Recommended by FernandTheFresh as part of this list.
[Content Warning: The Song of Saya (and by extension, what will be discussed in this review) contains content pertaining to sexual assault, gratuitous violence, and lolicon content. Read at your own discretion.]
An endless, twisting expanse of flesh and bone beneath a sky void of color and clouds. The sound of sinew creaking beneath footsteps as a wriggling mass of organs and eyeballs crawls past, speaking in tongues as endless mouths babble at you incessantly in a sickening farce resembling human speech. In this endless labyrinth of parodical biology, where every street looks like a Mandelbrot Fractal of bone and pus, every hallway the stifling intestine of some otherworldly leviathan, every room a humid mess of muscle and putrid, rotting skin, there is a girl, untarnished by this hell of red pulp and twitching tendons. Is she an oasis in this unrelenting terrorscape, or a sign of something far, far worse?
This is the premise of The Song of Saya. After getting into a near-fatal car accident and receiving an experimental brain surgery, Fuminori Sakisaka gains an extreme form of agnosia where everything he sees looks like its made of flesh and organs, everyone he meets looks like they stepped out of John Carpenter's "The Thing", and everything he smells and tastes is like raw sewage. The only thing keeping Fuminori from ending his own life is a mysterious young girl named Saya, who is the sole thing in Fuminori's terrorscape that still looks human. Right out the gate, The Song of Saya has a strong central hook. The horror is visceral and palpable from minute zero, the soundtrack is blaring this horrific Noise Rock present in even the downtempo tracks, and the presence of Saya brings up a lot of questions for the reader to consider within the first 5 minutes: Why is she untouched? What is her importance to Fuminori? If she's the only thing that looks human, what do people who aren't Fuminori perceive her as? Anyways, right after she's introduced, Fuminori is shown plowing Saya the Cronenberg Loli in a poorly-written sex scene, and I turn the game off.
Yeah, it's one of those.
While I'm no stranger to the Visual Novel medium's fraught relationship with eroge content, The Song of Saya's sheer graphic gratuitousness and general unpleasantness is what keeps it from really being a stand-out horror story. Beyond the well-rendered visceral imagery and intriguing cosmic horror elements, the relationship between Fuminori and Saya that serves as the emotional core of the plot is actually quite compelling. We watch their twisted relationship bloom as Fuminori slowly loses his humanity and morals as he descends deeper in love with Saya, and likewise, Saya slowly gains humanity in both the best and worst ways possible. In most good horror, it's that human emotional core at the center that makes it all work. Unfortunately, The Song of Saya is no Cronenberg's "The Fly", and is more analogous to something like "Mai-chan's Daily Life", or "A Serbian Film." It's a story full of absolutely abhorrent material, not limited to Cannibalism, Rape and implicit Pedophilia. Even barring Fuminori's agnosia, why he's going on about the beauty of someone that looks like a child to him and having sex with a pile of pig guts that resembles a child in his eyes is something that is not only never questioned by the narrative, but is something deliberately played up for eroticism by the narrative in its many grotesque sex scenes (Author's Note: Some people online will tell you that you are missing out on the full experience by playing the censored version on Steam. These people are not to be trusted, and you should steer clear of them. The only thing the Steam release removes is all the unnecessary sex scenes that are largely meant for the player to find erotic, and you are missing literally nothing by playing without the 18+ Patch).
Even barring that (which is a lot to bar if I'm being honest with you here), there's also two rape scenes also played for eroticism, one also including the lolicon content. While they do move the plot forward in a sense, even with the edited Steam release you can tell that these scenes were paragraphs of erotica meant to primarily titillate, while any implicit horror or plot impact is a secondary concern, which is a different kind of disgusting from the cannibalism and Meat-O-Vision the reader is subjected to. All of this taints The Song of Saya's other strengths, such as its soundtrack, its art, and its genuine moments of horror both subtle and overt, making The Song of Saya an incredibly hard sell to all but those with the absolute highest tolerance for quote un-quote "weeb shit". If it wasn't for this list, I probably wouldn't have ever touched this game. Which is why it's honestly kind of a bummer that if you took the overtly exploitative content out of the equation, The Song of Saya would probably be the best introductory Visual Novel for newcomers to the Visual Novel medium: it's short, it's easily accessible, and it manages to show off a lot of the medium's strengths without being too much of a slog. It's just a shame that all these qualities are in service of The Song of Saya. There are better visual novels for getting into the medium, and there are better cosmic horror stories that won't get you put on a watchlist. Steer clear, because you're not missing much.
...The soundtrack is pretty good though, give that a listen.
[Content Warning: The Song of Saya (and by extension, what will be discussed in this review) contains content pertaining to sexual assault, gratuitous violence, and lolicon content. Read at your own discretion.]
An endless, twisting expanse of flesh and bone beneath a sky void of color and clouds. The sound of sinew creaking beneath footsteps as a wriggling mass of organs and eyeballs crawls past, speaking in tongues as endless mouths babble at you incessantly in a sickening farce resembling human speech. In this endless labyrinth of parodical biology, where every street looks like a Mandelbrot Fractal of bone and pus, every hallway the stifling intestine of some otherworldly leviathan, every room a humid mess of muscle and putrid, rotting skin, there is a girl, untarnished by this hell of red pulp and twitching tendons. Is she an oasis in this unrelenting terrorscape, or a sign of something far, far worse?
This is the premise of The Song of Saya. After getting into a near-fatal car accident and receiving an experimental brain surgery, Fuminori Sakisaka gains an extreme form of agnosia where everything he sees looks like its made of flesh and organs, everyone he meets looks like they stepped out of John Carpenter's "The Thing", and everything he smells and tastes is like raw sewage. The only thing keeping Fuminori from ending his own life is a mysterious young girl named Saya, who is the sole thing in Fuminori's terrorscape that still looks human. Right out the gate, The Song of Saya has a strong central hook. The horror is visceral and palpable from minute zero, the soundtrack is blaring this horrific Noise Rock present in even the downtempo tracks, and the presence of Saya brings up a lot of questions for the reader to consider within the first 5 minutes: Why is she untouched? What is her importance to Fuminori? If she's the only thing that looks human, what do people who aren't Fuminori perceive her as? Anyways, right after she's introduced, Fuminori is shown plowing Saya the Cronenberg Loli in a poorly-written sex scene, and I turn the game off.
Yeah, it's one of those.
While I'm no stranger to the Visual Novel medium's fraught relationship with eroge content, The Song of Saya's sheer graphic gratuitousness and general unpleasantness is what keeps it from really being a stand-out horror story. Beyond the well-rendered visceral imagery and intriguing cosmic horror elements, the relationship between Fuminori and Saya that serves as the emotional core of the plot is actually quite compelling. We watch their twisted relationship bloom as Fuminori slowly loses his humanity and morals as he descends deeper in love with Saya, and likewise, Saya slowly gains humanity in both the best and worst ways possible. In most good horror, it's that human emotional core at the center that makes it all work. Unfortunately, The Song of Saya is no Cronenberg's "The Fly", and is more analogous to something like "Mai-chan's Daily Life", or "A Serbian Film." It's a story full of absolutely abhorrent material, not limited to Cannibalism, Rape and implicit Pedophilia. Even barring Fuminori's agnosia, why he's going on about the beauty of someone that looks like a child to him and having sex with a pile of pig guts that resembles a child in his eyes is something that is not only never questioned by the narrative, but is something deliberately played up for eroticism by the narrative in its many grotesque sex scenes (Author's Note: Some people online will tell you that you are missing out on the full experience by playing the censored version on Steam. These people are not to be trusted, and you should steer clear of them. The only thing the Steam release removes is all the unnecessary sex scenes that are largely meant for the player to find erotic, and you are missing literally nothing by playing without the 18+ Patch).
Even barring that (which is a lot to bar if I'm being honest with you here), there's also two rape scenes also played for eroticism, one also including the lolicon content. While they do move the plot forward in a sense, even with the edited Steam release you can tell that these scenes were paragraphs of erotica meant to primarily titillate, while any implicit horror or plot impact is a secondary concern, which is a different kind of disgusting from the cannibalism and Meat-O-Vision the reader is subjected to. All of this taints The Song of Saya's other strengths, such as its soundtrack, its art, and its genuine moments of horror both subtle and overt, making The Song of Saya an incredibly hard sell to all but those with the absolute highest tolerance for quote un-quote "weeb shit". If it wasn't for this list, I probably wouldn't have ever touched this game. Which is why it's honestly kind of a bummer that if you took the overtly exploitative content out of the equation, The Song of Saya would probably be the best introductory Visual Novel for newcomers to the Visual Novel medium: it's short, it's easily accessible, and it manages to show off a lot of the medium's strengths without being too much of a slog. It's just a shame that all these qualities are in service of The Song of Saya. There are better visual novels for getting into the medium, and there are better cosmic horror stories that won't get you put on a watchlist. Steer clear, because you're not missing much.
...The soundtrack is pretty good though, give that a listen.