Orion: A Sci-Fi Visual Novel

[h1] Pretty bad just skip it. [/h1]

Orion: A Sci-Fi Visual Novel is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit. This E-book features Choose-Your-Own-Adventure elements where you make some decisions that don't do anything to change the fact this is just an E-Book. Nobody finished reading a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because E-books aren't games. And neither is this. There's a sci-fi theme to this, so when compari…

Not the best VN, but at a discount I would still give it a chance Pros: 1. 4 main endings with positive and negative variants + true ending 2. Actually a decent, somewhat mysterious story 3. Interesting concept for Virgil 4. Skip option to go through the various paths faster Neutral: 1. Some paths seem a bit incoherent, which is partially explained in the true ending [spoiler] Those aren't really alternative paths, but subsequent time loops caused by slight changes in history[/spoiler] If you don't go for the full experience, this negatively affects the reception of each path when judged individually Cons: 1. Limited branching with the good paths often locked by choices sometimes irrelevant for a chosen scenario 2. True ending locked behind doing all other routes(however that's explained by the story) 3. While game is fully voiced, it doesn't feel that way. Most of the times you're presented with narration and inner monologues which aren't recorded, so due to the ratio of dialogues in the story you don't actually hear the actors that often 4. Most characters are "episodic", specific to one path To sum up. Game requires you to play it 9 times to fully appreciate the story(but the s…

Even for a fiver, this cost too much to what it has. That's it. That's why I don't recommend it. Oh, it's get worse. As much as I just want to point out that the price is too high, considering how short this game is. I just wanted to leave it there but how the game pans out, I can't help to explain the contents of how bad the game is and I really hope I'm not being so harsh about this. I really do. The game markets itself as a sci-fi visual novel. It's a slap together visual novel with a sci-fi theme too it. When you see it, you see how poorly tackled together the story is with the theme of it being sci-fi, then you see how the developer somehow takes away and monopolize the idea of it being a sci-fi visual novel. Somehow the developers has made the scif-i theme extremely generic like it's never been done before, only to find how narrowly driven the story is, maybe because the developers feels that it's their game and to respect it. There's loads of actual other visual novels from Japan that take the science fiction setting and their art is way better and somewhat stylish, then this game, to express that it's more entertaining if anything and doesn't take itself too seriously. Th…

This is an alright sci-fi visual novel. It has an ok story, characters, visuals, and music. There are 4 main story branches you can take, each with 2 endings. Once you experienced all of them, a final ending becomes available to discover. It doesn’t take too long to finish, but most of the story is a branching path, so there’s some replay value in here. The final ending is also long to read. Also, even if not great, there’s a lot of voice acting, adding more value. There’s a bug with the game not exiting properly, messing up the play time and forcing the player to restart Steam. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s very annoying when it does. To fix it, you must verify the integrity of the game files in the Steam game properties section. In the end, it’s an average visual novel, so there are a lot of better options to choose from. Still, for cheap or in a bundle, I guess it’s worth your time if you like sci-fi or to read VNs. Just don’t have high expectations. If I could, I would give it an average or mixed score.

This feels like it was written by someone fresh out of high school with a very shallow understanding of politics, human relationships, and life in general. There are some potentially interesting ideas here, but they are squandered by weak writing, unlikable cardboard characters, and mediocre voice acting. I really cannot recommend spending any time on it, even if it was free.