With Both Eyes Closed's landing page features a few cool pieces of animation, and I hoped the VN would be just as polished.

However, I found the build to be lackluster in all other departments. The art itself does feature in the VN, but it's not utilized in ways that optimally support the game, and honestly came off a bit clickbatey. 

The writing likes to circle around to talking about the same thing in slightly different ways (the number of times the protagonists talks about the pine trees alone!), which contributes to this VN feeling super slow-paced.  I appreciate a lengthy first build of a VN, but the length doesn't translate into development, and for a VN tagged as psych horror, there wasn't a lot of tension being built up.

In addition, the characters feel kinda hollow and tropey, and where the dialogue could be a nice break from all the narration, instead serves mainly to front the exposition. 

All in all, I would encourage the devs to thin out the narrative quite a bit. What could be a decent set up for a horror novel won't do any good if you can't keep the reader's attention through the first build

Rating: 2/5