Burrows is straight up stellar on a presentation and technical level, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of that comes from Nikko's experience from his usual art and his comic work. But his comic work was the one thing I was familiar with before playing this, and was what made me worried going in because I just don't like his comics. I don't want to say "full of itself" necessarily but there's something about Nikko's writing that always feels overly haughty and tactless, and sadly that's just kind of all on full display here with Burrows.
There's a feeling that I can't really describe here as anything other than disingenuous. For what should be a focused character drama, Burrows has terrible pacing issues because it cannot slow down for a single moment. It doesn't allow for essentially any quiet time to let a scene settle or give these characters space to exist and meaningfully flesh themselves out, instead opting for a far grander sin of sheer gratuity that affects every aspect of the game. For a game that's so willing to startle and jump the reader with more effort on sudden scares than any other VN within this sub-genre/community that I've played, they're a symptom of a bigger problem where Burrows is weirdly more afraid of having something smaller and more effective stand on its own. Burrows can't just have a character who's questionable and problematic because of his anger issues and actions, instead you get the game also smearing your face in the mud also screaming at you "ooOOoo he was also in an incestuous relationship!!!!!!!" It's not enough to have a character being overly anxious and panicked after having his trust damaged and being alone in a place he's not familiar with, he needs to be thrown into literal Silent Hill within the span of 4 hours of total play time to really throw him for a loop.
I might be admittedly somewhat of a gorehound in some of my entertainment with a good sense of morbid curiosity, and while Burrows' gorgeous artwork certainly more than delivers on that front, it's simultaneously another knock against the game and yet another symptom of its sheer overdose on gratuity. I don't really think I needed to have a hallucination of someone's head being blown off in clear plain view when it doesn't add much to the story itself. I don't think I needed a scene that shows somebody getting flayed alive completely out of the blue during another nightmare sequence. The best kind of horror is psychological, and at its strongest it would be a kind of writing that sticks with you long after its over. Burrows, and at this point just straight up the creator Nikko himself, seemingly believes that shock value somehow creates this grander tension and horror when it just does not need it at all. It actively detracts from any interesting ideas or storytelling that could have been here. I have other issues like an icky feeling in the back of my mind that somebody had their hand in their pants for a major chunk of the game with how incessantly horny the game gets at the worst inopportune times or a fragments/timeline feature that the game completely glosses over and I don't get the point of whatsoever, but frankly the longer I think about Burrows the more thoroughly disappointed and frustrated I get with it, so I will just stop.
I guess if you're familiar with Nikko's other work and enjoy it, you'll probably like this? But the part of a visual novel that truly matters, the writing, simply doesn't hold up for me despite how absurd of a carry the presentation tries to give it. And I'm absolutely not enjoying this to an extent that I need to just put my foot down and stop because it's not worth the effort no matter how stubborn I usually am.
There's a feeling that I can't really describe here as anything other than disingenuous. For what should be a focused character drama, Burrows has terrible pacing issues because it cannot slow down for a single moment. It doesn't allow for essentially any quiet time to let a scene settle or give these characters space to exist and meaningfully flesh themselves out, instead opting for a far grander sin of sheer gratuity that affects every aspect of the game. For a game that's so willing to startle and jump the reader with more effort on sudden scares than any other VN within this sub-genre/community that I've played, they're a symptom of a bigger problem where Burrows is weirdly more afraid of having something smaller and more effective stand on its own. Burrows can't just have a character who's questionable and problematic because of his anger issues and actions, instead you get the game also smearing your face in the mud also screaming at you "ooOOoo he was also in an incestuous relationship!!!!!!!" It's not enough to have a character being overly anxious and panicked after having his trust damaged and being alone in a place he's not familiar with, he needs to be thrown into literal Silent Hill within the span of 4 hours of total play time to really throw him for a loop.
I might be admittedly somewhat of a gorehound in some of my entertainment with a good sense of morbid curiosity, and while Burrows' gorgeous artwork certainly more than delivers on that front, it's simultaneously another knock against the game and yet another symptom of its sheer overdose on gratuity. I don't really think I needed to have a hallucination of someone's head being blown off in clear plain view when it doesn't add much to the story itself. I don't think I needed a scene that shows somebody getting flayed alive completely out of the blue during another nightmare sequence. The best kind of horror is psychological, and at its strongest it would be a kind of writing that sticks with you long after its over. Burrows, and at this point just straight up the creator Nikko himself, seemingly believes that shock value somehow creates this grander tension and horror when it just does not need it at all. It actively detracts from any interesting ideas or storytelling that could have been here. I have other issues like an icky feeling in the back of my mind that somebody had their hand in their pants for a major chunk of the game with how incessantly horny the game gets at the worst inopportune times or a fragments/timeline feature that the game completely glosses over and I don't get the point of whatsoever, but frankly the longer I think about Burrows the more thoroughly disappointed and frustrated I get with it, so I will just stop.
I guess if you're familiar with Nikko's other work and enjoy it, you'll probably like this? But the part of a visual novel that truly matters, the writing, simply doesn't hold up for me despite how absurd of a carry the presentation tries to give it. And I'm absolutely not enjoying this to an extent that I need to just put my foot down and stop because it's not worth the effort no matter how stubborn I usually am.