Unfortunately, I can't recommend [I] Song of Life [/i] because in English it's just unbearably painful to play it. It looks like a poor quality machine translation, I don't want to believe it's the result of a real person's effort. The English text is just literal translation of Russian, so it doesn't only sound weird, sometimes it's just impossible to understand anything as idioms are translated word by word, so their figurative meaning is lost; total mixture of pronouns :(( lots of Russian slang just written with English letters, because I guess Google Translator doesn't know such expressions. Welp, it was a pain.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2842860772
And it actually hurts AGAIN to see a visual novel created by my native devs in such a state, I get it, indie devs may lack necessary funds but in this case just release the game in one language you can afford. Sadly, I was said by some Russian acquaintances they are fine with machine translation as in this case they still may grasp at least the general idea. I'm still astonished, it's not reading, it's deciphering. Quite often to understand the plot I had to retranslate the English sentences back to Russian in my head to guess what's meant. Sometimes it didn't even help. I'm not sure at the end of the game I got the meaning of all the endings correctly. Plus there're lots of cultural references of our reality, even with a good localization I'm not sure the necessary image could be created for a foreign player but with this 'translation' it's a total disaster.
Perhaps if I played it in Russian, it wouldn't be a negative review as art is really nice. Some CGs are quite pretty. The idea of the story has some potential, it's not new but it's always fun to imagine what if... One of the reasons I love visual novels, it feels good to try out different choices, to experience what they lead to, to realize how my decisions influence my life, to be able to replay if I'm not satisfied with the outcome. To think something like this could be possible in real life, to make a choice but it's so logically intertwined with the very core of the story. Nice feature.
But still this game (especially in English version) feels more like a draft, it lacks so many essential things. Like, for example, the gallery. This novel has quite a number of beautiful CGs buut... there's no way to tell if you got them all. For example, I finished the game, visited the store page and realized while watching the video there that I haven't encountered some of CGs in the story yet. Though I was so sure I tried all the options. I'm still not 100% certain I don't miss some.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2843403059
It's a short story but it still has lots of endings and it's awesome buuut... there's no list of endings, no achievements, no guide. How to figure out I reached everything? On the one hand it felt a bit exciting to find several endings when I was already so sure the game is over xD A huge element of surprise. But on the other hand a completionist in me can't rest easy 'cause there's still a chance I haven't seen all the content. Annoying.
--machine English translation
--no gallery, no list of endings, no achs, no guide
--'Sexual Content' tag just for a boobs' CG? Other CGs were quite 'modest', textual description of intimate scenes was too short and kinda meh. So if that's the reason you wanna try this game, don't, you'll be disappointed.
+pretty art
+potentially interesting idea
+short, if I haven't convinced you and you gonna play it at least your suffering will be brief.
+price
Perhaps, after the serious editing of the English text the game could be recommended, for now it's in unreadable state.
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[th]More thoughts about the game in a [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/readingnook/discussions/0/3463849349661958905/] Reading Nook [/url][/th]
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