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Not sure if the more indie stuff falls within the scope of this thread, but the sequel to Butterfly Soup dropped a couple of weeks ago. First one was a great tale of gay idiots playing baseball, and this one... should be also???
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Nov 26, 2022 00:22
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goethe.cx posted:I might regret asking this, but what else should I play if I liked Danganronpa? Specifically the wacky and memorable characters, I don't mind murder game stuff but I'm not seeking it out in particular. I've played the Zero Escape games already Paradise Killer, maybe? The setting's pretty outlandish, but in many aspects it's "what if Danganronpa but more". Not really a visual novel, though. There's also Nine Doors, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, but I never played that one all the way through so can't guarantee its overall quality. e: oh, 9D9P9D is a Zero Escape game. I know things! SexyBlindfold fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Nov 26, 2022 |
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Nov 26, 2022 00:35
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vallhalla (but with numbers and hyphens thrown in there somewhere) is pretty good. If you enjoy it, you might like Coffee Talk, which has a similar setting but with a more saccharine vibe (vallhalla's tone is a bit more edgy). Another game with a similar-ish setting and visual style, but that plays like a more straightforward point-and-click detective adventure, is 2064: Read-only Memories.
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Nov 26, 2022 01:12
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fez_machine posted:Is there truly nothing great on Steam that isn't in my wishlist or I already own? I can't trust most steam reviews or vndb past the big 10 because they're full of jacking off hobbyists who write thousands of words praising some of the worst poo poo in the world. It might help if you mentioned what you look for in a visual novel? Are you looking for something that fits squarely within the genre or are you okay with something more VN-adjacent? You looking for a particular setting or art style? Romance, fantasy? Right now, the ones in my own wishlist I've got my eye on are I Was A Teenage Exocolonist (which I guess is VN-adjacent) and Salting the Earth (which looks interesting, but it might be, uh, for specific interests)
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Nov 26, 2022 03:26
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Similarly, I thought that the sequel for Coffee Talk was going to be canned after the sad news of one of the co-creators passing away suddenly, but seems like they're still chugging along for a mid-2023 release.
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Nov 26, 2022 04:41
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Don't think I'll be able to splurge on games for a little while yet, but Misericorde's making a pretty strong argument to climb to the top of my list. I might get it along with Butterfly Soup 2. One question that won't really dampen my interest in the game either way: I know this is supposed to be a period piece - do the characters speak in a modern fashion, or do they speak in an "old timey" way? As an ESL speaker I can find dialog in older settings hard to parse at times, but there's also cases like Pentiment where the writers reached a pretty good middle point of the characters speaking in a way that felt very authentic to their era (around the same time period as Misericorde, I think?) while also being fully understandable.
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Apr 18, 2023 23:38
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Not sure exactly how visual novel-y it's going to be, but I'm really liking the look of The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood. In other news, the sequel to Coffee Talk dropped last week. It's made by a pretty small team and one of the lead devs passed away mid-development, so I was surprised to see them actually finish it. The first game was pretty light compared to most of what's covered in the thread, but I really enjoyed it for what it was.
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Apr 28, 2023 04:14
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Not sure exactly how Visual Novel-y it counts as, but just tried out the demo for The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood and I liked the art and the writing quite a bit. Loved the tarot card creator system and the chance to do fortunetelling with a deck comprised entirely of silly little guys. It's from the same team that did The Red Strings Club, if you've played that one.
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Jun 21, 2023 08:11
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Still trying to wrap my head around how they plan to write for this, considering the concept. Anyway, here's my deck. Got the same Air card, since you only have a handful of possible combinations for the first one.    
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Jun 22, 2023 05:41
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Yeah, like it seems that mechanically the cards do boil down to what 'meanings' they have, and the 'meanings' will serve as tags to activate certain dialog choices, and not only will several cards share the same meanings but dialog choices can be activated by any of a number of meanings, so depending on how much variation you want to give, it's perfectly possible that the max number of available dialog choices in any given reading is, like, three, but that's still a LOT of writing. I'm guessing they'll compensate by the dialog that happens within the reading not actually having any impact in the branching of the story otherwise, and the "choices matter"-ing will be done in more conventional conversation options.
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Jun 22, 2023 06:41
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Another day, another demo for a not-quite-a-VN-but-close-enough from a small european studio where you use cards for fortune telling. This one seems a lot more casual than Cosmic Wheel, feels like kind of a mix between Coffee Talk in tone and setting and something like Regency Solitaire in gameplay. I like the bit about having to interpret the ~spirit of the cards~ after each game, even if the instances you get from it in the demo seem a bit railroady. It feels like a good way to give an illusion of agency to an otherwise linear gameplay, though the devs say there will be significant branching.
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Jun 23, 2023 21:41
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Hadn't been keeping up with the updates, but turns out The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is launching in ten days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAVZULwGMrw You can also check the dev news on the steam page for some short comics about the cast. I'm almost tempted to preorder for the first time in my life since this is one of the games I'd want for the art alone, but I'm gonna hold for a bit to see if it delivers.
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Aug 7, 2023 06:37
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I recently got Tangle Tower after having it gather dust on my wishlist for years, and can 100% recommend. I can't entirely compare it to the first game since it's been ages since I played it, but it's really nicely crafted. The art direction, character designs and voice acting just ooze with charm, but by far the best part of it is the backgrounds (the extras include plenty of production sketches for the characters and locations with comments from the devs, which is nice). The story's your standard whodunit/locked room murder in a spooky mansion full of quirky characters. It's not too long (took me some 7-8 hrs to complete) and you could say that the ending rushes a bit and dovetails into sequel bait, but I can't say it bothered me too much, since the time I spent up to that point was really enjoyable. I just hope the gap from this to the next game isn't so long.
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Aug 11, 2023 00:31
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let us know if it is "good" instead of "bad". i'm chiefly concerned about whether they fixed the main issue that the demo had, it being a worrying lack of Silly Little Guys to add to my custom tarot cards. i don't want a burning allegory of love and desire in cosmic alignment, i want a capybara wearing a hat, some goblins maybe, a skeleton playing xylophone on its ribcage, the good stuff
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Aug 16, 2023 18:41
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he's catholic so maxed up on the hosed up scale, yeah e: pretty sure blasphemous also had a bunch of homages to other indie games (spanish ones in particular) tucked in a corner, i think it was a gallery of paintings behind a hidden tunnel. it had a spot for red strings club (previous game from the CWS devs) iirc SexyBlindfold fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Aug 17, 2023 |
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Aug 17, 2023 01:02
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Snooze Cruise posted:question for other people playing cosmic wheel, does the Grethe romance still happen if you don't choose romance earlier in the story? I saw multiple people say that scene feels railroad-y, but i thought that was the point because it was fulfilling your pact and Grethe even has a line where she asks if you put a love spell at on her. As far as I can tell, it's not defined by picking Romance during your contract, but by the answer you give Grethe when she asks what you think about romance. I was like "eh, can take it or leave it" and didn't trigger her romance. Terrible choice imo. But I'm hitting the end of this run and it seems like terrible choices were kind of a trend, except for my deck, which looks baller as hell
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Aug 31, 2023 06:38
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Finished Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood a while ago and very much recommend it. Here's a few cards from my deck with which I definitely didn't break the universe it was like that when i found it stop asking    As expected, I didn't get the best ending, so I might give it another go after I let the experience rest a bit. It's going to be painful since in order to explore other routes I'll have to make choices that I find morally repulsive, like letting an influencer witch vibe check my political campaign. Then again the game forced me to become a witch liberal* so how bad can it be *To clarify: The game did not force me to become a witch liberal. My witch friend told me she was running for office and asked if I wanted to help and I said "sure" without asking about her platform, and I got multiple chances to take it back but that would have been rude so I got stuck as campaign manager for incremental witch change, which I'm pretty sure it's the exact same experience as doing a Moralist run in Disco Elysium. In short, I forced myself into becoming a witch liberal.
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Sep 26, 2023 22:57
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Spiggy posted:Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood was good until the election subplot went into full effect. The only part that really stuck out to me after that was a scene where the MC thinks she's back in the real world after trying to kill herself at the beach (I think my memory sucks) and her friends are trying to help her process it, but the MC keeps telling them about witch life. At the end of the scene it just turned out to be witchy subterfuge which felt kind of deflationary. Yeah, I've noticed quite a few players not vibing with the election subplot. Story-wise I don't mind it, since it serves as a good excuse for you to keep doing the things that the game's already good at, that is hosting witchy guests and trading witchy gossip. Gameplay-wise, though, the mechanics felt a bit off. It's not that the election system was underbaked - if anything, it was a bit of the opposite. You get all these bells and whistles to plan your electoral strategy and that's great but it just gave me the impression that this was something designed for a different game and somehow ended up getting recycled into this, for a section that's maybe one third of the game's runtime, if that? Also I can't confirm this since I've only done a single run, but I got the impression that your electoral performance matters extremely little short of getting you an achievement, since the final act makes those poll numbers dance like crazy anyway. That said, I still had a good impression of the ending. As expected of a ~choices matter~ kind of game, near the end you start getting, uh, what's the technical term, 'funneling' of the branching paths down into a more reduced set of options, but from what I could see through my furious savescumming there was still a pretty healthy dose of variation in how things could turn out. There's a reasonable balance between coming to terms with the consequences of your own choices and constantly getting ratfucked by the RNG will of your cute custom tarot deck.
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Sep 27, 2023 01:23
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After many months I finally decided to forcefully remove Misericorde from the anchoress cell it was occuppying in my library and give it a try. My review: I liked the game, but then it ended, and I did not like that it ended, so it's a bad game. It will only become a good game when the next episode drops and I can again spend hours upon hours with these lovely nuns. Further observations: - I was a bit iffy on playing a kinetic novel, but in retrospect a lot of the choices in VNs tend to be pointless fluff to obfuscate your way to the true ending, so streamlining the experience into something purely linear doesn't feel like a huge loss. I don't recall ever thinking "i wish i had a choice to do this differently, Hedwig you moron". I mean, Hedwig is a moron, but I was always looking forward to what mess she'd bumble into. - I really like the choice of protagonist. I feel like for a setting like this, it would have been easy to go with, like, a young novice, maybe one who was forced into her vows so she could offer a more skeptical perspective, but I really like that Hedwig is the biggest Jesus freak of the entire cast, I really like that she literally doesn't know jack poo poo outside of what's in the Bible and the Bible Extended Universe, I really like that, in addition to wanting to solve the case, she also gets to have motivations that are so alien not only to the other nuns, but also the reader, and she still comes across as such a likeable (if somewhat unhinged) weirdo. hehe. - drat, this game has a huge soundtrack for a uhhh 1? 2? 3 people project? My favorite so far is this one, which gives me mad Cocteau Twins vibes - It's true that the game plays a little loose with historical accuracy when placed next to something like Pentiment (the most obvious comparison), but I didn't spot anything particularly egregious. The dialogue feels a little modern both in vocabulary and tone, but most of the lines are entirely plausible for a convent where you send the bad nuns for nun crimes. - It took me a little while to realize I was supposed to read Darcy's text as  and not as a shitposting nunmy theory: hedwig has leadbrains from having been exposed to toxic inks in a poorly ventilated environment for most of her life
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Feb 29, 2024 01:33
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 22:59 |
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Snooze Cruise posted:my theory: hedwig has lesibrains she just has a strong yearning to quote Ruth 1:16-17 to someone
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Feb 29, 2024 02:13
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