Northanger Abbey

This is so fun! I really liked the demo, and am glad to be able to play the full game. It works if you've read the novel, or if you're new to Austen. Lots of romance options, and you can play a tonne of different genders and gender presentations.

I really love it! I finished one ending today and will most likely finish the others later. The game has tons of custom options and romance options for your character and the soundtrack is really lovely. :) I hope this studio will make more games based on Jane Austen's novels!

I have been a classics reader since I could read and write, reading the abridged versions during my maturing years and the 'full, canonical' works later when I could fully grasp the excellence of their writings in my adult years till the very present. Some of the literature that I have read (and remember of the top of my head) and adore the most include Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Around the world in 80 days and so many more. Having read Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice', I was aware of the way she writes about the British high class society, especially the royalty or the gentry as they were known during that time. So, when I was recommended 'Northanger Abbey' by the new steam discovery queue, I was excited beyond measure. I checked the developer and the publisher on steam and was a little disappointed to see that they had not published anything before and 'Northanger Abbey' was going to be their first VN! I decided to give them a chance nonetheless and am glad I did. The experience was even more enriched by the fact that I had not read the original novel before, so I was going in full blind and was excited at every turn of the page. I' am not going into the full details …

I have not read the original novel, but this is a delightful and funny iteration of it. Like a true heroine, I couldn't stop until I got the ending I wanted. I enjoyed the quite explicitly queer cast, and how my choices when creating the protagonist were reflected throughout the story. I was expecting the game to just swap out pronouns and elide anything else, but this extra attention to detail gave the experience more authenticity and texture. I do have some small complaints. I would have liked to see a bit more of an epilogue, and the story seems to oddly skip ahead at times - I'm guessing these correspond to chapter breaks in the original, but they're not clearly marked as such here. I also found character creation a bit confusing. The text tries to be tactful and circumspect with the questions it asks about your identity, but I found it all a bit ambiguous, such that I wasn't entirely sure at the end of it what I had actually told the game to do. I ended up redoing this a couple of times (and peeking ahead in the story a bit) to make sure that I understood it properly, and eventually I got what I intended. These are minor points that don't seriously dampen the experien…

This was such a charming, and fun game. Admittedly I don't know as much about Northanger Abbey as more well-known classics like Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, but I also don't think you need to, as the storylines themselves all play themselves out and there are of course moments where the story has to diverge from canon to make the different romances possible. I really loved the narrative voice, which felt like having Jane Austen sitting next to you, observing what is going on and communicating with you in ways that are wry, witty, sincere, funny, and at times very meta. I really loved the way gender was included. It never felt like an afterthought, and you don’t just get to pick being nonbinary, you can pick whether you’re out and androgynous, closeted to strangers, and how you look (within the constraints of the time, of course!) which was really awesome. The introduction was immediately compelling and made me realise how much other games with gender options could be creative and playful with gender selection. Music selection is really awesome and really well cued / looped, which is a strange thing to say but having played a lot of indies lately I've become mo…

I don't see why it says you get to choose your gender when it doesn't. It makes it seem like your character is hiding their gender no matter what option you choose which is fine, but don't pretend you have the option.