The Zodiac Trial

[h1]Fait comme un rat[/h1] [url=https://www.tumblr.com/miyakuli/734625703055753216/the-zodiac-trial?source=share]English review here[/url] 4.5/10 - The Zodiac Trial est un visual novel d'enquête s'inspirant visiblement de titres comme la saga Zero Ecape, où un groupe de personnage se retrouve à participer à un jeu mortel et tente d'y survivre. Disons le, le jeu n'a clairement pas un gros budget et en souffre sur certains points, mais son scénario possède malgré tout des qualités certaines. Cependant, je n'ai malheureusement pas assez accroché, principalement dû à la construction de l'ensemble du jeu : ❤ Le point fort du jeu réside sans hésitation dans son scénario ; il est bien construit et plutôt cohérent et le désir de résoudre l'affaire m'a permis de tenir jusqu'au bout. [b]+/-[/b] En revanche, la qualité d'écriture est trop changeante selon les routes ; dans certaines, la tension monte bien petit à petit et les événements peuvent alors surprendre positivement, dans d'autres les choses s'enchaînent beaucoup trop vite et le jeu ne prend pas du tout le temps de construire une ambiance générale ou un sentiment envers les personnages. Peut être un problème de rythme donc ou alors une écriture plus paresseuse. [b]+/-[/b] Quelques musiques d'ambiance sympathiques mais beaucoup de musiques qui ne vont mais alors pas du tout avec les scènes (avoir des musiques super joyeuses juste parce que les personnages se relaxent un peu, ce n'est pas cohérent avec le contexte et ça casse totalement l'immersion). [b]+/-[/b] En soit j'aime plutôt bien le chara-design mais les dessins restent très amateurs avec beaucoup de problème de proportions pour les corps. Aussi j'ai trouvé les illustrations beaucoup moins réussies que les sprites des personnages. ✖ Des décors qui ont trop un effet flou/réaliste Photoshoppé, ce n'est pas très beau. ✖ Le jeu possède 13 routes principales, chacune avec 4 fins différentes (ce qui fait donc 52 fins à débloquer) qui ne sont pas toujours claires dans la façon de les atteindre et d'ailleurs, il manque cruellement une flowchart pour avoir au moins une vision globale de ce qu'il reste à débloquer. A cause de ça, on est obligé de recommencer encore et encore, ce qui devient lassant même avec l'utilisation du skip. J'admets avoir sauté des fins par ennui.... ✖ Aussi, beaucoup de fins sont totalement inutiles et n'apportent rien à l'intrigue principale ; je trouve que le jeu a voulu être trop gourmand en contenu mais qu'au contraire cela l'a alourdi pour rien. ✖ Dans le descriptif du jeu il est indiqué que l'on va résoudre des puzzles....franchement si vous voulez y jouer pour cette raison, laissez tomber direct. Il n'y a que très peu à résoudre de nous même (des fois c'est la narration qui s'en charge...ok) et ils se résument juste à trouver des codes. De plus, certains impliquent de se rappeler de détails survenus dans d'autres routes, le problème étant que l'on a aucun carnet qui répertorie nos découvertes du coup à moins d'avoir une excellente mémoire, on se retrouve tout bête devant à regretter de ne pas avoir pris des notes la veille. Je salue les efforts d'un petit studio pour avoir voulu proposer une histoire intrigante et je ressens vraiment que cela a été fait avec un amour pour les jeux du même genre, mais le jeu manque sincèrement de maturité à mes yeux surtout dans sa construction, avec des embranchements trop chargés et une écriture pas toujours consistante. Pour les curieux, testez au moins pour son scénario !

I have a big soft spot for low budget death game Visual Novels and honestly, while The Zodiac Trial is by no means perfect, it continuously keeps up a good pace that makes for an overall very enjoyable experience I liked the characters overall a lot, they're definitely the stars of this VN. Everyone gets their own route with four endings, and each route is pretty different to each other - it's geninuely quite impressive how much subtle variety you get here. Combine this with the constant fast pacing, and I was always invested in the story, always interested to see where it would go next or what choices would do. I love that I got to see all the characters take on different roles and how they would react to it. Ox and Snake were the standouts for me! I was very invested in both It's not a deal breaker, but the art is a bit wonky. Some characters I think look great - Dragon, Rooster, Snake and Ox in particular - while other designs are somewhat dull, or have weird proportions that you take you out of things a little bit. Monkey I think is a good example of both of these things. The backgrounds are also just photos with filters on them, which I'm not gonna fault a low budget VN for, but it did occasionally make things hard to follow when characters were moving about a room or general area. There's also not a whole lot of CGIs so during big moments, you're usually left with a black screen or just the background, which can take you out of things a bit but again, I'm not gonna let it bother me in a low budget VN. The ones we do get generally look pretty good though! The soundtrack also isn't anything mindblowing, but it does the job and there's a couple of especially good tracks in there. Sound effects are quite lacking overall, though My main criticisms for The Zodiac Trial would be: 1. There's a good handful of typos, some of them quite unfortunate, like mixing up the name of a victim and their killer. It's not a dealbreaker, but it is noticable. 2. This is a Visual Novel made in ren'py, which means the standard features of scrolling back through text is very fluid, but it does mean you don't get a flowchart (despite there being over 50 endings) or some kind of menu with information you've already learnt, meaning you can feel overwhelmed at times or forget things. For example, I struggled to keep track of the Bowens and Morris', who are important characters to the story but not actually present 3. Sometimes it felt like the protagonist whose perspective you witness the story from was miles ahead of me, pulling out complicated deductions from thin air that I hadn't even began to grasp. Now I will admit, I am kinda dumb so maybe it was on me, but I did often feel like I was just coming along for the ride, although this personally didn't bother me too much

TLDR: more of a mixed than a true dislike, I didn’t dislike the game, but it would be pretty low on my list of death game recommendations. Zodiac Trial is exactly what it says on the tin, you have a cast of 12 participants, they’re locked in a school, and you have a host making them play a game that risks their lives. It’s the premise for a standard death game, and ultimately that’s what the game ends up being. You have a pretty standard overarching plot, you go through the different choices and routes until you end up at the true ending, and then you’re done. The writing isn’t bad, the overarching plot isn’t bad, it’s just very “ok” and there are other VNs that in my opinion, are just better options to spend your money on. Some of the actual death game mechanics are woefully underused(one of the mechanics I thought would be interesting only gets brought up in 1/12 routes). The art feels somewhat amateurish, and certain character designs just do not feel like they match personalities(dog particularly). I understand it’s an indie title, I’m not expecting danganronpa production value, but it does feel like just some odd choices were made. The music was mostly forgettable, some decent tracks but nothing I’ll be looking at after. It does have a bit of that indie charm in its dialogue, in the sense that some of the writing feels like it would get shot down by a major studio, but it made its way here and ends up being the most memorable part of the game(I particularly enjoyed the mouse “scooby doo”scene). I also enjoyed the interview rooms, I love when games do things like that. Unfortunately the overall experience was just rather forgettable, something I’d only recommend if someone told me they loved death games and were out of media to go through. I think the team has talent and will be playing through what they’ve released to see if another title resonates with me better.

This is a great VN and I enjoyed it.

Probably the best death game vn i have read. the characters in this game are very intelligent. there is alot of thought put into this. if you liked this one, you should try out other games made by this developer.

The Zodiac Trial is a death game visual novel where each player represents one of the twelve Chinese zodiac and have to use abilities given to them based on the animal they were assigned to escape a viscous death game. This is probably one of my favorite death games especially considering it's relatively small dev team. I think what makes this one stand out compared to the majority of the death game vns is that this one is mostly grounded in reality. There are no super powers other than some characters being physically stronger than others. There is no time travel, no supernatural abilities, super powered ai etc. Characters are well written but not necessarily likable and the plot mostly ties up any plot holes. Main character is also well grounded and not overly stupid or whiny and can even make some morally dubious choices if she must to survive. The game is fairly limited however, it is primarily a vn with very few puzzles that aren't that note worthy. The choices you make are pretty important and I do appreciate how each of the endings are vastly different from each other in both structure and theme. Overall if you enjoy stuff like 999, Danganronpa, Ace Attorney etc I think you will appreciate this game if you give it a chance.

[h1]This game is truly special[/h1] I don't often write reviews. This fact alone should speak to the quality of this game. I am going out of my way to do this because I believe this game deserves more attention. Let me be clear, despite having obvious inspirations from popular VNs like Zero Escape and Danganronpa, It is completely unfair to compare this game to those. Those games had a huge team and budget. This was made by one person under a thousand dollars. That being said, if you enjoyed Zero Escape and Danganronpa, I highly recommend you play Zodiac Trial. To keep this review as short as possible because I could talk about this all day, I'm going to list the pros, cons, stuff in between, and other notable things. [h2]PROS[/h2] - The storytelling, mystery, and characters are all great - No perverted garbage - Excellent amount of content for the price -No punishment for failing a puzzle -Sprite art looks good [h2]CONS[/h2] - For a Visual Novel, It's fairly lacking in the 'Visual' department (mainly the CGs are pretty poor) - In some of the routes, you must figure out who the bad guy is and be able to explain why to convince the group to take them out. The problem is, while it may technically give you all the information needed to figure it out during the investigation, It does a poor job of highlighting what is important and what isn't, which can make things difficult and a bit annoying. [h2]MID[/h2] - Music is good imo, but I can see it getting under peoples skin for being repetitive - Some errors in the writing but not enough to detract from the experience - Some people may find a few parts difficult to get past if they aren't paying attention. Really it's just a skill issue One thing I personally enjoyed about The Zodiac Trials was how grounded it was. It takes place in a fictional world/city but isn't science, historical, or fantasy fiction. Everything that happens, no matter how crazy it seems at the time, has a reasonable explanation. So yeah. Do yourself a favor and buy this game!

For all the death game sickos, a hearty recommendation. While the writing is pulpy without much internal narration. I initially was somewhat put off by that, but it fits story and format pretty well. That said, it sucked me in and made me play it for 3 days straight to play it. Definitely play if you have interest in death game stories.

At this point I have read every single piece of dialogue, every ending, every Narrator's Dialogue, I have consumed absolutely everything this game has to offer. However, I read pretty quickly so for most people it'll take way longer then the 24 hours it took me. This game is not perfect--there are a decent number of spelling mistakes, sometimes names get confused, and sometimes the images on screen don't line up with the dialogue (which I'll admit does make one puzzle a little harder). But except for that one puzzle, none of these flaws impacted the experience for me; I could always tell what the game was trying to say. And as some of the other reviews have pointed out, there is a limited amount of art here so sometimes character expressions don't quite match up with what they're saying and any action scenes can't be communicated visually. All of that being said, I thought this game was FANTASTIC. As you can tell from the steam description this is about a death game and you trying to get out alive and figure out what is going on. There are a large number of different endings depending on the choices you make. The reason I know that I've read every piece of dialogue is because I have extreme FOMO, so I pulled up a word document on a second screen and created my own timeline with every choice so I could make sure I tried every single option available. I really enjoyed that, but for others who aren't so detail-oriented it might be difficult to keep track of how to reach each ending and which paths you've already tried. A timeline for how the different choices lead to the different endings would have helped make things clearer like Zero Escape does. Because of the mechanics of some of the routes it might have been a bit challenging, or it might not have been included for budgetary reasons, but either way I think a visual graph of some kind would have been helpful. The thing that I love most about this game is that all of the important puzzles/mysteries were complex enough to make me think hard, but not so complicated that you feel like it's BS and there's no way you could have figured it out. By the end of my experience every question I had had been answered somewhere...except one but it was a small thing anyway. Whenever I didn't understand something and the answer was revealed, I always went OHHHHH instead of HUH?? For this price I think you definitely get your money's worth. This game has a lot of heart poured into it, and if we're talking about developer budget to game output ratio, I think this might be one of the best visual novels I've every played. At the end of the day though this is still a visual novel, so if you aren't up for a ton of reading I don't think this will be the game to change your mind. I'm going to remember this experience for a while to come

Actually the silliest, goofiest, game I've ever played. Wasn't expecting anything great until my boy Rooster ended racism. 10/10 writing, absolutely adore.