Wow, I didn’t expect such presentation! It got to be one of my favourite entries with “exorcist killing lie”!
The story was the right length, it looked like a pattern of “normal girl meets boy with power” at first but the characteristics of each character and the humour made it interesting all the way long!
I really liked the beginning with the “marry the first girl that comes” joke and other “dense” humour (funnily I also watched Violet Evergarden today which is on the more serious side, but the MC still manages to involuntarily pull a few jokes).
And the art direction / presentation is top-notch, with the frames, black and white with nice textures (screens) and more abstract shapes that make even the more geometrical backgrounds stand out. I quickly noticed the main frame changing on pulse beat, which are some point was perfectly matching the BGM beat (unfortunately it got unsynced later, I suppose there was no explicit sync code, but if the BGM started at a certain offset, since the beat period was the same, it just got synced).
The way frames are shown and moving is makes the game very dynamic, and part of the characters’ emotions actually go through this, rather than just facial expressions as in classic VN.
Dialogue is also well-paced and funny.
Surprisingly there is no battle animation / dedicated sprites and everything is done via sound and motion, but we understand what’s going on (maybe an exception is the last battle where the girl’s curses are done exclusively via SFX - for accessibility an FX would be welcome to accompany each attack).
I noticed that your team has a very different distribution from what I’m used to, with several people on overlapping art fields. This may explain the extra polish of art in BG, characters but also all the meta work with frames and motion design (and the eye catches too! Too bad I couldn’t screen capture them in time!)
Issues
- on a weaker machine like my laptop, the game is quite CPU consuming and each dialog box took some time before it displayed the “continue” arrow. As a result, I had to wait for a few seconds before I could press Space/Enter to advance. Clicking on the box with the mouse instead seemed to solve the issue. Maybe it’s a thing of Naninovel, and you could set it up to immediately show the arrow to continue dialogue immediately. The issue is not perceptible on a stronger machine like my SteamDeck, since the arrow appears immediately
- Keyboard/Gamepad nav is not 100% reliable, esp. in the Save/Load menu where you the selection may not go where you want
Spoiler
At the end, when the wallet is thrown, the animation suggests it’s going horizontally but the following CG shows that it was sent upwards in the sky to lure the enemy spirit, since the snake also goes there. Only with the following dialogue did I understand that both the wallet and enemy spirit was there. But part of the good presentation is also that things are well explained in text in case it wasn’t all clear in visuals.
Really, like “exorcist killing lie” that’s a very good one-shot, if you walked to an editor’s door you’d probably get published! … if they accepted dynamic, digital manga, obviously. Unlike “exorcist killing lie” I see it more as a pure one-shot than a pilot for a bigger world and plot, since the MC’s power has one very clear use that fits this particular mission, but nevertheless I’ll be following your future games!