One – also known as Kagayaku Kisetsu e – is one of the legends of the visual novel genre. Originally released way back in 1998, it was one of the early projects by a developer called Tactics, which is notable because many of the creative team moved on from that…
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CASCHA Games’ Concealed caught my attention for several reasons. The game has gorgeous art direction for one thing, and the promise of a horror visual novel set in a school is always a good way to catch my attention. Those two things go together beautifully. Unfortunately, this is going to…
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I’ll just get this warning out of the way up-front: There’s an explicit depiction of an apparent suicide in the first ten minutes of Virche Evermore -ErroR: Salvation-. It’s by no means the only content warning found in this incredibly dark visual novel. I overview some of the (many) other…
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Archetype Arcadia has an awful lot of content. The PR material claims 50 hours, and while I have a gut feeling that that’s assuming a fairly slow reading speed, I read quickly and I wouldn’t be surprised if I did actually spend that long getting to the end. It’s generally…
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Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue is not the Danganronpa clone it seems to be. It looks the part, but rather than being a “death game,” it’s closer to the first 90% of Lord of the Flies (the part where there’s tension but no murder) than Saw. Or Blue Lagoon were…
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Reality is increasingly uncertain, and this is fascinating. Anonymous;Code, the latest in the series that has brought us Steins;Gate, Robotics;Notes and Chaos;Head, is a play on this idea, and it, too, is fascinating. Quite possibly the most fascinating of all this series of visual novels, precisely because it is so…
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Thank the maker for Aksys. The publisher of the most niche of niche visual novels has announced that it will be bringing Spirit Hunter: Death Mark II to the Nintendo Switch, PC and PlayStation in late February 2024. Death Mark II is actually the third in the series, after Death…
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I struggle to think of a more consistent developer than Otomate. The Idea Factory otome specialist developer produces games at such a rate that I’m convinced the only reason we don’t get all of them in the West is that the localisers simply can’t work that fast… and that’s a…
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What happens when you blend the otome visual novel sub-genre with death games like Danganronpa or Squid Games? Essentially, you get Charade Maniacs. This is Idea Factory’s latest to make its way out west and it’s an intriguing and eclectic thing. I don’t know if this particular fusion of ideas…
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Rain is a common motif in noir. Whether it be the grim, dank, and hostile urban decay of Se7en, or the neon-drenched dystopia of Blade Runner, water is so common to noir that there is, to quote Paul Schrader in his book Notes on Film Noir “an almost Freudian attachment…
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