Missing Stars

Fran route when

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"Missing Stars" 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 is a very badly written Vietnamese e-book that seeks to treat mental illness through the medium of a completely garbage high school anime club drop-out fan-fiction. It's incomplete and abandoned, and that's the best part about this garbage. Trying to address serious issues such as mental and emotional health through the medium of video games (in this case crap e-books) is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good. The "developer" here is not a professional in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use e=books to pretend they are, this is not only utterly ineffective, it can be harmful. It's my opinion that it's improper to use crap e-books to address mental health issues. Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers. People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get attention/fame by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here. This was slapped together with the godawful Ren'Py visual novel construction kit... enabling terrible authors to publish books as if they were games when otherwise we might have been spared the pollution. So, just like no professional writing took place here, no professional software development took place, either. 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. One of the chief problems with failed authors polluting Steam with non-game E-books is that E-books can easily just be presented in a web browser... there's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't spend thousands on buying a gaming rig to spend money on Steam for something Chrome or Firefox could do. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent readers, and now there's basically nobody reading it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. While this E-book has no up-front cost, you can get better quality, professionally written books and comics for free online (from places like Project Gutenberg) or from public libraries. 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.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't think this game was way more popular than it is. Wow, it really feels so polished that you could mistake it for a mainstream visual novel. Missing Stars has you play as Erik Wilhelm, arriving at a new school for those with mental illnesses and disorders. Will he be able to fit in and continue on his journey through school, or will this new environment be too much for him, after the the brutal incident he ended up in? Along the way he meets a few interesting characters, will he be able to befriend them on this new journey he's befallen upon? The game does a great job in covering the serious topic of mental illness and being slightly educational at the same time! Not once did I feel like the game was portraying anyone in a disrespectful manner. Everyone has their struggles but it doesn't have to be a deterrent in their life. They can grow as people and live their lives, just like everyone else! The game also has great European representation, you have characters from France, Russia, Germany and Switzerland and the like, which is really cool to see! All the characters mesh together so well, they're all likeable and add to the game in different, but unique ways! I'm not picking favourites either, I loved them all very much! The game doesn't particularly end with a predictable romance either, but instead, sheds light on the importance of friendship, which I find unique. Of course, it would be no review of mine if I didn't subtly mention that the music is awesome, which it is very much so! Alas, the title screen theme is my favourite! Also, the title, Missing Stars, it's actually really brilliant. A lot of the time, people in these sorts of situations are overlooked but they are just like everyone else and equally as capable. That being said, the title deserves more recognition for how clever it is. The art's good too, very pretty backgrounds to add to the atmosphere, and the characters all have their appeal as well! The only actual noticeably bad thing about this game, if you could even see this as bad, is its weird attachment to the word "focusing" and "focused" spelling them as "focussing" and "focussed" for some strange reason. Credit to Likhos for pointing out why, see comments for more! I'm well aware that this game is still in its early stages and well, one thing I think that would be awesome to see is voice acting. Voice actors pertaining to where the actual characters are from, like a Russian voice actor for Natalya or a French voice actor for Jeanne, that would honestly be really awesome! I've tried to see what the main characters actually suffer from, and have the characters and what I've noticed listed below. Potential spoiler warning. [spoiler]Erik -> PTSD / anxiety / limp leg caused from falling off a mountain Annaliese (Anna) -> mute (not from birth) / social anxiety Katya -> blind in one eye / depression (?) / borderline personality disorder (thanks majinta0_0) Natalya (Nat) -> aloofness / lacks social awareness (thanks majinta0_0) Jeanne -> missing part of finger / Tourette's Syndrome Isolda -> autism (?) Feel free to correct me or let me know if I missed something in the comments! Would help a bunch! :) [/spoiler] Other than that, Missing Stars is brilliant, it's free (not entirely sure if that's permanent so get it while you can) and it offers a lot in the grand scheme of things, it's well worth your time. It shows that the future can be bright, despite being dealt a bad hand. You are just as amazing as everyone else, don't ever tell yourself otherwise or sell yourself short! I really hope to see more content for this game in the future, it's just that good! :)

Every part of this VN is well-made - the story, the characters, the art, the music - the only thing you wish is that there were more.

ela route when

Tied with KS and Umineko for Autistic Girls per VN (AG/V)