Awfully realistic dialogue, crass humor and a protagonist more (fundamentally) miserable than I ever thought possible in a visual novel. It's really an achievement how raw this is. Being set in the Balkans and having an artstyle of questionable quality and consistence really seals the deal, it hardly gets any more indie than this.
But I mean absolutely all of that in the best possible way. The unbridled novelty of a dating sim set in the Balkans and featuring a literal Wheel of Fortune on top of player choices to define endings is positively overwhelming. But of course it's not perfect. Nothing about the Balkans is.
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[u]DIALOGUE[/u]
I'll tackle this first because it might just be the best part. First off, the protagonist is quite easy to empathize with. Unlike most hikki protags in VN novels, this guy doesn't have the heroines (romanceable female characters in any given visual novel) swooning over him or even hinting at possibly being close to him the moment they encounter him for the first time. Already a great step up over so many good visual novels plagued with the overtly ficticious aspects to their "romance".
Other than that one writing decision, the protag is a well-rounded one also because his confidence builds up over time and not whenever the writers believe it's "opportune" or when he gets a lucky chance (with one or two exceptions that are rather reasonable logic-wise)
Now for the bad. The game is short. Stupidly short. So much so, that the number of cutoffs, man, it makes it feel like the game's scenes are stitched-together highlights rather than naturally occurring situations. I didn't notice this until I begun trying for all the endings, but genuinely, there is no sensible padding, or padding at all between the major scenes. Although I thought I disliked filler in VNs, it took me just playing this game to realize how important it is to set a tone and engage (albeit that may not be the intention of this game at all, anyway)
[u]BRANCHING AND ENDINGS[/u]
Abruptly finishing the previous section was a strategic decision to divide the matters into two, because this one I believe deserves some serious attention.
Starting off with honesty as usual, the choices in this game all seem so natural and yet they still manage to be strangely influential. I don't say this with uncertainty. It's nothing elusive or enigmatic, the way visual novel branching works, much less in the era of Ren'py. With some "research", I can confidently state that the effects some choices have are awfully arbitrary, and rather detrimental to completionists. I can't go into any more detail but I will warn any players-to-be that no matter how safe you think your choice was, it probably wasn't.
On a slightly more technical note, endings function rather strangely. Due to all bad endings being heroine non-specific, all character endings are good, and that means no extra screentime for your favorite heroine except for the ending (and there are none which are very long, mind you)
So if you find it easy to become infatuated with amateur-drawn fictional women made for a half-fluff visual novel that clocks in at about 20 minutes per ending, then maybe tread carefully around this one.
[u]SOUNDTRACK, ARTSTYLE AND MENUS[/u]
The music in the game is awesome. Unlike most VNs that have long tracks that eventually loop from the beginning, the game's tracks are designed as loops, sampled from turbo-folk songs. Although this technique would prove poor practice in most VNs, it fits this one perfectly, given the unserious tone and very short length. It also helps that there are enough of these loops that you rarely hear the same one twice in a run (and they're all real catchy)
Now the artstyle... yeah, it's kind of rough. Not "lazy" rough but just "amateur" rough, so there's still plenty of charm in it and it's by no means a real detractive aspect, if anything, squeaky-clean pro artwork would not fit the game very well... although the backgrounds really do get way too simple. I don't think it would be too difficult to photograph areas for certain backgrounds, but I respect going for the hard but honest way and making everything by hand, it's not distractingly bad by any means, your eyes will be fixed on the dialogue box anyway.
[h2]8/10[/h2]...extremely solid for a product [i]this[/i] indie, and I'm not saying that out of pity now, of course not, I believe I've been harsh enough on some things already, but this game does deserve recognition for what it attempted, as well as for what it succeeded in doing. And that is, an enjoyable, silly visual novel about a Balkan NEET getting whiplash by a sudden "turn" of events... [b]caused by the "turn" of a wheel[/b]
