I have a big soft spot for low budget death game Visual Novels and honestly, while The Zodiac Trial is by no means perfect, it continuously keeps up a good pace that makes for an overall very enjoyable experience
I liked the characters overall a lot, they're definitely the stars here. Everyone gets their own route with four endings, and each route is pretty different to each other - it's geninuely quite impressive how much subtle variety you get here. Combine this with the constant fast pacing, and I was always invested in the story, always interested to see where it would go next or what choices would do. I love that I got to see all the characters take on different roles and how they would react to it. Ox and Snake were the standouts for me! I was very invested in both
It's not a deal breaker, but the art is a bit wonky. Some characters I think look great - Dragon, Rooster, Snake and Ox in particular - while other designs are somewhat dull, or have weird proportions that you take you out of things a little bit. Monkey I think is a good example of both of these things. The backgrounds are also just photos with filters on them, which I'm not gonna fault a low budget VN for, but it did occasionally make things hard to follow when characters were moving about a room or general area. There's also not a whole lot of CGIs so during big moments, you're usually left with a black screen or just the background, which can take you out of things a bit but again, I'm not gonna let it bother me in a low budget VN. The ones we do get generally look pretty good though! The soundtrack also isn't anything mindblowing, but it does the job and there's a couple of especially good tracks in there. Sound effects are quite lacking overall, though
My main criticisms for The Zodiac Trial would be:
1. There's a good handful of typos, some of them quite unfortunate, like mixing up the name of a victim and their killer. It's not a dealbreaker, but it is noticable.
2. This is a Visual Novel made in ren'py, which means the standard features of scrolling back through text is very fluid, but it does mean you don't get a flowchart (despite there being over 50 endings) or some kind of menu with information you've already learnt, meaning you can feel overwhelmed at times or forget things. For example, I struggled to keep track of the Bowens and Morris', who are important characters to the story but not actually present
3. Sometimes it felt like the protagonist whose perspective you witness the story from was miles ahead of me, pulling out complicated deductions from thin air that I hadn't even began to grasp. Now I will admit, I am kinda dumb so maybe it was on me, but I did often feel like I was just coming along for the ride, although this personally didn't bother me too much
I liked the characters overall a lot, they're definitely the stars here. Everyone gets their own route with four endings, and each route is pretty different to each other - it's geninuely quite impressive how much subtle variety you get here. Combine this with the constant fast pacing, and I was always invested in the story, always interested to see where it would go next or what choices would do. I love that I got to see all the characters take on different roles and how they would react to it. Ox and Snake were the standouts for me! I was very invested in both
It's not a deal breaker, but the art is a bit wonky. Some characters I think look great - Dragon, Rooster, Snake and Ox in particular - while other designs are somewhat dull, or have weird proportions that you take you out of things a little bit. Monkey I think is a good example of both of these things. The backgrounds are also just photos with filters on them, which I'm not gonna fault a low budget VN for, but it did occasionally make things hard to follow when characters were moving about a room or general area. There's also not a whole lot of CGIs so during big moments, you're usually left with a black screen or just the background, which can take you out of things a bit but again, I'm not gonna let it bother me in a low budget VN. The ones we do get generally look pretty good though! The soundtrack also isn't anything mindblowing, but it does the job and there's a couple of especially good tracks in there. Sound effects are quite lacking overall, though
My main criticisms for The Zodiac Trial would be:
1. There's a good handful of typos, some of them quite unfortunate, like mixing up the name of a victim and their killer. It's not a dealbreaker, but it is noticable.
2. This is a Visual Novel made in ren'py, which means the standard features of scrolling back through text is very fluid, but it does mean you don't get a flowchart (despite there being over 50 endings) or some kind of menu with information you've already learnt, meaning you can feel overwhelmed at times or forget things. For example, I struggled to keep track of the Bowens and Morris', who are important characters to the story but not actually present
3. Sometimes it felt like the protagonist whose perspective you witness the story from was miles ahead of me, pulling out complicated deductions from thin air that I hadn't even began to grasp. Now I will admit, I am kinda dumb so maybe it was on me, but I did often feel like I was just coming along for the ride, although this personally didn't bother me too much