A series of strong individual scenes without a lot of internal cohesion. There's a great deal of vacillation in tone: the early chapters seem interesting in creating something like a grounded interpretation of the Late Middle Ages, but this is abandoned pretty suddenly in favor of writing the characters as something between Twitter users and the cast of a slice-of-life anime. This describes a lot of visual novels that I've absolutely hated, but I think very highly of Misericorde in spite of it: it's a game which always manages to stick the landing. A great deal of the game's word count is used to establish characters and self-consciously attempt to endear the audience to them, and relatively little is devoted to the development of the actual mystery plot, but it nevertheless rarely feels inefficient or bloated. Almost every character, even those who seem one-note on their introduction, has personal nuances and contradictions established by the end of the game. Scenes which might be pure fluff in another game almost always manage to leave the game's world a bit more fleshed out.
Misericorde makes a certain number of implicit promises in its framing device: that relationship between the cast will remain complex and tenuous, that nothing in the story is wholly unnecessary, and that the narrator will not necessarily become a better, wiser, or more fulfilled person by the end of the story. Volume One isn't much of a standalone narrative and ends on a scene that's notable but not very conclusive. It's hard to say, then, if the story ultimately has a point, if these events are going anywhere. It ends while still in the process of establishing context for a mystery, and while it does so in a smart, consistently enjoyable way it'll be disappointing if it's all one great hustle.
The game was greatly enhanced for me, and ballooned to about three times its expected run time, by the act of reading the whole thing aloud over a video call. This has also established voices for the cast which I now consider to be inseparable from them and which I now must share with uninitiated: Eustace talks in a nasal sneer, Darcy has a monotone valley girl accent, Charity sounds like Mercedes from Fire Emblem, and Moira has a strong southern accent, Ireland being the Osaka of the UK.
Misericorde makes a certain number of implicit promises in its framing device: that relationship between the cast will remain complex and tenuous, that nothing in the story is wholly unnecessary, and that the narrator will not necessarily become a better, wiser, or more fulfilled person by the end of the story. Volume One isn't much of a standalone narrative and ends on a scene that's notable but not very conclusive. It's hard to say, then, if the story ultimately has a point, if these events are going anywhere. It ends while still in the process of establishing context for a mystery, and while it does so in a smart, consistently enjoyable way it'll be disappointing if it's all one great hustle.
The game was greatly enhanced for me, and ballooned to about three times its expected run time, by the act of reading the whole thing aloud over a video call. This has also established voices for the cast which I now consider to be inseparable from them and which I now must share with uninitiated: Eustace talks in a nasal sneer, Darcy has a monotone valley girl accent, Charity sounds like Mercedes from Fire Emblem, and Moira has a strong southern accent, Ireland being the Osaka of the UK.