Highway Blossoms has a fantastic story. It's genuinely really good for a cute little road trip/treasure hunting story with two disaster lesbians. The visuals are good, the writing is alright, the voice acting is only slightly grating at certain times, the music is fine, and there's even some optional smut for the people who don't just want to experience a wholesome story.

Now you might read that and then ask "Why did you only give it 2 stars? Is it not a good game with all that praise?" and that's the thing. It's not a game. Highway Blossoms is a prime thing to point at when it comes to the whole "What makes something a game" argument.

I'm not playing a game when I play through Highway Blossoms, I'm reading a book but instead of flipping a page every few minutes I'm mashing spacebar a couple thousand times. The story is good but you're not acting in it, you're just a third party. There's no action the player can take to do anything, you're just reading a book or listening to the characters speak to one another. There is no gameplay. It does not exist.

I think Highway Blossoms is a beautiful and really engaging story with all sorts of twists and turns. And I do recommend you give it a read. But I wish that way to experience it was as an anime, or a short mini series, or a book. Or anything that doesn't destroy your mouse or your keyboard to read. It took me about 10 hours to finish, but it probably could be read through in about 9. After that it'll sit in your steam library for the rest of time. Because past your first reading, there's no reason to go back.

A short visual novel about the developing relationship of a two woman that happen to meet while one is on a road trip dealing with the recent loss of her grandpa and the other is hunting treasure. Decently written but doesn't spend enough time with what matters or adds to the main women's characterizations, instead often focused on bad or ridiculous elements, seems to forget about or ignore what should be more important parts, and falls into too many cliches. Nothing special artwork wise but the voice acting is good.

A large part of the story is focused on a ridiculous treasure hunt road trip that would be ok serving as a macguffin just to bring the women together at first, but with so much time spent finding different parts of the treasure, introducing a weird and unlikable side character and her group as people looking for the treasure and apparently related to the guy who hid it, and actually having the characters find the treasure but it never really mattering or meaning anything to the plot really makes it seems like any other excuse to have the characters together would have made more sense. Looking for the treasure also involves them trespassing on native American territory to try to find gold and the more unlikable side character wanting to blow up landmarks and for no real reason being the only ones to find the parts of the treasure compared to massive crowds of other people looking just because Amber has read some landmark/road attraction flyers and pamphlets while on other trips in the past. There are multiple parts of the plot that just seem to get dropped where you don't know what one of the characters was doing when she says she will be away for a few hours to get a surprise for the other one, you never really learn what Marina wanted the treasure for even though it seemed that the question created awkwardness at first but was then forgotten about, Amber's issues with being in a relationship while dealing with her Grandpa's recent death both seem a bit ridiculous and overblown in a way that isn't really addressed well more so when it portrays her in a more abusive way at some parts.

There seems to be a problem with the game, that has lasted for some time now, where the achievements just don't unlock. One scene had one of the character being removed for a few lines with some placeholder text put over where they used to be saying the game was unable to find a certain image.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1675673408284278784