I've played through every route on the itch.io version, which is why my Steam time is weird, which works, because this review is a bit weird. I would recommend this VN with a great number of caveats, including that the writing is quite bad, the art - what little isn't just blurred real-world photographs on repeat - is pretty bad, the music is occasionally passable, the voice acting is at best fine and at worst just really bad, the foley is dubious, the characters aren't interesting and have little to no chemistry, and the overall plot is, at best, fine. Not to mention one character is just very bad and obvious Fenris Dragon Age fanfiction. But outside that, if you want a kind of brainless m/m fantasy VN, one okay route (the secret one), and some interesting bad endings, then yes, this may be for you.
I cannot overemphasize how incredibly bad the writing in this is. It reads like a first attempt at writing a fantasy novel, which never saw an edit to cut down at least half of the repetition. Many parts of this are pages of text that could have been said in a sentence or two. There's a lot of vague hand-waving to generic fantasy concepts you've seen in the past without any real description (e.g., bad people doing bad things in the dark times, who and what specifically, you don't really know). The writing itself is clumsy, full of mistakes someone who doesn't know what it is they're writing about would have (e.g., wrapping a sword in metal). This is not helped by the deluge of entirely unimportant and vague backstory you are bashed over the head with at the beginning of the story, and which never really lets up. You are introduced to a world that doesn't really matter, and uninformed about more important things, like large chunks of the backstory for Kymil and all the love interests and side characters (much of which is in an extra document you need to download from itch). I fell asleep multiple times while playing this because not only is it repetitive and overly long and vague, but it's also incredibly boring. Carrault and Kymil also have zero chemistry, which is funny, given Carrault is based very obviously on the most popular love interest in Dragon Age II (just dye his hair white). There's also just a lot of typos.
If you were ever on deviantart, you will be familiar with the level of original art in this (the mediocre stuff, not the good stuff). It's not precisely the worst, though the artist could probably use some more anatomy practice, given there are some weird lines on legs and arms in particular, and faces get a bit weird. Kymil's shortness in comparison to the love interests is also a bit iffy. The actual CGs range from bland to fine (Carrault's nsfw CG) to almost comically ridiculous ([spoiler]Kaul's first nsfw CG[/spoiler]). But most of the "art" in the game is just blurred photographs from real-world places, often repeated as you "switch" between locations, including [spoiler]Trinity College Library in Ireland (they didn't even blur out the Latin in a game on another planet(?) with at least one fantasy language lol), the Canterbury Cathedral high table in Kent, England, and the Lincoln Cathedral in Lincoln, England. One shot is just a flyover of Florence, Italy. The visual used for the guide you get when you buy the game is just a color-changed version of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, France. I also think the fountain area is from Dragon Age: Inquisition[/spoiler]. Why make a visual game if you can't be assed to provide most of the visuals and just get photos from other people to blur? Other VNs can have kind of boring background visuals you see on repeat, but they're typically at least drawn by the developers, and some are interesting. Given most of the game is staring at these very obviously blurred photographs rather than original art, while incredibly bad, boring, and repetitive text plays interminably at you, it doesn't generally create a good time. It feels like most everyone involved in this project couldn't do anything involved (art, writing, editing), and largely didn't try, and that's an odd feeling to have while playing through it.
It doesn't help that the text keeps being moved around the screen rather arbitrarily. Sometimes a character speaking will be in front of you. Sometimes they'll switch to being a little head in the text box. Then back. And back again. Sometimes text will be on a page text box. Sometimes it's just at the bottom of the screen. I think the developers realized that their boring game staring at photos they didn't make that were also boring needed some breaks between things, and that's why the frequent switching is there. It's just weirdly distracting. I am however grateful you can turn the VA off, and the speed up and skips are generous, if a bit clunky at times.
Why then, would I recommend this to anyone? I think [spoiler]Kaul's[/spoiler] route is genuinely decent in many aspects, and I think it's laudable to have [spoiler]a disabled love interest, which seems to be relatively rare for these VNs[/spoiler]. It's underused, and has some writing holes that could have used more of those many words the story boasts of, and [spoiler]Kaul's blindness[/spoiler] is handled, at best, pretty weirdly. If nothing else, there's something there the other routes don't have. But the latter half is still pretty bad. If you've played every other m/m game you can and need something else to pass the time, this is maybe something? Some of the bad routes are also fun enough, if also pretty badly written, though I do appreciate the conceit that [spoiler]the good routes are the heroes, and the bad routes are the villains; it lets you explore the full cast in ways other VNs I've seen just don't let you[/spoiler]. And it has some nice angst in spots. I do appreciate that the itch version exists, because actually being able to own games these days is such a rarity.
Overall, it's not a good visual novel or enjoyable, except in very, very brief parts. Buy it on sale, and play the uncensored version on itch.
