EVN Chronicles' Steam Curator Wrap-up – Fall 2019 (Summer Meetings; Omnimus; Knife Sisters; The Far Rings; 4 Alice: Lorange Journey)

Hello and welcome to my seasonal Steam Curator Connect Wrap-up, where I’ll be looking at games sent to me for review through my Steam Curator profile during the last few months – particularly the shorter/simpler among them, for which I couldn’t make dedicated posts. This time, the quality of the VNs I’ve received was a positive surprise, with each title offering something interesting and most of them exceeding my expectations in some ways. The highlights of today’s list are definitely the virtual reality-themed thriller Omnimus and the uniquely-stylized, mildly-erotic queer VN Knife Sisters. However, all of the games I’ll be writing about are arguably worth your attention, so please stay with me while I explore their main perks and issues. As usual, links in each title will lead you straight to the Steam store page, so you can quickly check the games out at their source. Enjoy!

Summer Meetings

The growth of Mikołaj Spychał’s lineup of perfectly-generic romance VNs quite likely isn’t stopping any time soon, and his fourth game, Summer Meetings, is another incremental improvement to the previously-established formula. Much of the fun in his VNs come not from the very standard love stories, or especially from the minimalistic visuals (nearly no CGs and simple sprites), but from the ability to mess up the romance in an impressive number of ways. Dating a few girls at once without them knowing, cheating, randomly kissing the wrong girl at the concert you went to as a group… For people that just want to see the world burn, this might be the best opportunity since School Days (although without that significant bonus of hentai and/or gore).

                At the same time, the core story is solid enough for what it tries to be and the writing feels like a step up from all the author’s previous titles: it has a nice flow to it and the English script feels pretty much devoid of translation issues I’ve noticed in his earlier games. The five heroines are decently fleshed-out and even can surprise you in some ways – like the step-sister's willingness to keep the romance non-committal and even tolerating other girl being the protagonist’s primary focus. The main thing stopping me from fully recommending it is the price: for a VN this simple visually and with 5-6 hours of content, 10 dollars feels like an overkill. If you find it for half of that price, however, it’s a surprisingly fun way of burning one or two evenings.

Final Rating: Cautiously Recommended

Omnimus

Omnimus is probably the biggest positive surprise of today’s list: a cheap visual novel by a low-profile Russian studio that at first looked rather unassuming, but quickly managed to capture my attention with a high-quality intro. After that, it simply never stopped being well-produced and immersive. The opening segment efficiently introduces you to the setting: a near-future Earth on which, after a series of natural disasters and conflicts, the nation-states started decaying, making space for the rise of corporate power. From this broad picture we're immediately transitioning to our protagonist waking up from a coma, apparently paralyzed, only to find out that he’s been “volunteered” for a highly-ambitious virtual reality experiment. He then meets three other test subjects, with whom he’ll get involved in a highly-unpredictable intrigue with strong flavours of capitalist dystopia and transhumanism.

                While short and ultimately pretty simple (the plot is mostly linear and your choices have only a very limited impact on the major events), Omnimus do a few things very well. First, it effectively sustains a sense of tension while you’re navigating the virtual world, without knowing its real purpose or true intentions of the crucial actors involved in the story. Second, it makes the mystery plot rather complex and ambiguous – each reveal both clarifies certain things and makes you question the sincerity of those providing you with the information. Each of the two main forces driving the plot has their own agenda, not necessarily aligning with your best interest and you have to play knowing you’re your own best, and possibly only ally. There’s also a very minimalistic romance subplot for each of the two female characters you meet in the virtual reality – this is the source of one of my only complaints about the game, as getting the romance scenes requires making a perfect sequence of 9, very not-obvious choices, which is a major overkill. Other than that, though, Omnimus is just a very cool experience, which reads, looks and sounds very solid despite costing just 2 dollars. This is exactly the kind of quality and value proposition I like to see in EVNs by small studios, and I strongly encourage all of you to check it out and support the devs behind it.

Final Rating: Highly Recommended

Knife Sisters

Knife Sisters is a deeply unique VN experience for a variety of reasons. Its pencil-drawn, monochrome art is very distinct, but also surprisingly detailed and expressive. Its choice system, with the ability to respond immediately, stall to see different dialogue options or just wait out decisions altogether, represents real-life dialogue way better and more in-depth than most of the typical visual novel mechanics. Its approach to romance is unapologetically queer and polygamous, and full of eroticism, but never crosses the line into plain porn. The effecting mix is quite unlike anything I’ve read before, while it also isn’t extravagant or extreme in its context to the point it couldn’t be enjoyed by more or less anyone who isn’t allergic to LGBT+ themes.

                The game focuses on Leo, a non-binary individual whose life is turned upside-down by the arrival of their new roommate, a strange girl known as Dagger. Trying to pull Leo in strange occult rituals and apparent personal vendettas, she opens a horror plot going alongside a much more relaxed story of protagonist’s relationships and hook-ups. All this leaves quite a lot of space for player agency, both with the usual dialogue choices and decisions on what to do/who to meet at many point in the story, while always staying true to the main character’s core personality traits – general lack of interest in long-term relationships and laid-back nature, meaning they’ll always prioritize fun over building deep bonds. It’s not your usual love story, but is very believable and consistent in what it shows, and even wholesome in its own peculiar way, as it rewards being mindful of other people’s feelings and needs, despite the kinky and non-committal nature of what is happening between them and the protagonist.

                While I have some minor gripes with Knife Sisters, like the lack of certain quality-of-life features (the game is made in Unity and not a dedicated VN engine) and lack of control over certain events (for example, you can’t outright avoid many romantic interactions even when you want to), they are mostly irrelevant in comparison to sheer enjoyment factor it offers. It simply looks, sounds and reads to well for those issues to have a major impact and if it sounds like something you might enjoy, I wholeheartedly recommend giving it a chance.

Final Rating: Highly Recommended

The Far Rings

Getting a review copy of a free game is always a bit ironic, but in the case of The Far Rings, I can’t say I regret getting the curation request and the opportunity to share this game with others. This small sci-fi otome, co-authored by the game jam veteran Heiden (responsible for the semi-famous Helena’s Flowers, among other titles) offers a brief, but well-written and well-paced story about war and prejudice, with a totalitarian state in the background. The protagonist, Athena, is a doctor who went on a humanitarian aid mission to a planet invaded without provocation by her homeworld. There, her organisation’s camp is attacked by the local resistance and she is the only one to survive the resulting massacre. The story proper starts with Athena on a small spaceship, carrying both her and a prisoner – alien supposedly responsible for orchestrating the attack – back to her home platen, piloted by a young naval officer acting as the ship’s only crew. Before they can reach their destination, the player can discover the connections between Athena and those accompanying her on her journey, and maybe find an escape from the cycle of conflict and oppression forced upon then by her planet’s progressively more authoritarian and warmongering government.

                The Far Rings, while very short (around two hours of content), does many things well. The quickly-stablished setting and the reveals, both those related to heroes and Athena herself, are genuinely interesting. The protagonist is well fleshed out and her idealism clashes constantly with the attitudes of those around her, shaped by the pressure to conform and the atrocities of war. The aesthetic and sound, while not particularly flashy, are really well-done. Ignoring one naively-positive resolution to the story (I’m pretty sure that shouting at a homicidal warlord could have many results, but him backing down is the least probable one), it’s a thoroughly enjoyable experience, with the authors promising to expand on it further with a definitive version featuring an extra (true) ending. You might want to wait until that kicks in, but even now, for the generous price of nothing, it’s a visual novel absolutely worth trying out.

Final Rating: Recommended

4 Alice: Lorange Journey & Divine D.I.V.A

It’s arguably pretty futile to write here about games that were delisted since I’ve received my review copies, but in the case the author decides to restore them, I’ve decided to give them some coverage – also because they are something of a unique affair and this applies particularly to the first game in question, 4 Alice. That short story is written from the perspective of an autistic person interacting with other people like her, but whose disorders show different symptoms and levels of severity. It offers a very rare opportunity for to experience the thought process and perception of the world by someone on the autism spectrum without being overly focused on the attempts to educate people – its brief fantasy/horror plot about a group of girls stuck in a magical house could work without the quirks of its cast, but is made more interesting by their internal struggles and unusual behaviour.

                The second story, Divine D.I.V.A, is a bit less interesting – a simple wish-fulfilment story about a team of female mercenaries in the far future. Both games are also brought down by technical limitations: the simultaneous French and English text in both the story and menus is particularly jarring, killing the aesthetic of both titles (which is already very simple – they’re very basic interactive fiction with no character sprites and stock art). English translation is also pretty junky, but the experience of reading these stories made me believe the author had some potential and many things to say. If she polishes her approach to making the stories and returns to Steam, I’ll be quite interested in seeing what she comes up with.

Final Rating: Cautiously Recommended

And this would be it for today’s summary – the next one will be coming in February, hopefully with the winter season giving me the opportunity to go through some longer/more ambitious games that are still waiting to be covered on the blog. And there are some amazing-looking titles in my backlog, that I really want to give a proper look and share them with all of you. Until that happens, I hope you’ve all enjoyed today's list – see you in two weeks!

Soundless -A Modern Salem in Remote Area- Review (English Original Visual Novel)

There were few EVNs in the last few years that I’ve seen seriously hyped up by other VN fans and brought to my attention through multiple recommendations and positive reviews – particularly beyond titles by a handful of relatively well-known and respected creators such as ebi-hime. The game I’ll be writing about today, Soundless -A Modern Salem in Remote Area-, is one of such exceptions, enthusiastic opinions about which intrigued me to a major degree, even though it ended up being two years before I finally picked it up. And this is not where the curious and unusual things about it end: this freeware visual novel was released in late 2017 by a small circle under the name of Milk+ and is heavily influenced by the denpa subgenre of horror – one reliant on distortion of reality and chains of bizarre events, true meaning of which is usually hidden under multiple layers of mystery. It mimics extremely well the visual style and climate of the early 2000s’ Japanese games, offering a now rarely-seen call-back to parts of visual novel history highly nostalgic to many fans. And thankfully, there’s a lot more to it than just the interesting stylisation and riding on memories of the past…

Soundless is not an experience for those faint of heart, but is more about psychological abuse and social exclusion than plain violence

 

Soundless offers a multi-layered story and some of its themes are impossible to talk about without major spoilers, which I’ll do my best to avoid. Most of the main plot, however, consistently revolves around Mercy, an ostracized teenage girl living a miserable life in an isolated village led by a strange religious cult. Her apparent mental illness, involving various hallucinations and delusions, led her to being embraced by the community as a mystic, however, when a certain chain of events turned her visions dark and disturbing, she was proclaimed a curse-bearer and started being perceived as a danger. Abused both by the village’s “clergy” and the children in her school, she suffers through incredible pain and loneliness – until a new holy woman, appearing in the village after the tragic death of the previous one, shows her kindness no one was willing to offer for years. All this, however, is just a surface of a very dense story, taking many unpredictable turns and slowly revealing the meaning behind various developments and subplots. Then, the last missing parts of the puzzle are provided through bonus content, uncovering the final set of mysteries connected to the game’s setting and crucial characters.

                Soundless’ most immediate themes are those of mental illness and social exclusion – we observe the whole story through the distorted lens of Mercy’s mind, which warps the reality around her in a disturbing fashion. She’s not really an unreliable narrator, but one that filters the world through a layer of dark delusions and deeply-internalized identity of a cursed person, who deserves being excluded due to her impurity. It’s an excruciating study of scapegoating, in a way more disturbing than the witch trials the game’s title references through its long-term and systematic nature. It’s not a story of a violent incident, but an ever-growing spiral of abuse targeting a person stripped from their human dignity and protection connected to being part of the community. Mercy is an outcast, but is also necessary as a symbol – a personification of “the other”, a visible threat cementing the unity of other villagers under their religious leader. The game approaches this topic in a detailed and gruesome manner, before it shifts to other, similarly disturbing issues.

Soundless doesn’t shy away from using strange visual effects and distorting the story to represent the protagonist’s mental illness, but it's hard to accuse it of prioritizing form over substance

 

Writing in Soundless can be only described as excellent. Above all, the game excels at creating a dense, depressing atmosphere of entrapment and hopelessness that dominate Mercy’s life. Following her struggle was disturbing and captivating at the same time and when I was expecting the story to reach a predictably-grim conclusion, it struck me with a serious of surprises, most of which I didn’t even vaguely anticipate. Other major characters, such as Delilah, the heir of one of the prestigious clergy families, are interesting and believable enough to give the story proper depth. From the title, one could easily expect Soundless to be just a tale of faceless mob prosecuting a defenceless girl, but Mercy’s tragedy is very personalized and reflected in her interactions with crucial members of the community. Most of them also have roles to play in the plot’s sudden turns.

                If I had to complain about something in the context of Soundless’ story, it would be its final chapter, focusing on what can be described as light yuri romance between the protagonist and Auma, a holy woman newly-arrived in the village and insistent on ignoring Mercy's status as a pariah. While it has its own set of themes, it feels fairly disconnected with the flow and tone of the previous story segments. It’s also where the game's denpa stylisation kicks in the hardest, with whole segments presented through strange collages and child-like drawings, coupled with heavily distorted dialogue. While I don't think it was bad by any definition, it was hard for me to adjust to the new direction of the story and I enjoyed it less than everything that came before it. It also underlines the fact that Soundless is probably not for everyone – between its disturbing moments and sheer weirdness and confusion that occasionally kick in, I can easily imagine some readers finding it pretentious or overbearing.

The yuri subplot which develops in the latter half of the game is probably one of its weaker parts and evolves into a really strange and confusing direction

 

Presentation-wise, Soundless truly feels more like an early-2000s Japanese doujin than a modern VN, despite being made in Ren'Py. The photographic backgrounds, the style of the drawings, NVL text display and even the UI just scream “old Japanese VN”, and if someone showed it to me as an obscure fan-translated title, I’d have no reason to doubt their word. This mimicry is not just kitsch imitation though, as Soundless really captures and spirit and thick climate of the better VNs of that era, while telling a really original and impactful story. It’s also far from being stale or unimaginative, mixing various techniques (like full-colour and sepia drawings) and artstyles depending on what fits specific situations. The relative simplicity of the presentation leaves a lot of space for the excellent prose to do its job, while the minimalistic music and creepy sound effects further enhance the overall climate. In this, it reminds me of another title I’ve read recently, Nitroplus’ Phenomeno – just with a much more robust story and many more things to say.

                As it’s pretty clear by this point, I enjoyed Soundless a lot and consider it easily one of the best horror EVNs I’ve read so far. For such a small (6-8 hours of reading) game, and one so simple from the technical standpoint, it’s an impressive storytelling achievement and stands out from most VNs in its category. It was obviously crafted with a lot of care and the authors improved upon their initial work with the 1.2 and 2.0 versions, the latter published a year after the initial release of the game. As a free title, I see little reason for any VN fan to not give it a chance – unless the denpa horror formula is really not your thing. And if it is something you particularly enjoy, this game is an absolute must-read.

 
Final Rating: 4/5
 
Pros:
+ Engaging, multi-layered narrative
+ Great sense of tension
+ Effective handling of multiple dark themes
 
Cons:
- Tiny resolution and (purposefully) clunky feel
- Goes slightly off the rails at the end


VNDB Page
Download Soundless for free on Itch.io

Maggot Baits Review (Japanese Visual Novel)

Maggot Baits is something of a Holy Grail of dark eroge, highly anticipated by guro fans within the Western VN community and often hyped as the greatest achievement of the company that produced it, Clock Up. As one the most gruesome VNs ever produced, and quite likely the most brutal one ever brought to the West, it contains dozens upon dozens of violent sex scenes, all accompanied by intricate CGs, with small variations in them so numerable that they sum to nearly 2500 unique illustrations. All of that placed in a highly-unique, modern-fantasy setting populated by amazingly-crafted characters and tackling interesting philosophical and religious topics. While it’s pretty much the furthest possible thing from what I usually write about on this blog, few games intrigued me as much as this one, particularly after my inconsistent, but extremely interesting experience with Clock Up’s another famous title, euphoria. Everything I’ve heard about Maggot Baits suggested that it was both more extreme and overall better than studio’s other bestseller, and after reading it to completion, I felt the need to share my thoughts about it in detail. Both because it’s a pretty fascinating case of strengths and pitfalls of this breed of eroge, and to warn those interested in it as a piece of storytelling – while in many ways an incredible achievement, this game is extremely hard to recommend for a “normie” reader such as myself. Why is that exactly?

                Before I go into story details, it’s most important to deal with Maggot Baits’ greatest issue – its structure and general storytelling formula. This game is, at its core, a guro nukige and it’s incredibly dedicated to this template. It throws h-scenes at you at very consistent intervals, disregarding whatever might be going on in the story and sacrificing any sense of pacing or tension so it can constantly offer a new piece of violent hentai. Quite often, the scenes are not important for, or even directly connected to what’s happening in the plot, pretty much pausing the whole narrative to insert a new piece of fanservice. In this, it goes even further than euphoria, which did a much better job intertwining its scenes with the story and had a bit more restraint in the most dramatic and meaningful parts of the plot. Maggot Baits even goes to the length of adding a major side-branch in the first chapter of the story, which is nothing but 3-4 hours of futanari porn leading to a bad ending. All of it narratively empty and pretty much derailing your experience if you expect any kind of interesting reveals or a meaningful conclusion within it. I still don’t understand why it was a part of the main story, and especially inserted so early in the game, before you build any connection to the characters involved or can understand the full implications of what is happening in those scenes. 

 

Maggot Baits’ possibly greatest strength lays in its characters – both “heroes” and “villains” have complex motivations and their actions, as cruel as they might be, are hardly ever plain good or evil

 

There’s also one more crucial issue that should be made clear for anyone approaching this game simply looking for a dark, gore-filled story. The fetish-serving character of Maggot Baits means it’s full of a very specific brand of gore – sexualized violence on female characters. The near-immortality of the witches is a useful gimmick allowing the game's creators to push the abuse to its logical boundaries without killing off characters every time (although even this goes with a caveat that rape is way more prevalent in the h-scenes than actual bloody torture). While there’s a bit of general blood and guts, and a bit of chuunige-style fighting, most of it is conveyed in the form of text rather than shown in CGs. The massive focus on porn also means the actual story content is smaller and less developed than both the length of the game (20+ hours) and the incredible amount of visual assets would suggest. I’ve spent hours simply skipping through h-scenes that didn’t seem to have any plot relevance and quickly scanning through those that I felt could offer some bits of worthwhile information or character development, trying to get to the next story bit. While in euphoria one could argue there was some kind of balance between the story and hentai, here all the efforts were ultimately aimed at serving the guro porn, with the narrative being the icing on top of it and never really prioritized. And that’s to the point where even some guro fans might find the experience a bit overindulgent and tedious – there’s only that much stimuli you can take in before going numb.

                At the same time, it’s absolutely impossible to argue with the game’s production quality. The writing is excellent, including the greatest h-scene text I’ve seen to date. While the visuals left me mostly indifferent after a short while, despite their truly extreme and detailed nature, the gruesome, vivid descriptions accompanying them did a good job at keeping me uneasy. In many ways it surpassed writing of euphoria, really focusing on the psychological dynamic of the torture scenes rather than just absurd lines spewed by the heroines (those are still present, but I’m not sure that part of h-scene dialogue can be done in a way that doesn’t feel absurd to me). All of it is accompanied by extremely unsettling and suggestive voice acting and sounds, both done in a way that is probably hard to find anywhere outside of Clock Up games. Music is properly gritty and dynamic, underlining the brutal and hopeless atmosphere of the whole experience.

The game’s writing is, for the most part, stellar, even if it can’t escape some awkward exposition and over-the-top edginess

 

But, I haven’t even started on what this game is exactly about? Maybe I’m subconsciously avoiding this part, as it’s both not easy to explain and hard to talk about without spoilers. The general outline features Tsunuga Shougo, a former policeman, on an extremely-bloody path of revenge against powers controlling Kantou’s Pandemonium – a lawless city carved out of modern Japan, infested by powerful, supernatural beings known as Disaster’s Witches. Those apparently immortal women, unbeatable through conventional means, are what transformed the Pandemonium into an exterritorial den of vice and murder, populated by the worst scum this world knows – their origins and purpose, however, are a complete mystery to both the outside world and the witches themselves. During the game’s plot Tsunuga’s self-destructive quest, aided by a few of the witches and most closely connected to the one known as Carol, will (accidentally) uncover the meaning behind the existence of Pandemonium and all the insane happenings within it. And all of this happens with the brutal "witch hunts", capturing the seemingly-invincible women and thoroughly testing the limits of their immortal bodies, going on in the background.

                The setup, despite relying on some tired eroge tropes (primarily “the magic of semen”, which serves as one of the main sources of power for the witches), is pretty awesome and the primary characters in the story are even better. There’s little place for black and white morality in Maggot Baits’ world, with even the protagonist and the three “good” witches allied with him committing various atrocities. At the same time, outside of random, sadistic henchmen and thugs, there’s also no evil for the sake of evil. Shimon, the main antagonist of the story, is a prime example of this, having his hands in some incredibly despicable acts, but doing all of them as part of his work towards a very surprising and arguably noble goal. Even the other memorable villain, the brutal witch Sandy, proves to be much more than just a sadist murdering people and hunting her own kind for sports, despite the first impression she gives. As the story progresses, few things in Pandemonium stay as they first appeared to be and I found most of the twists and reveals the game offered quite fantastic.

The love story component of the game is both well-done and in line with the dark, tragic nature of its setting, despite a few questionable narrative choices

 

There’s also the romantic subplot between Shougo and Carol, the thing which earned the game its “pure love story” categorisation on VNDB. This develops between two playthroughs: after you finish the game for the first time and reach the first proper ending (at this point there’s just one choice in the whole game, leading to the aforementioned futanari side-arc), you get a few extra choices unlocked, making it possible to steer Shougo in a slightly different direction. This allows for the troubled romantic subplot to blossom and the game to reach its true ending – not necessarily “better” than the first one when it goes to its overall tone, but more fulfilling from the viewpoint of the protagonist. There’s actually a very interesting dynamic between the two endings, as the first one introduces some extremely intriguing religious and philosophical themes, like various understandings and meanings of love, and concludes the story with a utopia being born out of the hell of Kantou’s Pandemonium. For me, it was absolutely the most engrossing and thought-provoking moment in the game – to the point that the true ending, even though it iterated on the first one's ideas and featured a few interesting twists of its own, felt kind of bland in comparison.

                And all of this would be truly great, if not cut into tiny pieces by the relentless stream of h-content. The game bends itself at every turn to squeeze in additional fanservice and outdo itself in its extreme nature. Sometimes it’s truly unique and disturbing, sometimes plain laughable (my personal favourite being the pig sex scene from the aforementioned futanari arc). Most importantly, though, it’s simply not worth going through for anyone reading VNs for the story and not being specifically interested in guro porn. I don’t regret reading Maggot Baits, as I was simply too curious to not check it out, but it’s quite likely the last game of this type and the last Clock Up title I’ll ever read. And ultimately, I can only suggest avoiding those to the vast majority of VN readers – while euphoria had its share of problems, it compensated for it with the excellent climate and by expertly integrating much of its h-content with the flow and leading themes of its story. This game, on the other hand, is just a dark nukige – a damn good one, but truly worthwhile only for the very specific subset of readers for whom guro is a reward in itself, and the story is just a fun bonus. If that’s you, you can grab this game without a second thought. If not… There are infinitely better ways to spend 45 dollars and 20+ hours of your time.

 
Final Rating: 3/5
 
Pros:
+ Awesome quality of the visuals
+ Tons of CGs
+ Excellent characters
+ Great Soundtrack
+ Serious approach to its main themes

Cons:
- No consideration for pacing
- …like, none at all
- A lot of h-scenes feel forced and repetitive


VNDB page
Buy Maggot Baits on MagngaGamer Store