This year I saved a sleepy village from a monster, I tried to unite a divided caste society, and I started a band. I defended the innocent in court, tried to stay alive in a death game, fought with street gangs in a cyberpunk society and found the impostor among us. The twist is this – I did all of this in visual novels.
Even if you get past the misconception of all visual novels being the weirdly horny games you sometimes come across on Steam’s Popular Up and Coming lists, visual novels can be difficult to talk about. I’m not saying the people who shy away from visual novels don’t like to read in general. But there is the expectation of interactivity with games, and to many, visual novels aren’t interactive enough – not even games like Ace Attorney, which according to the original definition of a visual novel, is technically an adventure game. Visual novels can encompass all genres – the wide range of experiences I’ve had this year alone also attest to how many stories fit a choice-driven format.
Visual novels are a great way of studying branching decision-making in games and work particularly well with anything that asks players for a hard choice. Two games exemplified both the sheer narrative and technical work that goes into crafting unforeseen consequences. Gnosia, which came out in the West on Switch this year and is to receive a PC port, is a game where a group of people try to find out via discussion if one or more people in their midst (I say people, one of them is a dolphin in a spacesuit) is out to murder them. Because you’re talking to a bunch of computer-controlled people, this is a bit of a hard sell narratively, but the different roles you can inhabit and number of questions you can ask leads to so many different outcomes I would pay developer Petit Depotto good money to take a peek at their branching cause and effect models.
Buried Stars, a Korean visual novel, is the better choice if you’re looking for a death game with a stronger narrative focus – I haven’t really played anything that compares to it since the golden age of Danganronpa/Zero Escape a good decade ago. It suffers from sub-par English translation, which unfortunately is a common problem, but it takes an interesting stab at social media culture and the hunt for fame. In it, a group of contestants of a pop idol show get trapped in a studio, only to find out that this, as well as their potential death at the hands of a stranger, is all part of the show.