KaRu

Playing KaRu, I thought that it was a very thrilling short story with a good brotherly dynamic between the two main characters. It was quite fun listening to and reading the dialogue, and it was very cool to pick out everything and find all the secrets! The game can be quite intense for the faint of heart, but if you're willing to brave some of the more horrific elements, you'll be in for quite the pleasant surprise.

Wanted to give this a fair shot but as of the 1.5 patch it was just too frustrating to continue more than a few minutes. Takes so long to load I first thought game had crashed. Default display is Fullscreen but UI is broken unless in window mode. Just changing that was a challenge. As has been pointed out the eccentric font is difficult to read. Can change the font color but hat won't make it any more legible. Very LONG delays between scenes; to the point I was playing a cookie clicker on black screens, inadvertently jumping ahead when text did finally appear on screen. Does have VA, but if your not a Voice Actor it breaks the immersion so had to mute it. Game is also very bloated. A 1-hr VN I expect to be around 150MB, not 1.5GB! Could have an interesting story but will never know as game is in a near unplayable state.

So you probably have read the amount of reviews that talks about how this game crashes, UI doesn't work most of time, the game doesn't start, the game crashes etc. While they aren't wrong, they aren't correct as well. Despite these issues I have faced before, the game does work from beginning till end, and it does offer a lot for a free game as well. For a studio's first game it came out really outstanding, from voice acting to art to the story itself and the writing as well. You can get around these technical issues without much hassle, like avoiding using the X button downright the screen, you can use the right click instead. For the crashes I mostly faced them after clicking play on steam or loading the save file and they aren't really a huge issue, it only crashes once when loading save file, after trying second time it works. For the UI being broken unless in windowed mode, change to windowed mode, tap the maximize button on the window then switch to fullscreen once again, it should work. Just pointing out that the game is worth trying despite the technical issues, you won't lose anything from trying it out.

Pretty decent, surprised it's free. It's a visual novel about human trafficking but for other fictional races since it's set in a fantasy world. It's a little bit janky but you can work around it. Avoid skipping right before a cutscene and just know you can't load a save in game, you have to get to the main menu to load. The only reason I didn't 100% the achievements is because there's pixel hunting involved and I'm not bothering doing that without a guide.

[b][i][[RE-EDITED AND RE-REVIEW]][/i][/b] [i]WARNING: Some light gore, human trafficking and subject that can correlate to body harvesting but not explicitly. If you're sensitive to these topics avoid this game.[/i] Karu is a short horror point-and-click visual game where we play as Karu, who is part of a group of beings known as parasites who feed off the emotions of other people. The thing is, our protagonist is different from the other parasites due to one being a[strike] doctor as well as practising the art of not committing to their urges to feed off from people and they have been doing this successfully for years.[/strike][spoiler]Suddenly, they were kidnapped and held captive in a dungeon-like underground alongside a doll-like child, who is a being who carries a lot of emotions, mainly fear and confusion as of now considering the predicament they are in and who they are in it with.[/spoiler] You must have some time up your hands if you're reading this review so far so you should surely have enough time to install this game straight away and complete it in one sitting (if you haven't already). It's only about 1.30 minutes long, don't mind my playtime, that was just me spending too more time than I should trying to fix the lighting issue where the game was completely dark having no other options to adjust the brightness in-game. The issue was later fixed a couple of months after release, so I was finally able to play the game having a gut feeling from the start there was something special about it and it proved to me right and much more than that. My major regret was not coming back any sooner to change the score I had the first time around (which I've deleted). Firstly, the 2 main characters have amazing growth and development, all within a span of an hour, complementing well from each other well. One is a scared child who is quick to judge and has a lot of emotional baggage, the other is a gentle soft-spoken caring guardian who would do whatever they can to look after the stranger they just met. Even with their differences, I couldn't help but root for them to make it out in one piece of the situation they found themselves in. Even though their spoken dialogue was spoken with a lot of conviction you can feel the power of their sentences to convey raw emotions to make you wear the same shoes as them to feel how they feel in the current situation they are in and relate to them. And do I need to say the ideas introduced in this game are all original? So if you're tired of learning about the same werewolf lore or being reintroduced to Greek mythically come here and learn about what 'Achuls' is or find what they meant when they say 'essence'. This was an incredible journey through and through with a heartbreaking payoff and satisfying conclusion that kept me hyped for the next project set in the same well-established universe (rumours had suggested). [i]P.S.[/i] Do feel inclined to use a guide if you are unable to progress to the next chapter from not finding all the items and/or interactable surfaces considering it can still be hard and specific to click on them even with the mouse censor (even when you have the brightness all the way up). I found one incident where I had to use to guide to do that but the story is all the way worth it continue to climb out of the hurdle.

I really like the atmosphere! ,,, now trying to figure out the true ending :D

[h1]This is bad[/h1] First of all , the game didn't pop off properly , just not on full part on my monitor. After closing and reopening it, it finally worked. While playing, I noticed bizarre game design: for example, skipping scenes also skips dialogue with no option to avoid it. Worse, there’s a character inconsistency: a long-haired girl is referred to with “his/he” by the devs, yet has a female voice actor and a male-modeled chest. I also can’t finish the game due to a pixel-hunting bug; there are no clues in the cell. Conclusion: 1/10.

Visually VERY pleasing, artworks are great. Story has world building and hits the emotions multiple times. The ui does show a bit of age, and does soft lock every once in a while. But the game can still be played from start to end