot of "game" involved and is moreso just clicking through what's happening. Unlike the ZE games (a very very clear inspiration) I didn't feel like i had a lot of agency playing this one and it took a lot of the suspense out of it. However, I still want to recommend the game because I think it's very cool what was done with the premise and I ended up liking the story a lot more after i had seen it all and the plot was tied together. Definitely a super cool plot! If you are an enfranchised ZE enjoyer I would buy it, if you're new to the genre I would not recommend this as a standalone title though.

I played the original version of Head AS Code several years ago and quite enjoyed it. Recently, I decided to play this remake (as well as the sequel) in preparation for the final game. I think this second playthrough left me slightly less impressed with the game, but it was still a good experience overall. The short verdict: HasC is a good Zero Escape-inspired ontological mystery that doesn't quite live up to its inspiration, but is likely to provide a enjoyable time for fans of the series. HasC has several strong points. The metro train station setting is unique, and the ontological mystery is a strong hook. The twists are interesting and surprising, and I enjoyed the way the different endings both answered questions while also presenting new mysteries. I know some lament the lack of interactive puzzles, but I didn't mind (the few puzzles that do exist actually hurt the pacing in my opinion). Pacing is a strong point of the game overall, which pairs well with its suspense to create a story you want to see through to the end. On the other hand, the character writing is unfortunately a bit weak. The lovable jokester Marco is by far my favorite, even though he doesn't get much screentime. The rest of the cast tends to be a tad undeveloped (which was somewhat of an inevitability given then game's brisk pacing). What really bothers me, however, is the way characters are made to act unrealistically for the sake of creating violence and drama. I won't go into specifics to avoid spoilers, but nearly every optional bad end in this game is the result of bizarre shifts in characterization that felt inconsistent with what we'd seen previously. The writing (in a technical sense) is another area that falls flat. Throughout the game, many sentences are stilted and poorly constructed. This is especially apparent with the character "A", who I believe is meant to come across as arrogant. In reality, his dialogue is sometimes painfully awkward to read and does not sound like how any real person would speak. Overall, a fine choice for fans of ontological mysteries like Zero Escape. The new art and QoL features make this a definite upgrade from the original, but I still enjoyed the game a little less on replay (likely due to a more critical eye on my part). However, the mysteries and reveals are still quite solid, and I think that's what matters most in a game like this.

Head AS Code is a solid and tragically underrated entry into the genre of 'Zero-escapelikes', putting its own unique spin on the core premise, that is: A bunch of quirky characters who don't get along are locked in a structure full of elaborately constructed puzzle rooms and introduced to the threat of painful death; tomfoolery ensues. HAC asks the question, what if that happened but in Canada and with trains? There's actually little in the way of actual puzzle solving since most of it will be done for you, but that's not really why we're here. We're here for the characters, the winding, branching storyline and the twists and turns within and on this front HAC delivers, mostly. Though most of the characters in HAC are multidimensional and full of surprises, others noticeably get the short end of the fleshing out stick, and I feel as though this reduces the impact of certain moments and reveals. If you're familiar with the genre of zero-escapadelikes you might think to expect what twists lay ahead. HAC expects you to expect this and deliberately twists these twists into something entirely unexpected. That said 'unexpected' is not necessarily superior and a handful of these reveals feel as though they exist solely to subvert preconceived expectations, others suffer due to the aforementioned deficiency of character development. All that said I liked HAC overall and recommend it to any fan of mystery/thriller Visual novels. E best girl.

I highly enjoyed playing this game and it was 100% a worthwhile investment for me. It isn't exactly a masterpiece, but I found the story to be very enjoyable. I had a ton of fun theorizing and mentally piecing together bits of the story and character lore. I felt like the open timeline worked really well and discovering all the routes was very fun. While it doesn't have much depth as a lot of other mainstream death games, it's certainly very good for a smaller team and it was still well worth playing. I do think a lot of the escape rooms were a bit pointless, with it largely being just clicking around and the characters solving the rooms for you. It would have been nice to at least attempt some of the puzzles they show, since they actually did have fun concepts! It just fell short when the characters solved it with no input from the player. That being said, I personally found the story to more than make up for the lack of puzzles. I do wish we got a better look into the characters and their backstories as well as explanations for their actions, but by the end of everything I was largely satisfied with the story. Overall, I think the developer(s) did a great job on this and you should absolutely consider adding this to your library.

While I recommend this game it comes at big leniency for the small development team and the added recommendation to wait for a sale, as I can't in good conscience say that 20 bucks feel like the right price. Hopefully I haven't scared you off just yet then on to the actual review: The music, sounds, menu ui and especially the flowchart and cgs are very well done. The writing quality is consistently swinging betweem good and serviceable, tho I don't think that most of the characters will stick you, but the true ending is saved it for me. On to the greatest sin of the game tho. For a game build on the "death game" gimmick and clearly taking inspiration from the Zero Escape series (There is that mention for you in this review) you would think that the Escape rooms which are a central gimmick would be more interactable. The way it is tho, there are only really two puzzles in the game, with one of them getting autosolved by your partner if you mess up thrice and the rest are just you clicking the on screen prompts and getting narrated to without any sort experimentation. Lastly I did enjoy the dev commentary in the lexicon after beating the game. I am probably going to look into the rest of the soon to be triology.