Train of Afterlife

I'm experiencing rather conflicted feelings regarding this VN, as I believe that the concept certainly has great potential, yet the general execution is underwhelming, in my opinion. I find the story itself quite intriguing and it includes clever ideas, additionally the setting and mysterious design create an interesting atmosphere. The art and music are very lovely too. While the writing managed to be thought-provoking and introduced interesting philosophical and psychological concepts to contemplate about, I wish that those elements were handled more in-depth, as the dialogues and explanations of nearly everything are very brief. To me, the writing was simply rushed and left out too many specifications, which was particularly a problem during the endings, flashbacks and characterizations and didn't quite allow me to fully get immersed in the story. The plot just offers a lot of complexity and layers, therefore it's understandingly difficult to compress it all into a short timeframe. What bothered me as well, is the technical situation of the game; the UI feels rather inconvenient and the gameplay itself can get rather irritating due to its repetitive nature and confusing pass…

the soundtrack is so < 3 ..

(Review copied from my Backloggd review.) This game is a work of art. It is thought provoking and philosophical, and at times feels very personal. Some of the story-telling is presented in a nonlinear way, which made it feel a bit like the writer dropped me into the deep end suddenly, where I floundered about in confusion for a while, trying to make sense of something I didn't yet have all of the necessary pieces of (which I suspect is similar to how the protagonist feels). This felt very intentional, and kept me interested in gathering all of the pieces — most of which, I couldn't make sense of until I neared the story's conclusion. The game in general all feels very intentional... Unfortunately, I did struggle with the repetitiveness when I was playing through the latter half of the endings. There *IS actually a way to skip text*: by holding the down arrow key on your keyboard. That single feature would have left me with nothing to complain about, had I known about it! It's not explicitly indicated anywhere within the game, so I did not learn about it until after I completed the game. Clicking repeatedly to skip lines I'd read many times before sometimes caused me to accidental…

Nice but short. Buy on sale, or pass

Recommend this purely on the fact that the devs corrected a mistake with the keys from one of the bundle / key aggregate dealers. The story itself is cute and short. Kind of a "Baby's first game" sort of feel and I think you can get a discounted somewhere for wait for a sale. I wouldn't pay $10 but if it was 50% or more off, then the price would be fair.

I decide to try the game out since it is part of Zeiva games series, this game is sort bare minimum which exact hit the style. Unlike other games which are colorful and detailed, it is vague, mysterious and bleak which fit the game theme color and setting. To be honest, when I reach the nightmare ending, I became a coward and watch YouTube video to see how it ends. Regardless, the game is good. The story have quite a plot twist as it is Yan Yi purgutory or nightmare for losing her loved ones. I already feel sad for the twins' little sister Yu death, to the point that she hate her previous life and surpress it. The Chinese characters made me think that this take place in China although maybe it is in a fictional world with Area-X and Dragon Essence along with Natural. I am tempted to draw a fan art of all of Yan Yi loved ones together. Although Moair die a good death since he is getting too old but at least he save the twins. All the people in the train are all good people and despite Yi thinking that she only care her twin Fei, she still care for others. Reminded me of Mikasa Ackerman. I hope that Yi have a good life after her train trip. The side story is interesting, I thought Ma…