The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. This is better than crack.

Such an ambitious and deep mystery! Took me a while to wrap my head around it, but the twists and the payoff at the end are really satisfying.

I would only rec this game to people who don't mind a couple things: 1. clunky, dry, and verbose writing. It's grammatically correct, but very robotic and unnatural sounding. Things that took 3 run on sentences to explain could've taken 2 simple sentences. I felt like the writer liked to whip out a thesaurus every now and then, as usually the vocab was simple but they'd use obfuscate, calling an imaginary friend intangible(??? who says that), or referring to a destroyed floor as devastated. Should've been run through like 2 editors. I wanted to pay attention and read closely, but the writing was annoying so I took to skimming the text. It's unfortunate since yeah how am I gonna catch all the clues if I skim. The pacing could've been better. Chapter 1 was very long, exacerbated by the verbose writing tbh. Chapter 3 was very boring. This is a plot focused vn, so the characters were mostly there to spout off theories/test out logic. Can't say I enjoyed reading someone thinking it through, but I'm sure others do. 2. This is more on the logic puzzle side. Sure there is an enjoyable mystery, but it's more so a very complicated logic puzzle. If you enjoy that, great! I still kind of enjoyed it and personally didn't really try with the quizzes or note taking. Some minor critiques: given it's a visual novel it would've been nice to have more visuals. There are the basic character portraits and the occasional cg. But like when they're referring to blood on the floor they could put a little picture to show it. The setting was odd. I was taken aback when it was definitively revealed to be Japan. The names are like vaguely Japanese and the town cgs were obviously not Japan. just because there's an anime aesthetic, doesn't mean the setting has to be Japan..... I did kind of enjoy it, but it wasn't what I expected. The music was good for setting the mood and the art was nice. For me the biggest hang up was the writing, but again if it's not something you'd mind it's a fun mystery/puzzle vn.