So far I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit. Here’s a few highlights, after playing v0.3.
The game is great at pulling your emotional strings. The intro song is beautiful, the creepy scene makes you feel uncomfortable, “I have a degree in Psychology and I couldn’t figure her out” makes you laugh, Natsumi accepting herself is heartwarming. It’s currently light on H content but I understand that it’s an early version.
I like the MC’s lack of self-control. It plays well with the VN genre, where the players themselves have such a weak control over the actions of the MC.
Is Nova a hallucination? Is she real? I love how well this plays with the protag’s issues.
The user interface is visually cluttered, and I feel like most buttons there could be merged. In my humble opinion, something like this would work well:
- Visual indicator of the time of the day at the top right. Clicking it should skip time (so you don’t need to go to the bed for that.) It’s where most interface elements are.
- Day of the week right below that indicator.
- Map button right below the above. It would be great if its menu allowed you to go to a specific room/area of the uni/house, without relying on that bottom “window” to do so.
- Quest button right below it.
- “Engine” button below it. Clicking it would bring up a menu with the following tabs: settings; save game; load game; history, including a “memories” button; and the current contents of the lotus menu. Pressing Esc could bring this menu up, on the last tab, so you’d get more visibility for your links (“rate this game”, Discord channel, etc.) Keyboard shortcuts for each tab would be really nice.
- “Back”, “auto” and “skip” buttons. Or dunno, they could be placed inside the menu above, they could be included into the “settings” tab of the menu proposed above.
This is based on playing the game from a computer but, if the mobile interface is similar, I believe that it would improve it too (since space is at premium on a phone screen). Specially because the art of the game is pretty, so the least amount of things between you and the art, the better.
Should I feel bad for hating the principal?