I have to say, for a visual novel that I did not enjoy for the first 30 minutes, not only the story got so much better, I actually fell in love with the lore and the characters to a point of obsession - thank you Roi, I will eat anything you give me, and I don't care what the devs say about you because you are a treasure, and nothing less than a psychotic gentleman. Now, I think there are some consistency issues with the writing and the pacing of the story, some of the routes have very blunt and short responses, and then you follow the Roi's path and it's all philosophical, mysterious, intense, and thought-provoking, like the writing got brilliant all of a sudden - it's like I am playing a different game. You know what the problem was for me, all of the abrupt deaths at the start because they tried to give me metaphors before I was able to interpret them - but once you have a better grab on the lore, it makes more sense. I actually like narrative games where the character can die constantly, but I think you don't want them to feel sudden and cheap, I only like those that feel earned.
Also, in order to understand the impact of some of the endings you need to know what happened in a different ending, so your experience may change based on the order you unlock them. The game got so sad sometimes I felt bad playing it, in a good way I mean, but still, it will take me days to recover from the melancholy. It actually has a pretty decent amount of content for the price, at 3 hours I got about 80% of the content, with a few missing endings which I currently am unable to locate.
So much gorgeous art in this game, I don't think the trailer and even the first half of the game shows it, the only lacking parts are the backgrounds, but it's understandable, I guess you have to cut corners somewhere as an indie team. All of the cutscenes and the ending art is so beautiful, I want to use it as desktop backgrounds or something, please make some steam profile covers and maybe an art book. The soundtrack was mostly ambient and conservative, however, I think you manipulated the effects better than I expected in a $5 game. One question though, with all of the cool art in the game, why the main menu looks so meh in comparison, you do all of that work but you don't care to make a great first impression.
[h1] Pros: [/h1]
(+) I think the writing in this game has moments of brilliance, nuances, attention to detail, and is actually very emotional in some paths. It was not consistently good across the whole game and I think some of the random deaths took away from it. Again, I like games where you can die a lot, but I think it needs to be used more strategically so you do not interrupt the story, the deaths have to be earned, if that makes sense (and some of them are, just most of them are not).
I want to make a separate note for the world-building and the lore, while the game is not that interesting at first, I think the overall story has a lot of thought-provoking themes once you get a better idea of what is going on, very unique I would say. We pretty much have just 4 characters, but all 4 have interesting motivations, and I enjoyed that I could not tell for sure if I could trust them or not.
(+) The art in the game is absolutely gorgeous, especially the occasional character interactions and those endings. Overall I really enjoyed the unique look of the world and the character design. If I had to nitpick one thing, I wish the backgrounds and the main menu also had the same look to it, or at least something close to it.
(+) Decent amount of content for the price. I didn't do everything in the 3 hours, I imagine 4 would be enough with a guide. Pretty fun to collect achievements if you are into that.
[h1] Feedback: [/h1]
[u] Pacing [/u] - I don't mind the idea of constant narrative deaths, but I wish they were used more strategically. Those in the early game seemingly tried to push some metaphors, but you kinda need the context behind the lore of the game to get much value out of them. I like some of the deaths in the game when they were earned, but you didn't need as many of them to get the point across, it just made me restart the game constantly.
As I mentioned the art was really good, I only wish the main menu and backgrounds were similar to the cutscenes.
[b] Overall Thoughts: 8/10 [/b]
As poorly as this game started for me, I think the unique lore of the game and the characters concluded in a good place. Maybe I am a slightly emotional person, but I thought the game had very strong moments of sadness, happiness, and everything in between, very enjoyable characters once you understand what drives them. Well, this one requires a bit of a commitment to power through it, but in the end, it was worth it.
[code]Review by: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31294838-Hidden-Gem-Discovery/ [/code]
