A downloadable visual novel for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.
There's a lot of work that's gone into this visual novel - it just might also take a bit of patience for readers to get the best out of it.
Sci-fi is always a tough one to tackle from a world-building perspective, and starting this story off you'll have to be prepared for a lot of prelude. There's an interesting, yet curious, decision whereby the first two "chapters" don't even include the player character, which honestly made me feel rather perplexed by what was going on, particularly when I was presented with choices. Once you are past this, you effectively have a "second" prelude section whereby "your" character finally appears. It's best to settle in and work your way through all of this at once, because until I got this far, I honestly found the experience a little difficult to engage with.
The art is fine, although I felt it sometimes didn't always fit the mood or setting it was trying to convey. Character art is better, although I am still torn on whether the rudimentary animations are more annoying than simply not having them. The other thing I found was that while it was entirely understandable for all characters to be wearing the same uniforms in such a scenario, it really impacts their identity, so some of them had real difficulty standing out to me. This will obviously vary with your own perspective.
The story has a classic space opera type, political/mystery aspect to it, which is fine, but with these typically being a bit of a slow-burn along with the game's already exacerbated introduction, means that it can possibly feel a little drawn out. The writing is fine, but could possibly do with another pass to sharpen it up - I don't care to know in-lore reasons regarding why or why not a communication device can work in the middle of character interactions and choices, for example. I did, however, like the "villains" here, and this is certainly one aspect that did excel. I felt I knew more about their worlds, society and culture from reading between half a dozen lines of their speech than I got from technical lore dumps directly written into the story of my own character. If I had to give a single reason that drove me onwards, it was actually to see more of them and what they would do, rather than anything else.
The only last element that perplexed me were some of the choice prompts - not only because I was surprised to be making them, but because for some of them, I clearly had no idea or ability to reason between picking one of the other. I have not explored how much affect these have, but picking options for characters that you don't know, or picking between two options which have no way of distinguishing the outcomes just feels a little confusing or sometimes unsatisfying.
I think there is fundamentally something very good here, it is simply that, due to various choices and peoples preferences on characters or story presentation, not everyone will like it or perhaps appreciate it. There is undoubtedly a lot of effort going into this, and it is already a lengthy product, so if you are a big sci-fi fan and don't mind trying to tackle a visual novel that requires a few concessions and some time to really get going, it's worth a go.
