Lyantei

I'm rather sad to give this game a negative rating, because it's not terrible at its core. I just have too many issues with how it was executed to recommend it to anyone, especially at this price point. To not waste time, my problems were: - The triggers that start events which introduce characters to you and open their story arcs are absurdly cryptic and hard to find. You can easily miss major parts of the story and without a guide available anywhere, after a while, I had zero motivation to look for them any longer. - Stat management is basic and rather boring. There's only one goal - gather a specific amount of money within a month, and pretty much no interesting side objectives or modifiers. Also, I was sometimes under impression that the help other characters give you, taking some tasks upon themselves, do not always work properly. - The story overall is very short and writing is awkward. The personal storylines of the characters - the ones I was able to find - were cheesy and not very impactful, but above all, they were too rushed to leave any serious impression. The romance was minimalistic at best, and the lack of CGs made it feel empty. If this was a free game, I'd say it needs a bit of work and after that, it could be worth your time. As it is now... I don't see a way I could reasonably recommend paying for it. Sadly, it just doesn't reach the quality or enjoyment factor I expect from a commercial product. ------------- PS If you're interested in quality visual novels, check out [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32980295/]my curator page[/url].

Lyantei is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit. This E-book features Choose-Your-Own-Adventure elements where you make some decisions that don't do anything to change the fact this is just an E-Book. Nobody finished reading a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because E-books aren't games. And neither is this. This E-book doesn't even have an interesting premise, you just talk to a bunch of people in an inn, and help them out, I mean... very close to a story about paint drying, here. The artwork here is terrible, it's a hodge-podge of amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets and illustrations. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the E-book is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers. Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. There's no options to change the resolution for the E-book or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this E-book will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this E-Book is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 readers. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only reader activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 real, actual games (not E-books) for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality E-Book is to be expected. Lyantei has the comically over-optimistic price of around $9 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. You can get better quality books and comics for free online or from public libraries, or from bookstores for a fraction of the price of this "game". Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games. [b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/b] Valve have marked this E-Book as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the E-Book (to date). Until this status changes, this E-Book will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this E-Book.

Lyantei is a casual visual novel from Sweet Slush Games. The main story is about you going to help you're aunt run a tavern, which has you doing different daily task. The story is a bit weird in places and clearly loses some effect in the translation. I wasn't impressed by the story as much as the artwork. The story just seems to try too hard and failed to get the effect it wanted with me. With that said you can tell a lot of love went into the game and several of the 6 main characters are interesting enough to keep you going. Each day you can complete 3 task, while other guest will chip in and help complete task as well. Your basically trying to make the Tavern the best place possible. Reputation, cleanliness, efficiency, food, potions and more are all things you can work on during the day to help the tavern succeed. While doing these task other events can spring up and give you more story and paths to follow. Most of the daily choices I ended up hitting the automate option, and that can get old pretty fast, but I did enjoy the story events that would pop up from time to time and I felt like the choices I made in those events changed my story quite a bit. Overall If your into Graphic Novel games then you might enjoy this one. If your on the border I'd wait for a sale and give it a try. [table] [tr] [th] If you enjoyed my review please consider following and joining my Steam group [tr] [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/MatureMindedGamers#curation]Mature Minded Gamers[/url] [/tr] We have free game giveaway's every month for all Members, just click Follow and Join! [/th] [/tr] [/table]

Lyantei has a lot of wholesome interactions with its diverse cast of characters. I played through once with the tavern management, and for subsequent playthroughs I just used the story mode. Unlike most VNs that I have read, Lyantei's story mode lets you explicitly choose which character path(s) to take - a design choice I much prefer over trying to figure out the exact right things to say to unlock a story route. The art, music, and writing are all pretty good. The character interactions are all generally quite wholesome and the story feels quite warm. A very minor issue: a couple of menu prompts weren't translated from the original German. Lyantei seems to have flown under the radar, and I think it deserves more visibility. I enjoyed it. My time counter got messed up somehow, my actual playtime is about 3.5 hours.