Hello and welcome to this year’s first EVN Chronicles Steam Curator Wrap-Up, where I look at the games that were sent to me in the past six months through Steam’s Curator Connect, but were either too small to warrant a full review, or I simply couldn’t cover them in detail due to time constraints. When I first did this kind of posts last year (you can check them out here: Part 1, Part 2), some of the games featured there waited extremely long for being covered. Because of this, I’ve decided that from this point forward, I’ll make this a twice-a-year event, being sure that every VN given to me gets its space on the blog within a reasonable time period. As always, I’m extremely thankful to all the developers that send me their work for assessment and it saddens me whenever my impressions are negative. I hope, however, that the feedback I can offer will be valuable to them, while believe it’s my duty to my readers to warn them against buying a game I find lacking. So, setting the introductory drivel aside, I hope you enjoy this brief overview of these four interesting VNs sent to me during the first half of 2019!
Snowed IN is an unusual yuri nukige, focusing on pair for soldiers in the distant future, where cybernetic enhancement of the human body has reached incredible levels of sophistication. The protagonist, Sigma, is an experienced spec-ops officer who has modified her body to the point where little of it remains organic. For an infiltration mission against a cell of anti-augmentation radicals, she’s assigned with a fresh, talented recruit – a full “natural” named Linde, whose presence in the military is connected with an affirmative action plan for those not augmented. The two polar-opposite individuals, both through their background and attitudes, have to work together to survive the extremely dangerous assignment – and the mission itself hides even more threats and twists then the initial setup would suggest.
Sounds intriguing? It surely does, but the fact this is a nukige, and a very short one at that (up to an hour and a half of content), should be taken into account when setting your expectations. The game explores its main themes rather briefly, often switching to sex scenes that are only vaguely justifiable in the context of the tense plot – the writing and main intrigue are solid, but simply too rushed to provide a compelling narrative. There are also some highly-questionable elements to it, especially in the rather distasteful bad ending – that’s definitely one point at which h-content was very unnecessary, even if those scenes are the “main point” of the game. As a piece of yuri smut in an unusual setting, it's definitely not the worst thing around – just don't expect anything more than that.
Final Rating: (Cautiously) Recommended
The retro-inspired, pixelart VN The Great Voyage is definitely the best piece of literature among the titles listed in today's post, despite being the shortest one out of them all. This kinetic novel, with only around an hour of content, tells the story of three refugees from a city sacked by a ruthless rebel army. Stuck on a fleet of ships escaped from the carnage, now desperately looking for a new home and avoiding inevitable pursue by the enemy, the three protagonists (young noblewomen Eugenie, a melancholic poet Vassan and a con-artist posing as a foreign ambassador, Memnon) have to cope with their new situation, the loss they experienced and even the sins of their pasts. All this leads to a highly-compelling narrative about vastly different individuals trying to survive against all odds, find a new meaning to their lives and manoeuvring events mostly outside of their control – a deeply un-heroic and rather pessimistic scenario, that nonetheless feels interesting and genuine just because of how imperfect and often powerless its main characters are.
The story is presented with simple, but highly stylized art that greatly fits its gloomy climate (and the same can be said about the game's eerie soundtrack). Its main downside is, obviously, the tiny length of the whole experience (thankfully the pricing is appropriately scaled, with the game costing $2 both on Steam and Itch.io), but I can't say it left me unsatisfied in any major way. It did a surprisingly good job at both developing the main characters and resolving their arcs, and even creating an interesting and believable setting for their stories to play out in. The premise obviously held the potential to expand into a much grander tale, but it's not something I could seriously hold against The Great Voyage – it's simply a great short story that I can recommend wholeheartedly to anyone that looks for a satisfying literary experience in their VNs above anything else.
Final Rating: Highly Recommended
Today's Steam is full of extremely simple VNs that are put on the platform as cash-grab shovelware, early experiments with VN-making software or even straight-up trolling. And while Manna for our Malices might look like it belongs to one of those categories, with its simplistic visuals and over-the-top writing, there’s actually much more to it. In this short time-looping story, you take control of Ai, a foul-mouthed high school girl who, for an unknown reason, is killed by a knifer while coming back home after lessons, only to wake up in at the beginning of the same day. Throughout the game, you’ll go through this loop dozens of times (quite often with Ai commenting angrily about her poor luck), slowly uncovering the underlying conspiracies and the roles the protagonist and people around her play in the whole intrigue. With every new piece of information, the already-visited locations will provide new clues and new dialogue options will appear, until you’re ready to solve the puzzle and break Ai out of the endless cycle of waking up and being murdered.
The game, for the most part, does a really good job of implementing this concept, at least before the very last stretch – I had to consult the walkthrough to reach the true ending and I’m not sure I’d ever come up with the solution the VN expected me to find otherwise. The characters are heavily exaggerated, being either complete weirdos or walking anime tropes (this includes the protagonist and her closest friend Aoi, who’s a “deredere childhood friend” archetype on steroids). The humour is crude but effective, and after getting into the story I was strangely invested in solving the overall puzzle, while the “true” conclusion was properly fun and cheesy. The game play’s a lot on anime clichés, with an obvious understanding of the medium, which helps in making its visuals and writing seem like a deliberate choice, rather than just amateurishness. The end effect is trashy for sure, but strangely captivating – I had a lot of fun going through the various stages of the intrigue and uncovering layers upon layers of mystery beneath the at first mundane-looking setting. For this, I can quite confidently recommend giving Manna for our Malices a chance – although, for the amount of content it offers, the $5 asking price is just barely acceptable.
Lately, I’ve grown weary of tackling stat management games, as over time I find more and more of them pointlessly tedious and boring, with “simulation” aspects rarely being compelling and mostly distracting me from the parts of the game I’m actually interested in, that is, the story. Still, in the case of Lyantei, I think my biases are among the lesser reasons for which I did not enjoy playing it. At first glance, this story of a young girl/guy (you can choose the protagonist’s gender, which mostly affects the romance options available to you) traveling to a distant inn owned by their aunt, in order to help her pay off a debt seems like something I’d enjoy – more casual, slice-of-life stories in a fantasy setting are still a bit underexplored niche and offer great potential. The production values of the game, while simple, were also not bad enough to discourage me – I can put up with anything that isn’t straight-up ugly if what I read is interesting enough.
Sadly, in Lyantei there’s barely any interesting narrative to speak of – the character arcs are incredibly cliched, which is only made worse by the awkward English writing and the protagonist who just comes out as pushy and weird, sticking his/her nose into everyone's business without any real reason. The game is also very short, which makes all the character arcs feel incredibly rushed. The romance especially comes pretty much out of nowhere, while lack of proper CGs make the story feel empty like few other VNs I’ve played. On top of that, the structure of the game drove me to utter frustration – to get into each hero/heroine arcs you have to stumble upon them early on, by doing various chores at the inn at the right moments. Absurdly-enough, the triggers lead to these scenes are quite obscure and it’s easy to miss most of the story in each of your runs. I see absolutely no logic behind that choice and with no guide available, I ended up dropping Lyantei without finishing all the routes, which I do very rarely, especially with games I receive review copies for. Little good can also be said about stat-management itself, which is basic and functional, but not in any way interesting. Your only goal is to earn enough money in 30 days to pay off your Aunt’s debt, by helping around the inn and selling potions you make with your alchemy skills, but with the short span of the game and no meaningful side objectives, there’s actually very little to it.
In the end, while I feel that Lyantei is not an awful game at its core, it just doesn’t represent the quality I’m looking for in a commercial product and can’t recommend buying it under any conditions. If it was a free VN, with some additional polish and tweaks I could still consider it worth trying out – however, I don’t think the developer will be able to fix it enough to justify putting a price tag on it, and especially the $9 one it currently has. Maybe on their next try…
Final Rating: Not Recommended
Mikołaj Spychał is a Polish VN developer that has recently released his second attempt at creating a perfectly-generic high school romance VN (after his debut Jake's Love Story and a quite unfortunate journey to the world of catgirls in the form of his second title, Nekokoro). And while you're probably thinking now that more cookie-cutter, teenage love stories is the last thing our niche needs, there are still things to appreciate in Courage for a Kiss, at least from the perspective of its author's growth. The main storyline here involves the protagonist and four girls somewhat reluctantly banding up to create a school play for a regional contest – the play itself is an interesting storytelling gimmick, as its content and the roles particular characters will perform depend on some of your choices. These changes are particularly fun to observe between routes, just as are minor variations in the dialogue that reflect your previous choices and the information you learn about the girls in different paths. While other than that the heroines and their stories are utterly generic and even a bit too similar to each other, this attention to detail makes the setting feel a bit deeper than you'd expect.
Visually the game is simple, but pleasant to look at and is undeniably a huge improvement over this dev's earlier projects, with decent, mildly animated sprites and high-quality backgrounds. However, it suffers from a single, borderline-fatal flaw – an utter lack of proper CGs, which takes away quite a lot of impact from crucial moments in the story. The music is good for the most part, but sometimes kicks in a bit too strong, distracting from the scene rather than supporting it. All-in-all, it's a competent and reasonably satisfying, even if very basic and tame romance VN, and if you for some reason feel like reading another one of those, there are definitely worse options out there.
Final Rating: (Cautiously) Recommended
There weren't many “must reads” among the shorter VNs sent to me in the last few months, but I can’t say they didn’t offer surprises – the one game that I actually expected the least from, Manna for our Malices, managed to be the most enjoyable among them and something I wouldn’t mind seeing more of in the EVN scene – a witty play on the formula that didn’t treat itself seriously, but still strived to tell a fun story and surprise the reader with its twists. This kind of fun factor is what both Snowed IN and Lyantei visibly lacked, making them much more forgettable by the result. The Great Voyage, on the other hand, reminded me that VNs can be great not only as full-fledged video games, but also as a form of illustrated literature – focusing on a really compelling narrative is often worth a lot more than gameplay gimmicks and branching paths, then it goes to satisfaction you gan from the whole experience. And for the meantime, I hope you all enjoyed this little post – if the games that get sent to me warrant it, the next one will show up in December. You can also expect full-on reviews of larger games given to me through Steam Curation – I’ve received review copies of some very interesting titles, both new and old, that I really want to give the spotlight to. Have a great weekend everyone!
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