Not It: Spookiest Edition

Given the price tag, “Not It. Spookiest Edition” is a surprisingly ambitious little visual novel. It is fully voiced with decent voice actors and the artwork is quite good as well. The story is engaging and the protagonist is sympathetic. “Not It” is rather short though (seven play throughs took me 2,5 hours) and it contains several glitches. E.g. a character that had died in a previous scene is present in the artwork of the next scene. The number of different panels is very limited, too. Still, given the low price I would recommend buying this title.

Joseph gave me a literal headache

While a overall short experience, taking as long as 40 minutes to complete a story form beginning to end, Not It: Spookiest Edition is a great horror-tinged visual novel well worth the admission price. That 40 minutes is just one play through, assuming you read all the narration and listen to all the fully voiced dialog. However the real meat and potatoes of the game is finding new routes through the story or new scenarios to experience. While you go about your story spelunking, Not It: Spookiest Edition lends you a couple of fantastic features to aid you. Like a save system with a generous amount of save slots that can be placed at critical points in the story like a major choice. AND you get a rewind and fast forward feature so if you make a choice and you don't like how its going, simply roll the mouse wheel up until you get back to where you want. If you like the art style and a good horror mystery, then Not It: Spookiest Edition is for you!

So, I played one round of Not It and have the faint idea that I barely touched the surface, since this visual novel has 30.000 words and 25 endings, so please consider this when reading my review. I also got the steam key from the devs. I had a lot of fun with the setting and the characters. It’s great to have voice over for visual novels, it makes the characters come to life and the cast is engaging (a little campy - just enjoy the accents, don’t think about them too much, lol, it fits the visual style and story). The story itself is a lovely cozy (and quite murdery) Halloween-in-a-smalltown-setting that I personally loved. My playthrough took 45 minutes till the end but I played it quite safe and probably therefore got one of the better and more immediate endings. I think this is a great game both for people who are into visual novels and those who are new to the genre or don’t engage with it often since Not It has shorter story lengths depending on your decisions and the voice over also keeps things more active. Unfortunately, I can’t say how gory this really gets (damn my sensible decision-making) since I really wanted to see some guts but since there is a gore-filter, I am quite sure Not It will deliver. Costing less than 6 bucks, I would definitely recommend it since it’s easy to get in, fun to get through and interesting enough to go for several endings. My Lets Play to get a first impression: https://youtu.be/sT4gDKLiwZE

Great voice acting, Suspenseful and entertaining. This game is Perfect for Halloween.

First thing I would like to praise is the voice acting. The way they spoke made me chuckle a little due to the tones they used. I felt the art was quite fitting for this kind of game too. Now as for the game, it is very short. The endings are not that varied and small choices can affect how things progress. It can be very subtle and you may need to replay through certain saves. Being a believer or a skeptic does unlock new paths, so keep that in mind if you're struggling for the 100% route. There is not really any depth in it. A situation happens and Katie needs to handle it then make it until morning. I do not want to spoil should you decide to play it for yourself. The endings are.. basically the same. It is just minor differences. I do think the 'good ending' was quite amusing with the mayor. As for the rest it would be nice if there was more story and different outcomes. At the very end there are just two outcomes that happen. The changes are within the inn that make the 'endings'. It would be nice to see some kind of relationship progression. I do not mean romantic. One route you commit a crime with a certain someone, it would be fun to see how that would play out if you did leave together. As I said the game is just very short and that's fine. If you knew what you were doing then you could complete it under 2hrs. There is just not enough content? I think having less 'endings' and more depth would have been better. I did prefer their other game with the ghost more and that too was a short game with fewer endings. There was not enough variety to this game. That does not mean some of the split paths were not good to explore though! It just had a lot of backtracking to try and find them all with hardly any changes. Its a game that doesn't really take itself seriously. I just believe the developers could have added more to it because they clearly put some passion into this. It's not a bad game. It may not be for me. As for the 'gore', it is not gory. I guess if you're a kid and new to it then yes, you could say its gore. You do not see anything graphic. The horror is very minor. At first it seemed creepy but it wore off quickly because you're busy replaying the same scenes searching for new content. I did not get the creepy CGs until the end of my playthroughs. Amusingly I was getting the better endings first. One thing I would like to mention was the credit links imbedded in the game. I did not expect that and was a little concerned about where I was being taken to. My browser did not like it and it made me feel quite anxious. I understand the intention but I did not notice the link icon until after clicking. I thought I could click anywhere to go back to the title screen, assumed it was just a normal credits screen. I also agree with one review where they stated there seemed to be an issue with it registering with your mouse input. It did not make the game unplayable though. I do struggle between recommending the game and not. I think due to the games desire for multiple endings being quite thin and the progress it takes to reach them is killing the mood, I will have to say no. This is down to personal preference and so others may really love this game. It does have some strong points but I had got into this expecting something a bit different.

Meh. It was good enough for me to get to the best ending, but just barely. I like quirky little experiences like this one, but honestly, I can't in good conscience recommend this to anybody. First of all - the pace is, for the most part, lightning-fast. That means it gets to the interesting part almost immediately, but at the cost of complete lack of any buildup of tension. And if there's no tension, there's no fear. So even when "spooky" stuff starts happening and our characters get closer and closer to their (not) inevitable demise, it's not actually spooky. Even when people start dying, it doesn't really get tense - and I didn't see any shocking gore either, but that's perhaps because I simply picked routes where casualties were kept low. Of note is the fact that the game is fully voiced. Sadly, the performances are a little flat and amateurish, and rather than helping convey the terror of characters, they draw attention to their blandness. One particular character is constantly freaking out, and their performance is decent enough, but it comes off as annoying. On top of that, different characters have different volume: some are quiet, some are loud. Have you ever seen anything like that? The main character is incredibly loud, while the policeman is quiet like a whisper. Luckily there are sliders that allow you to adjust the volume of individual voices, but it doesn't completely solve the problem: the policeman was way too quiet even after some tweaks. The general plot and mystery are also nothing to write about. There is a little clever twist at the very end, but all it did is made me roll my eyes. There's a certain subplot which seems like it's a foreshadowing for something later, but it goes absolutely nowhere. Again, maybe it does in other routes, I can't say. As for the art... it's great. That's plain to see. Colourful, expressive, pleasing. Sadly, it gets bogged down by the mediocre story it happens to be in. Nothing more to say here. Ask yourself: Do you REALLY like mysteries and little visual novels? If yes, then I'd say that the mediocrity is ironically something interesting about this game, worth checking out as a curiosity if nothing else. If no, then there's nothing for you here. Big apologies to the dev for such a mean critique; there's clearly some effort put into this, which is why it's such a shame that the end product is so uninspiring. Hope that helps.

its a graet game keep it up

Way too short ...... and not the most engaging

The writing is sooooo freaking good