End of the Line is wonderfully depressing experience that delivers on all fronts. From excellent sprites, to polished writing and an engaging narrative and dialogue, it’s worthwhile from end to end. There are some characteristics that don’t exactly click from the jump, but eventually all pieces fall into place. Definitely the strongest submission in Novembear 2024.

First of all: I feel like the narrative and the presentation are kind of in conflict here. The story itself is pretty bleak and quiet, with not a lot of big things happening after Owen's endearingly silly introduction, but the visuals are so busy with all the animations, the meticulous sprite movements, and the transitions that the overall vibe is energetic and at times leans towards chaotic.

I have long maintained that visual novels are a medium built on abstraction, and having something new and exciting happen on the screen is a tool for conveying emphasis – sometimes good direction amounts to being sparing with how many devices you introduce and how you use them. Too often, it felt like a formal mechanism was motivated by making the game feel impressively produced rather than underlining the importance of and pushing the specific emotions in each scene. The intrusive effects in the flashbacks are probably the worst offender; we already know all this happened in the past, so is it really necessary to frame it so heavily through a retroactive lens instead of allowing the reader to experience what the characters were feeling then?

I think the same dissonance can be felt in the pacing. As mentioned, while End of the Line is kind of a serene character drama in spirit, there are not a lot of truly slow, contemplative moments that would give the ideas and the imagery time to sink in. I guess a lot of this comes down to the VN being such a talky piece – most of the dialogue is concerned pretty directly with the themes, so there's just not a whole lot of space for forming your own response to the material. The game just kind of holds your hand, and you feel what you're told to feel and think what you're told to think.

The structure is also kind of jumpy. The flashbacks feel too aggressively pruned of everything but direct setup to work as satisfying scenes by themselves, and I don't really see the point of covering so much time when it feels like the plot beats could be made to play out within the same day or so. To be clear, I don't think any of this is bad storytelling in general, but it just doesn't feel like a good fit for the story being told.

I would say the prose and dialogue are pretty solid work all around, and I didn't spot big editorial issues beyond the tense being inconsistent in just a couple of places. Generally speaking, though, the writing did feel too melodramatic for my tastes – the characters' mental states are projected outwards into the narrative and the setting to the point that it feels like there's nothing that's not a symbol of some kind. The crumbling house, environmental disasters, the desperate task of catching one final fish... sometimes, it's ok to write in details just for the sake of flourish, or to set the mood, or to create the impression that the characters have lives beyond the confines of these particular events.

So much of what the VN does is plainly functional enough to risk the mechanisms of the narrative feeling exposed. The same can be said for the overtly satisfying bookend of a final line and all the other setups and payoffs – they're all so neat that the storytelling doesn't feel organic or raw enough to respect the immensely bleak subject matter.

To mention a singular plot point: near the middle, there's a twist that didn't really land for me because it felt like it was built too much on reader expectations in lieu of being actually written into the text. It just didn't feel like the reasons why Arthur would think so matched the reader's, creating an unwelcome distance and making it difficult to emphatize with what the character was feeling during the fallout. I like it as a fun reader-hostile move in theory, but I think the execution focused on the less compelling aspect.

End of the Line is certainly competently put together, and you can respect the huge team's efforts making for something with a stunning amount of production value for a game jam submission. Ultimately, though, I just wasn't a big fan of many storytelling and directorial decisions and, as a result, failed to have an emotional reaction. In a work that feels like it's banking so hard on that happening, it's difficult to feel like I enjoyed the time I spent with it.