Would you like a quick summary of this game? Okay, then let's put it this way. "Lionessy Story?" That's a terrible name for a game because what the holy heck is a lionessy supposed to be? A better title for this visual novel would be, "The Savannah Sucks Simulator 2017." There, I've done it, I've told you all you need to know about what happens here.
Blah. Fine. I'll expand on that and try to offer some constructive insight. This visual novel is miserable, and not for reasons the developers probably intended. It suffers on multiple levels, and it has too many flaws to ever be worth the $4.99 USD it is priced at. I got it in a bundle, so that doesn't matter from my wallet's perspective, but I wouldn't even want it for free. At least card-grinding enthusiasts can scavenge a whopping six cards from this, and that's all you really need for a game on Steam, right?
Normally I would start with talking about the story, but that's going to be a heck of a topic to cover. It's a topic that I think needs a closer look than usual due to the entire concept being destined for failure. Thus, I'm going to quickly go over the other categories before getting to the plot and characters, since those two are tied closely together.
The art is jarring. I thought the lions and hyenas looked unintentionally unsettling. By trying to convey happiness, sadness, and anger onto the animals, they went from being cutesy creatures to being flat-out weird at best, terrifying at worst. There are a couple of backgrounds and CGs that look nice, but most of what you see is not something is pleasant for the eyes.
I wouldn't say the music is awful overall, but there are some tracks I didn't like, and the others were nothing to write home about. The worst part is the massive amount of tone whiplash. There's happy music, then it becomes intense from a scene that is supposed to be horrifying or depressing, and then bam, back to happy! My favorite was where a killing took place with serious music, only to have the goofiest piece on the soundtrack play before the scene ends. "Yay, violent death!"
This game claims to have voice acting. The "voice acting" is lion roars and hyena laughs. They get annoying very, very quickly. Thankfully they aren't used a ton, but when they are, they bugged me a lot. It really wasn't necessary to include them. At least they can be muted from the options menu. (EDIT: The Russian text has voice acting. The adults seem okay. The cubs sound like adults. Can't comment much otherwise.)
As I find myself saying too often about indie visual novels on Steam, this game needs proof-reading. Sure, you can tell what's going on in most of the scenes, but that doesn't excuse the constant spelling and grammatical errors. I got sick of seeing "strength" being spelled as "strenght" and "its/it's" being misused. Also, periods exist, please learn to use them consistently.
Sprinkled throughout Lionessy Story is a series of "Info" windows that give real facts about lions. By "real" I mean "things that might be right." Let me be completely clear: I am not an expert on lions. I don't have the knowledge or experience to say whether most of the facts were true or false. But from my basic understanding of lions, and from the brief perusal I took to look for information after playing this, there are a lot of "facts" that don't seem to be all that factual. But there are also ones that appear to be accurate. The point I'm trying to make is that I'm skeptical on some of the information given, but won't call them outright mistakes since I have little knowledge in this field.
This is a short visual novel. I went at a slow pace while blindstreaming and finished it in an hour and a half. $4.99 for an hour and a half of gameplay at max is a pretty shoddy rate. There is no replayability here. The game has all of one choice and it changes nothing beyond giving a slight amount of more dialogue. I don't know why they even bothered to include it. I guess you can claim the ending screen is lengthy since they repeat "THIS IS THE END" about ten to fifteen times before the game actually ends. It made me think the bloody thing was broken.
Now we can tackle the plot, and let me warn you that from this point on, there will be spoilers. I dislike giving spoilers in reviews for multiple reasons, but so much of my dislike for the game is from the overall story that I can't skip over this part without it being a cop-out. So here we go:
SPOILERS.
The story is dismal. It starts off with an innocent setting involving a lioness and her three cubs, but the tone drastically shifts when the pride is invaded by two lions. From this point off, there is loads of death. The three other cubs get mutilated onscreen, including a lovingly-rendered image of one with its eyes torn out. The brother lion drowns. The sister lion's back legs are crushed and she is abandoned to die. The mother dies from disease. The protagonist gets torn apart by hyenas to suffer a slow, painful death that is written out vividly for the audience's pleasure.
You might think all of these tragedies exist to tug the player's heartstrings. One of the most powerful things a story can do is invoke strong emotions. If horrific actions are occurring, readers would ideally feel sorrow for the characters, or shed tears to see them meet such fates. But this story fails because of one simple fact: it is pointless.
When the reader sees the pride invasion, they know what will happen. It is easy to guess that everyone is going to die. There are plots where this works. If the audience gets attached and the characters accomplish something, then there was a point to the story. If the path to a dark end is filled with a tale worth remembering, it can become bittersweet, or even uplifting. If the emotions invoked are from mourning for the characters that are so cherished, then that is a beautiful thing. You can't have true sorrow for characters dying if you never loved them.
Lionessy Story does not have lovable characters. Only one lion has a name, but that's not much of an issue since they are distinguished by different terms and images. The issue is that they are generic lions. The protagonist cub sounds like an adult while narrating, and his individualty is not established. The cubs have similar dialogue and never give a reason for the player to care about them. Even if they did, when the audience knows that those characters are doomed for a short life, why should they even try to get attached? The plot is, "Natural life in the savannah leads to animals dying horrifically." Which, to be fair, is true. The killing of cubs is something that actually happens when lions take over prides. But if you humanize animals, then even if it is a showcase of their true nature, the reader will attach human morals to them. The slaughter is pointless beyond "for the evulz" in a story with animals that have human traits. So why get invested?
What this leads to is a story that lacks a purpose beyond making the audience feel apathetic or depressed. I mean that as in feeling down for the sake of feeling down, not as,"That was a tearful scene that I'll remember as amazing for the emotions it caused me to feel." I'm more talking about, "Why did I ever play this game? Why did I want to see a bunch of lions die terrible deaths?" The facts showcased would make sense in a documentary. This game is trying to tell a story with the information being secondary. It comes across as the type of writing that is overly shocking and appalling to get audience reactions. I really dislike that type of writing, and that means I really dislike this story.
SPOILERS OVER.
Thus, I found Lionessy Story to be awful. Its base is an interesting concept that had very little done to uplift it. Any thoughts I might have had about what it could have been were lost in the lack of overall development and overblown doom-and-gloom. Avoid this and check out one of the many better visual novels available.
