VirtuaVerse looks and sounds nice. I like retro pixel graphics, and I like retro bit-music. In terms of presentation, it had me hooked from the start. The story was fairly stereotypical for this genre, but that's never an issue... as long as the gameplay is fun, the same assortment of tropes can still be fun. Sadly, the story, characters, and puzzles dragged the experience down for me to the point where I no longer enjoyed it. The characters became more unrelatable and unlikable as the story progressed, the plot devolved into Tell-Don't-Show for many of its beats, and the inventory puzzles were convoluted, arbitrary, and frustrating more often than not. A few parts of the game rose above this trend and managed to be fun and engaging, but not often or consistently enough to save the game as a whole. The frustration of getting through parts of the game was only made worse by an unsatisfying ending. I appreciate what Theta Division was going for, but they sadly fell rather short of the mark.
