At times, The Leveret Spirit… doesn’t feel like a particularly serious work. It’s a snapshot of a time from only 15 years ago, but of a very different internet, centering around a very specific sort of online community / friend group that has long since disappeared - and of how, in spite of the supposed lightheartedness of these online relationships (and of the way this work portrays them at first), the emotions behind them are very much real, and things can quickly spiral out of control.
After all, online worlds make it that much easier to hide the real emotions behind the screen - people put on acts and pretend their problems aren’t as serious as they are, and no one can really call them out on it because interpersonal communication is so much more limited over this medium. When dealing with static avatars, subtle expressions and gestures are replaced with a combination of preset moves - emotes, kaomoji, text formatting, and even some silly manipulations of one’s in-game avatar which communities agree mean certain things (while it doesn’t show up in this VN, something that comes to mind is repeated use of crouching/pressing the shift key as either showing friendliness, or as ‘teabagging’ one’s opponents).
Now, the reason I just ranted about this for two paragraphs is because I think it’s this specific form of online interaction and relationship which The Leveret Spirit manages to get across really well - through a mixture of clever presentation tricks and sprite animations, it bring back memories to anyone who’s been there in these types of old online communities - or who’s been even remotely adjacent to them. It’s really good stuff.
I do think the VN does ‘shoot itself in the foot’ at times, so to speak, by swapping between these sorts of rigid game-ified interactions for a far more traditional format - you’ll read a sentence about the MC expressing an emotion via an emote, before the narration suddenly swaps out as though the MC was really experiencing the scene - right down to characters’ subtle gestures and movements which could never really be seen within game. While I understand the desire for more traditional prose and descriptions of character emotions at times, I think it ultimately does a disservice to the game’s ability to capture online interactions and cheapens them somewhat.
It might be tricky to write these sorts of interactions in a compelling manner and to have them make up the bulk of the character actions, but the writing on display here is strong enough that I do think the team has the ability to make it work.
I haven’t talked much about the plot much yet, but I did enjoy it quite a bit - the characters are both realistic and relatable, and by the time the interpersonal drama came along I genuinely wasn’t sure who to side with - it’s one of those situations where no one’s really in the right, and everyone sucks in different regards - but the one thing for sure is that both characters come out of it hurting, which makes for the best type of character drama.
That said, I think the overarching narrative of the secret quest is a bit weaker, specifically because it felt quite a bit less believable than everything else. It’s still solid, and I like the idea of the rogue dev keeping it in in spite of it being controversial, but it all feels a bit arbitrary, and as though it’d have been discovered only a few weeks after the game released, rather than only a few months before its shutdown. That said, it’s far from a serious problem, and I think the way the story elegantly handles the online relationships involved with all of their nuances more than makes up for it.
Oh and the art is awesome. I forgot to mention it but it’s really really good. Great work!