Our Lovely Escape Review (English Original Visual Novel)

Few EVN studios leave me with such mixed feelings as Reine Works – a small team creating otome and yuri VNs at an impressive pace since 2017, known for titles such as Blossoms Bloom Brightest and Reflections ~Dreams and Reality~. While I enjoy the ideas behind much of their work and there’s usually a visible improvement in quality with each new release, the storytelling in their games always proved lacking, leaving me either bored or weirded out in the end. Still, I was invested enough to still support their increasingly ambitious and interesting-looking projects, including minor Kickstarter pledges. This is how I ended up playing Our Lovely Escape – a small VN with choosable protagonist gender and three female romance interests, which appeared on Steam in late September 2019, after many long delays. Marketed in a way that suggested a dark twist to every heroine arc, hidden under a façade of a cute, New Game!-like story about an all-female game studio, it seemed to mix many elements I personally enjoy. What I got, however, is quite likely the worst Raine Work’s game to date and will stay in my mind as one of the most upsetting VNs I’ve read to date.

This passionate scene coming just a few minutes after Alexis’ drunken barfing session is a pretty solid representation of Our Lovely Escape’s romance

Atypically, I’ll start with Our Lovely Escape’s sex scenes – the main ones show up pretty early in the game, at the beginning of every route. They are also all happening in fairly uncomfortable circumstances: with both the protagonist and the heroine being heavily drunk after a party celebrating studio’s latest release, with very little build-up or romantic tension in the story leading up to it. In most scenarios, there will also be a second h-scene further down the line, usually even shorter and more generic than the first one. As it is often my impression with this kind of games, playing as a woman makes the creepy feel of the initial hookup a bit more bearable – otherwise the power balance, and even the protagonist’s status as an only guy in the studio make much of the prelude to heroine arcs pretty uncomfortable. Even in the yuri variants, however, I’m not sure the sex scenes serve any purpose at all – I’m not a huge fan of hentai, but I can’t remember the last time erotic content in a visual novel left me this indifferent, probably because I simply felt nothing for the characters involved at the point it happened. If you want to buy this game primarily as an eroge, it’s definitely not worth it.

                So, is the story any better? Well, not really. Because there’s barely any story to speak of. The game starts in a rather unassuming fashion, immediately introducing the protagonist – a new employee in a small gaming company making otome VNs – and his three female co-workers. The New Game! influences can be seen not only in the general setup, but even character designs: a shy and secretive Mayu closely resembles Hifumi and strict, professional Lissa gives a similar vibe to Rin. The undisciplined, childish Alexis is a bit of an exception, mostly because the New Game! girls were all meant to be likeable, with mostly positive traits outside of some minor quirks. The main problem with Our Lovely Escape’s cast is that while all of them hold really disturbing secrets, the first impressions they give are also pretty awful. I lost most interest in each of them even before their routes really started, finding their behaviour and the office drama they get into quite obnoxious. The game tries to be something of a bait-and-switch, but really underdelivers on the “bait” part – there’s no reason for the reader to care about any of the characters or get emotionally invested before things go awry, especially with how short and generic the common route is (less than an hour, with the whole game being at around 5 hours of content).

At first, the New Game! parallels are pretty uncanny…

After that, it only gets worse. Psychological horror works best when it introduces some relatable elements or interesting motivations for the characters. Even completely outlandish and brutal VNs such as euphoria can be compelling by creating interesting conflicts, like the dark urges of the protagonist he desperately tries to suppress. Here, the main character is a blank slate, without any interesting traits and a backstory that is only briefly touched upon (mostly consisting of being a childhood friend of Lissa, who watched over him/her for many years before they moved away from each other). The heroines are straight-up psychos, and are so in an obnoxious/edgy fashion that does not leave space for any real character developments of interesting twists. This also spoils the few “good” endings the game offers: knowing the context behind the heroine’s actions and attitudes makes the romantic moments equally or even more riveting than the macabre ones.

                At the same time, Our Lovely Escape also never really commits to its darker side, with the bloody moments never shown in CGs and no truly extreme content. The most disturbing scenes are definitely within Alexis’ route, which is also the only one with no good ending (just neutral and horrible ones), but even those do not introduce any ideas beyond the heroine being a homicidal maniac acting out with little to no provocation. It would be way more interesting if the protagonist was really at fault in some of these situations or proved unstable themselves, but it was really all about inconsistent, not very believable outbursts from the girls. The “plot twists” the game offered left me feeling upset, but for all the wrong reasons – similarly to Carpe Diem: Reboot, by the end I simply hated the story and everyone in it, rather than being unsettled in a meaningful way and feeling for the characters. This actually sets Our Lovely Escape as one of the least enjoyable VNs I’ve ever read story-wise. The minor issues, like some of the blind choices that require pure trial-and-error approach from you to reach your preferred routes and endings pale in comparison to the core issues with the game’s writing.

…but they’re very quickly replaced with empty edginess.

Contrasting with the deeply-underwhelming story, the game’s production values are really solid, even if the efforts of the team not always felt well-directed. In this, I’m referring mostly to Live-2D scenes, which show up in somewhat-random moments in both the common route and heroine routes, with relatively little impact. At the same time things like the h-scenes, which could really use some variety or extra visual flair, are very static. Otherwise, I don’t really have any complaints about the art: both visual design and quality of all the assets are really nice and consistent. The soundtrack was a little bit more of a mixed bag – while I didn’t dislike any of the tracks, some of the more dynamic ones, for example accompanying the previously-mentioned office drama, proved seriously distracting. I really prefer my VN music staying safely in the background, unless it’s really great and kicking in during crucial moments of the story. Here is managed to disrupt my reading experience on quite a few occasions.

                As you can imagine at this point, I can’t with a clear conscience recommend playing Our Lovely Escape – and this is a shame, because it was both a game I was seriously anticipating and one that had the potential to be really enjoyable. Psychological horror, even in its more trashy variants, is a fun genre and this VN only needed a little bit of depth and feeling of tension/entrapment to work. Hopefully, Reine Works can take some lessons from its failures and make sure their next move outside of the otome comfort zone is more successful. For readers… I can only suggest skipping out on this one – it’s not even interesting enough in its failures to be really worth experiencing. Truly a shame...

Final Rating: 2/5

Pros:
+ Decent-quality art

Cons:
- Unlikeable heroines
- Rushed story
- Works neither as romance nor as a horror
- Distracting music


VNDB Page
Buy Our Lovely Escape on Steam or Itch.io

Blog Update + My Visual Novel Fan Translation University Project

Hello there, all you good people still following my content-starved blog! There will be no regular review post this week (I’ll be catching up next week with one about Reine Work’s Our Lovely Escape, and hopefully a week after that with one of the long-overdue games sent to me for review), but I’ve wanted to take this opportunity to share the reasons behind the recent slowdown on the site and talk a bit my plans for the future. A warning: this will contain a lot of personal musings that most of you are probably not very interested in. However, I kind of need this opportunity to vent and reset. I’ll add a tl;dr version at the end of this post.

             Outside of my, not-extremely-successful attempt to jumpstart a new wave of activity on Fuwanovel, there have been a few other things happening behind the scenes. The major one was my academic project on visual novel fan translations, which led me to submitting a paper for an international fan studies conference in Cracow. Preparing the speech in English (this was the first time I wasn’t speaking in Polish on such an event), running a survey with people involved in fan translation projects… It all took a lot out of me and gave me little time and energy to actually enjoy VNs as such. It also coincided with a minor health issue, which despite its non-threatening nature made it impossible for me to sit straight for nearly two weeks – a truly infuriating thing when you should be working on your computer and are basically running out of time. This was probably a major factor which destroyed my motivation for working on the project, which in turn made it be the most painful and depressing one to date. I, however, still made my short presentation in the presence of prof. Matt Hills, one of the most influential researchers in my obscure field of study, and learned quite a lot from other speakers. Here’s some photographic proof, courtesy of my girlfriend who once more agreed to help me inflate my ego by documenting my speech. 😉

As you can see, I was asking the Heavens to help me and my listeners to get through those 20+ minutes of my horrible English accent. Not sure to what degree my prayers were heard, but at least there were no fatalities. Oh, and in the lower-left corner, it’s Matt Hills. That was both awesome and terrifying.

And here’s a rare moment where my conference ID wasn’t hanging backwards! You can see the fear in my eyes – one would think after nearly 10 similar presentations I’d be a little bit calmer, but it’s apparently in my nature to stress out over everything.

And here’s me taking one of two questions that were still possible to ask after I’ve used all the discussion time for my way-too-long PowerPoint slideshow. And yup, I will insert Flowers whenever that's even remotely appropriate. Suou x Rikka forever. You can't stop me!

             While, in general, my project was fruitful and I’m satisfied with my performance, I also ended up so physically and emotionally drained that I’ve ditched the other two days of the conference, just enjoying my time in Cracow. Even after coming back, I had a day of what could be described as a full-on breakdown before I kind of got my shit together. All this, of course, has some very real consequences for the blog: for quite a while, I didn’t have the time and energy to really read VNs. And, obviously, without any new material to cover, I didn’t write anything either. It’s the first time since establishing the Blogger site that I have no “emergency” posts to use or quick ideas to supplement more involved write-ups with, even despite switching to the biweekly schedule. And honestly, I don’t expect to write much in-advance anymore. The “one post every two weeks” frequency is here to stay and I’m going to be flexible about it, switching content and dates when necessary.

             The other thing is that I still want to make the blog a little bit more of my personal space. I’ve kept up the regular stream of content both to become a better writer and to prove a few things to myself. I think I’m satisfied with what I’ve achieved, and while I’m definitely not discarding the general profile of the blog and the responsibilities I’ve taken upon myself (like covering the games sent to me), I’m going to have fun with it too. Write silly stuff connected to the weeb culture and my peculiar experience with it. I’ve already hinted at this at the beginning of the summer, but I’m even more determined to make it happen now. No hobby I’ve picked up over the years was this intellectually stimulating and satisfying as this one and I want to do all I can to keep it this way – I can't let things go too stale. 

             And while I’m doing all this weird stuff and overthinking things, I hope you guys will stay and still read my crappy writing. Exploring the creativity and passion of EVN devs is not something I’ll ever get tired of, and I hope we can enjoy their stuff together for years to come. Thank you all for following my work, and until next week!

tl;dr I’ve been to a fan studies conference which, together with minor health issues, ate a month and a half of my life. I’ll get back to “serious” posting next week, returning to the bi-weekly schedule. I might sneak in some weird posts about Japanese popculture between “proper” EVN ones. EVNs are love, EVNs are life (still). See you next week for actual content!

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator Review (Free Visual Novel)

As it’s probably very clear by this point, I like visual novels. Like, a lot. I also happen to like KFC, which definitely places in my top 3 of fast food chains available here in Poland, occasionally coming very close to claiming that number 1 spot. The only thing stopping me from enjoying its antibiotic-filled, industrial chicken goodness every other day is the lack of convenient locales (in stark contrast to McDonald’s, as the closest one is in a very cosy corner just 10-minutes’ walk away from my place, just beckoning me to claim those coupons for cheap coffee). Thus, there should be nothing preventing me from enjoying a parody/advertisement VN aimed at stroking that unsatisfied urge for greasy, over-salted chicken treats. I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator, released on Steam two weeks ago and developed by a niche studio under the name Psyop, had the potential to not only be a whacky marketing tool for KFC, but also a fun joke VN – with the backing of a giant corporation and a team of not-completely-clueless people working on it, it could've easily exceeded everyone’s expectations. However, it really, really didn’t…

Whatever you might think about this game, it’s hard to argue with the extreme, masculine charm of its iteration of Colonel Sanders. Quite a… FILF? No… DILF? Ugh, nevermind…

 

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! was created with a very clear agenda in mind – it’s a device to promote KFC’s new mac and cheese dish and, more broadly, make you think about its blood-vessel-clogging menu for much of your reading experience. In this regard, it seems to be extremely successful on both macro and micro scale. It was the talk of the day on social media and even gaming sites for quite a while, achieving that for what was probably a tiny fraction of the cost of a traditional marketing campaign. It also really made me want to go to KFC, although that feeling was deeply bitter-sweet (bitter-salty?), as nearly none of the menu items featured in the game are a thing in the Eastern-European shithole I live in. We actually have some crappy “California” seasonal menu with pineapple in everything – a major turnoff, if you ask me. But, if I actually was in US, I’d be rising my cholesterol levels with that disgustingly-fatty pasta dish until I got sick of it – thus, I think the advert part works well enough.

                When it goes to the visual novel itself, it’s exactly the wacky collection of memes, caricatural characters and paper-thin plot you would expect it to be. Some say it’s just another pseudo-parody VN making fun of anime tropes, but those are really less prevalent than pure randomness. Also, all those absurd "gags" probably sounded way more fun in the script than they actually are after being brought to life. You start as a genderless student enrolled in a crash-course cooking academy, having to navigate your way through a number of “funny” choices in order to achieve two goals: show your fellow student, Colonel Sanders, that you’re a person worth his affection, and a chef good enough to become his business partner (both parts are connected to different choices and getting the cooking part right is actually a bit tricky). In all of it, there's a pretty clear message about simple cooking being supreme over snobbish culinary experiments, and Colonel Sander’s chicken dishes being exquisite, so I guess it conveys something akin to KFC’s driving philosophy. The ending you get mostly depends on whether you follow these "ideals" in your choices. There’s also a tiny bit of charisma to Sanders himself and the protagonist’s best friend, Miriam, and a few jokes connected to those two were actually amusing. The whole rest of the cast and the “main plot” itself are garbage.

The exaggerated, wacky characters and abundance of memes would not be a major issue if they were employed in witty, genuinely funny ways – they are not…

 

There are also other elements in I Love You, Colonel Sanders! that you would expect from this kind of meme game, like random game-overs (you can thankfully go back to the choice just by clicking “try again”) and over-the-top music. The latter might actually be the worst part of the whole experience – it gravitates between utterly generic and seriously obnoxious, with the loud cacophony that kicks in during all more intense moments (like the cook-off sections) being simply unbearable. Interestingly enough, the game also isn’t a dating sim by any definition – while you have to deal with a few timed choices (pretty annoying and unintuitive when it goes to which answers are the correct ones), there are no gameplay mechanics to speak of. From the technical viewpoint, it’s extremely limited even for a visual novel, with no manual save (this is thankfully not so problematic with just how short it is), no backlog and dreadfully bare-bones options menu – basically just sound sliders and two pre-set graphical levels. This probably stems from the fact that it wasn’t made in a dedicated visual novel engine (I assume it was done in Unity), but it’s still an embarrassment for a semi-experienced studio to ignore quality-of-life features to this degree. Options like textbox opacity (hope you like white text on white background), text speed or skip-read options are in every modern VN for a reason, and I find ignoring them unacceptable even in a game this short.

…I mean, your teacher is a talking Corgi! Sitting on a pedestal! That’s funny, right? Right???

 

If I can find something good about this VN, it would probably be visuals – most character designs are fun and assets are all-around solid. The variety of expressions on sprites is very satisfactory, and there are even some surprising traces of actual effort, like the alternative clothing made pretty much exclusively for the short ending sequence of the game. The opening animation could be described as pretty awesome and I’d be genuinely impressed if the VN itself was this vibrant. The fact it isn’t, and how messy its script is, makes me think that the production was rushed, without much time for devs to get really creative – which is a shame, but on the other hand, it's hard to argue with the memetic spread of this game and the generally-positive response it got. People were definitely amused by it, and that’s what the whole project was about. We can complain about how uninspired it is or how it lacks substance (unless you count chicken grease, there's a lot of that), but that doesn’t change the fact it was effective.

                And, as the last issue, there’s the immortal question of “what does it mean for VNs”? Unlike with the cases of DDLC or Devgru-p’s Hitler waifu game, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! enforces the image of visual novels as those whacky, shallow anime games not only through its outer appearance, but all of its content. It also, as mentioned before, mixes up what a dating sim and visual novel are, playing into popular assumptions. I’ll still ask all those crying about the damage to VNs image to calm down – I assure you, 99% of those that discount VNs as just waifu games for weebs wouldn’t be interested in them anyway. And, in the long run, the formula being used in all kinds of ways might be better than it being dead beyond our hermetic niche. I just hope that the next game of this kind will be just slightly more competent, showing at least a bit of the technical functionality and storytelling potential of modern VNs. It only takes a bit more effort to achieve that.

Final Score: 2/5

Pros:
+ Works as an advertisement
+ Good visuals
 
Cons:
- Mediocre humour
- Story? What Story?
- Music that will make your ears bleed
- Embarrassing lack of quality-of-life features 


VNDB Page
Play I Love You, Colonel Sanders! for free on Steam