Posted on: October 7, 2018

Xzaril
Verified ownerGames: 482 Reviews: 1
Kindred Spirits
Kindred Spirits is a very light read compared to most games in the genre. The main narrative is of a loose-structured format. After reading a set of main event scenes, you have to backtrack chronologically to see that same time period through the perspective of the different secondary characters. I found this format to work well to flesh out the characters. You often get to hear their own thoughts, and see new, or parts of existing, events in which the main character never took part. Unfortunately, the loose format also brings out my main negative of the game: there is a good amount of shared text and dialogue. I am not very fond of re-reading scenes in visual novels. In other games, with a more common narrative, different game routes often share complete scenes with the exact same text. This makes it easy to simply skip the entire scene. But this is not applicable to Kindred Spirits as the shared scenes contain new content based on which character's perspective it plays from, that I would not like to miss. I very much enjoyed the artstyle. The characters and CGs all look amazing. However, the character sprites are mostly fixed and lack the expressive variety seen in bigger titles. The music begins to feel repetitive quickly, but I never found this to be a problem as the two main background tracks, in addition to being very catchy, fits the game well enough that I started looking forward to them starting up again. The story and reading experience of Kindred Spirits can only be described by me as pure joy. I was hooked from the start and had a blast playing through it, even with the shortcomings. I think the low-budget feel even enhances the immersion. I doubt the game would have been as good if it had the same budget and quality as one of Liar-soft's mainstream titles, like Gahkthun.
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