No Recollection

7/10 No Recollection is an average looking visual novel with a beautifully crafted story about solving a mystery. My takeaway: I truly loved playing and reading No Recollection; easily one of the best written free visual novels I’ve come across. It took me 12 hours to fully complete this title and while I was playing I couldn’t stop reading it. The achievements weren’t too hard and does a great job at rewarding the player to explore different endings. Very well done on the author's part but it is clear the creator isn’t an artist. The biggest gripe I have about No Recollection has to do with some unnecessary dialogue and the visuals as a whole. The game is just a little… ugly. I really hope this gets remastered at some point because I have a feeling it would be a lot more popular. The visuals took away from how well the story is written and pulls the player away from complete immersion. Sometimes the MC can be a little dense in visual novels and this isn’t an exception. There were moments where I felt like yelling at him to be more aware of the obvious but it wasn’t to the point where it became a problem BUT what was a problem is that he often commented on the same things over and over again to the point you’d believe yourself to be blind. Like if something is gray he will tell you it’s gray at least 7 times; part of me wants to replay this just to see how many times he feels the need to tell me the color of something in front of me but despite this increasingly annoying internal dialogue he has, it didn’t take away from the main story for me. The other characters were likable and the more I read the more I grew to like them and their flaws. [u]Pros[/u] [list] [*] Beautifully written. [*] Almost no spelling or grammar mistakes. I caught 2 in the 12 hours it took me to read it. [*] Unpredictable! I had theories while I played and almost all of them were wrong. [*] It touches very real topics in a sensitive way. It isn’t played for laughs or gags. [*] Multiple endings! [*] It did make me laugh and tense at times. [*] Music was fitting and the usage of sound effects also fit. [*] The game is HUGE. at 150k words it’s well worth looking into. [*] Achievements! [*] Can you believe it’s made by one person? Great job! [*] The foreshadowing was crazy. [/list] [u]Cons[/u] [list] [*] Just a wee bit ugly. [*] No trigger warning for some of the more sensitive themes in the story. [*] Just one love interest despite having almost all of the main cast feel like they could be love interests. [*] A few loose threads concerning random plot points like whether or not we need to eat but it isn’t important enough to make that much of a difference in my opinion. [/list] [spoiler] Despite being about government experiments I didn’t feel like the story was all that corny and generic. If anything some of the fourth wall breaking took away from that and feels extremely out of place in a story like this. [/spoiler] Theory: [spoiler] I normally never do theories so this is just a testament on how much I loved this title. At the very end there’s an optional epilogue regarding their futures. Jane and the MC end up, in one ending, living with a man named John Smith. John Smith takes them in after hearing their stories and related to them due to his son getting ‘locked away’ 6 years ago. This lines up with an extremely minor character named John Smith you come across living in the facility who was the first to be brought there for experimentation after committing arson. Seeing how Jane was there for presumably 2ish years it’s not impossible the first resident could be John the son. John Smith, the father, also states his son’s name is John which further backed up my assumption since John, the son, also had his last name listed as Smith.. I was really hoping that maybe this ties into a possible second story but maybe I was reading too much into it. [/spoiler] To see more reviews like this one come support me and follow this curating page! I’d really appreciate it! https://store.steampowered.com/curator/46085490-SumiSux-At-Games/