ExcelElmira の最近のレビュー

Disclaimer: I've never played any other visual novel / dating sim before. I wrote this review after finishing the game twice (once blind and once with a guide).

Pros:

• Beautiful visuals (especially the backgrounds)
  
• Amazing soundtrack -- Not only does the music actually sound good, but it also perfectly matches the atmosphere changes throughout the game. When you're in trouble, a heavy metal guitar riff plays. When you're in a romantic moment, a smooth piano tune plays. AAA studios could learn from this sound design.
  
• The choices you make in the game matter a lot for the story. And it's a pretty good story (for a visual novel, I guess). The game is played over 7 days and in my two playthroughs, the last 2-3 days were completely different (and there was already a lot of differences in the first 4-5 days).
  
• Sometimes the game gets pretty romantic / philosophical / deep.
  
• I think it allows a people to learn about Russian culture. There's a lot of references throught the game to Russian culture and if you google them a bit, you will learn even more. Like, this game makes me want to travel Russian countryside and eat Russian food ...
  
• Extensive achievement / collection system -- I might take a short break now, but I definitely want to replay this game again in the future to get more endings / scenes.

Cons:

• Few choices -- While the choices in the game matter a lot, there's not many of them. I can't count the times when the protagonist just did / said something dumb / rude and I didn't have any way to influence that. That felt very annoying.
  
• It seems like no character in the game has a sense of humour. I don't think I ever laughed once playing this game. Some of the characters joke in-game, but it's not funny for the player nor for the other characters (who seem to get offended very easily at everything).
  
• Bad translation -- Some phrases just sound weird after they were translated from Russian to English. On top of that, there is a lot of typos.
  
• Boring dialogue -- On the second playthrough I noticed how often the dialogue is so stupid. It is usually something like this:
  
  Semyon: Don't you think this is ...
  Semyon: ... weird?
  Slavya: What is weird?
  Semyon: Nothing.
  Slavya: What do you mean 'nothing'?
  Semyon: What do you mean 'what'?
  Slavya: Nevermind.
  Semyon: It's just ...
  Semyon: ... it's like ...
  Slavya: It's like what?
  Semyon: I don't know.
  Slavya: I don't know either.
  
  On top of that, between each line, you have 3 lines of internal monologue like: "I wonder what will she say next. She is usually not so talkative. I didn't expect to find her here. It's such a beautiful day today."

I knew from the other reviews that there are no jumpscares (which is true), but I was really scared nonetheless. The atmosphere and the story really sent shivers down my spine.
In my opinion, the story itself only gets scary at the very end.

It's not a bad game, but it doesn't deserve all the praise it's getting.

The movement is stutter-y, making it look like I get massive fps drops (while I only get minor fps drops). And also it makes my cooling fans spin faster than Fallout 4. For a simple 2D platformer, that's not the best optimization.

The controls are kind of clunky. You use WASD + Spacebar for movement. You dash by pressing enter and you select the direction of your dash with the mouse, requiring you to have 3 hands (of course you can't change that). After a while I discovered that you can also dash with the left mouse button (but this wasn't written anywhere).

Of course there's also a lot of good about this game (mostly the price), but you can read about it in other reviews.

Positives:
+ Art is very nice
+ Story seems to be pretty branching

Negatives:
- I don't know how to use the MacBook UI
- Dialogue options reminiscent of Fallout 4