I got this for someone who likes hidden object puzzles, and he happily spent about 20 minutes finding 96 cats out of 100 in this charming illustration. "Some of the cats are darn small and hide really good!"
Overall a positive experience despite a few serious drawbacks. The good: The story was quite enjoyable. (Abrupt ending, but if you've played VTM: Bloodlines, that's not super surprising.) The bad: Lack of long-term results in response to your choices. If you really try, you can die, but you have to work at it. Otherwise, you can't fail and there's only one ending. Only one! In a visual novel! The ugly: You can't load an earlier save to make a different choice. The game only allows one save per character and doesn't allow you to exit without saving, meaning that if you want to see the reaction to a different choice, you have to play through the whole game again. I'm guessing it was a deliberate choice trying to ramp up tension, but it just comes off as annoying. (In case, like me, you think you'll be clever and "exit" by forcing it to close using windows task manager: nope, it saved before closing.) There is no "skip seen" option. If you want to see what changes there are (due to choices or character background), you have to reread every line each time you replay the game. This is another option that's standard in free visual novels, so it's a weird omission. Finally, an issue that's immersion-breaking rather than just annoying: Your character is always referred to as "they." It's one thing if, in real life or in games, someone asks for they/them/their pronouns, but otherwise it's super weird. If it'd require too much coding to change pronouns based on character (and considering I've seen free visual novels that do it, this seems lazy) you could just rewrite lines to avoid needing gendered pronouns at all. For instance, change, "Yeah, they're here," to, "Yeah, the person you're waiting for is here." And, "Give it to them," could easily become, "Give it to the fledgling." Not hard. Ultimately? Worth playing, but get it on sale.
Overall, I loved this game. The premise, the world, the roleplaying, the dark humor, the ending... (There's also some outstanding voice acting. Voices of Nerat, I'm looking at you.) But. The game sometimes crashes, and there were some proofreading errors in the written stuff (mostly in the DLC). Not egregious, but immersion-breaking. I had trouble deciding between 4 and 5 stars, but I'm going to round up since I just finished my fourth playthrough, and the fact that I wanted to play it four times in a row really says something.
Engaging enough to finish, but only truly enjoyable if: 1. You don't need an interesting heroine. You learn a couple minutes into the game that the Heroine has lost her personality in addition to her memories. When she gets it back, she's still not particularly interesting. 2. You're okay with the Heroine having no thoughts of her own. For most of the game Orion just tells her the thoughts she should have. 3. You're fine with player choices being only what to say, not what to do. Orion, not the player, controls the Heroine's actions. When he seems to offer a choice, it's often fake. (Example: Orion asks, "Do you want to go or not?" If the player chooses "not go," Orion replies, "But I think we should," and the Heroine goes.) 4. You're cool with last century's beliefs about sexual harassment and violence. Quote from a love interest in the game: "If you invite a man into your room when you're alone, you've basically already consented [to sex]." Quote from another guy: "If you're not careful, I may do terrible things to you." And another: "If you don't struggle, I won't know when to stop." (Is this a Japanese thing? There were sexual threats/harassment by love interests in the other two Japanese otome I've tried.) It gets much, much worse—trigger warning worse—from two of the love interests, and that's in their bleeping Good Ends! Bad Ends can be terrible, but a Good End shouldn't have the player wishing the Heroine would get away! 5. You believe a declaration of love will magically solve any emotional problem, no matter how violent and complex. Mentally ill murderer? Jealous attempted rapist? Tell them you love them, and all will be right! The truly awful thing is, the game did some things very well, with lovely art and a sometimes-immersive story, so some people will really enjoy the game and make mental excuses for the way the Heroine is treated. And it's easy for mental excuses to go from being about a game to being about real life relationships.
If I'd had a friend describe this one to me ahead of time I probably wouldn't have bought it, but I'm glad I did. As the game blurb says, this visual novel is ABOUT THE WOMEN. Romance takes a backseat, here, in favor of explicit discussions about motivations, perceptions, and how our behavior influences others. The blurb is mostly on point about what this game is, except for the slightly misleading, "Distancing itself from the judgmental simplicity of the original." This game is definitely judgmental, though certainly in a more complex way than the original fairytale. (Important note: many choices determine the main character's personality while you play. So if your first time she's a hypocritical brat, don't despair: if you make other choices she may tend toward clever, goodhearted, or manipulative.) The artwork is lush, with a few weird touches that contribute to a very atmospheric whole. The body of the visual novel is meaty, and though the endings/epilogues feel way more bare-bones than I'd like, some people will be excited by the number of little variations in them. (This game is a completionist's dream/nightmare. If you need help, there's a Cinders Wiki.) For me, the "beautiful and strange" aspect outweighs the fact that the game can feel a bit preachy at times. I'm glad I waited for a sale since I'm unlikely to play this again in the future, but I'm glad I did give some money for this weird little gem. And I'll be keeping my eye on MoaCube.
Since I really enjoyed Hatoful Boyfriend, I was excited to try this one. But it feels... flat. It's neither a cheerful dating sim nor a particularly thought-provoking dark story, which were the things I enjoyed about the original game. Holiday Star has no real branching (or stat raising, for that matter) so you're just watching the characters do things rather than being any part of the story. This makes it hard to emotionally invest in any of it. And since it's set during a couple weeks within the original story, nothing could be allowed to happen which would affect any of the first game. So with no character growth, relationship changes, or events with lasting repercussions... what's the point?
A zany, madcap, mostly-light-hearted dating sim for six or seven of the routes; for one of them a horror story; and the last a dark meditation on the nature of love and violence. I enjoyed them all. I particularly appreciated the exploration of various types of love; besides the expected, there were the types of non-romantic love that exist between a parent and a child, between brothers, and between friends. (At least, they came up on most routes and were seriously examined on the "fulfill a promise"/BBL/"Hurtful Boyfriend" route.) What I found a delightful surprise was the fairly capable heroine. In the few Japanese games I've played, and even in some of the otome games that are Western-made, the heroine is usually helpless, ditzy, and dim. The main reasons I'm giving the game four stars instead of five are mechanical. 1. You can't look at a text log, or go back a few comments. If you accidentally left clicked before you finished reading a bit of dialog, there's no way to see it short of loading a previous save and playing again until you get back to where you missed the comment. 2. You can't save while a choice is on the screen. The game tries to compensate, signaling an upcoming choice by making it so you need to click two or three times to get to the choice itself, showing that you need to save then... but if you're fast forwarding through a scene, there's no pause before a choice. Save often. 3. And if you are replaying the game, or a route, to see what's different when you've made different choices, there's no "skip seen" option. Fast forward always skips the entire scene rather than giving you the option to stop where new content begins. These three things may seem minor to those who aren't used to playing games built with the Ren'Py engine, but they're features I've come to rely on. (And since they're things even <i>free</i> games do, it seems a bizarre lack for a commercial game.)
"Icewind Dale 2 Complete" does some things very well. The combat was great, and I enjoyed the way dialogue options and NPC reactions frequently differed depending on the race/alignment/class of the party leader. Unfortunately, even more than in the first "Icewind Dale," the story is tiring. At one point you've just fought five mini-bosses to get the tokens to let you get to the boss, but he's actually just the area boss; the real bosses are higher up, accessible only by passing through more area bosses protected by mini-bosses with accompanying minions. (Not that at any point you know how many area bosses you have left to go...) If you're trying to keep track of the stitched-together episodes that make up the overall story, good luck: the journal records all quest details mixed together in the order in which you trigger them. (Luckily?) you never need to remember much at all; any of chapters one through five could easily be cut from the game. "Icewind Dale 2" eventually felt like hacking my way through a grocery list, and near the end of the fifth chapter I gave up on it. If you like an engrossing story, forget this one. Buy "Planescape: Torment" or "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic."
The puzzles are mostly logical (though I wish they could be solved in more than one way) and the story seems interesting. The reason for the low rating is actually the humor. I do like some Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, World of Warcraft, etc. jokes, but the sheer number of these crammed in is exhausting rather than clever. And there was no internal humor: in four hours' play, I did not notice one joke that didn't either parody an outside source or break the fourth wall. I'm not usually a quitter, but four hours was all I could take before frustration too badly outweighed fun.
