A solid VN game entry by Dontnod that doesn't reach the heights of some of their more mainstream games.
The character art, backgrounds, and score are all beautifully designed and help the flow of the game (the characters at times reminded me of the Hotel Dusk style), but pacing feels off at times due to the inherent start-stop process of the flowchart (The Augural). I love other VNs like 999 and VLR that use flowcharts, but usually the sections are longer. At times, you click a node here and get a few lines delivered, before a short load back to the Augural.
The story itself has some impactful choices that make the narrative feel like it actually changed. You can't go an "evil" route as far as I could tell, but you can definitely land between ruthless rebel and balancing hippie. Every character in the plot is fairly memorable, and there is a broad swath of representation that doesn't feel jammed in (despite this, there are multiple Steam discussions complaining about "wokeness"). Even the Aspirations (the higher powers you frequently commune with) have variance - Power, for instance, is not an annoying autocrat, but more so a supportive dad figure.
The main issues with the game are the quantity of loading times, the slightly abrupt ending, and also the lack of QoL features for replaying and reloading. Even upon beating the game, there's no way to select a specific chapter and start from this point. This is something other VNs have been doing for years now! Hopefully that feature will be added in a patch from Dontnod, but for now it's annoying to not be able to go back further than the start of the current chapter.
The character art, backgrounds, and score are all beautifully designed and help the flow of the game (the characters at times reminded me of the Hotel Dusk style), but pacing feels off at times due to the inherent start-stop process of the flowchart (The Augural). I love other VNs like 999 and VLR that use flowcharts, but usually the sections are longer. At times, you click a node here and get a few lines delivered, before a short load back to the Augural.
The story itself has some impactful choices that make the narrative feel like it actually changed. You can't go an "evil" route as far as I could tell, but you can definitely land between ruthless rebel and balancing hippie. Every character in the plot is fairly memorable, and there is a broad swath of representation that doesn't feel jammed in (despite this, there are multiple Steam discussions complaining about "wokeness"). Even the Aspirations (the higher powers you frequently commune with) have variance - Power, for instance, is not an annoying autocrat, but more so a supportive dad figure.
The main issues with the game are the quantity of loading times, the slightly abrupt ending, and also the lack of QoL features for replaying and reloading. Even upon beating the game, there's no way to select a specific chapter and start from this point. This is something other VNs have been doing for years now! Hopefully that feature will be added in a patch from Dontnod, but for now it's annoying to not be able to go back further than the start of the current chapter.