As someone who went into this knowing only about the... questionable aspects of this game thanks to Twitter, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was an actual video game here.

Since The Coffin of Andy and Leyley (TCOAAL) is still in early access, it's obviously not going to be content complete, but there's still some meat on its bones, figuratively and literally. TCOAAL's main positive is the visuals, which are really good all around. Character designs are cute without drawing you out of the creepy atmosphere. The characters themselves aren't half bad either, particularly the two leads of Andrew and Ashley. Both are clearly messed up in different ways, but the game never tries to portray them as good people, just clearly damaged people dealing with extreme circumstances in often extreme ways.

That being said, due to the game only having two chapters out as of the time of me writing this review, the story is a bit lacking. The whole demon aspect of the plot feels unexplored, and there's some loose threads present that feel very arbitrary at the present moment. Lots of the game also feels very railroaded, which I guess is to be expected with a more visual novel style of story telling, but from an RPG Maker adventure game I expected a bit more in terms of exploration. As for the elephant in the room, the incest is a looming presence in the game, but isn't as big of a factor as you've probably been lead to believe. There's only one scene that actually implies anything explicit, and it's an optional scene that the game warns you about beforehand. It's definitely not preferable, but not something that soured the whole pot for me, at least. Overall, I enjoyed the game enough, but I'd say to wait until the full release to give it a try.

Reviewed on Nov 02, 2023


Comments