Advent: Dawn

[h1]Strange Case of Mr Frankenstein[/h1] What a strange playthrough this was. Took me a while to get through it, because it felt as if the game was holding a distorting mirror before me all the way to the abyss, distracting me with uncanny familiarities and slowing down my progress. For I was stopping every other step and writing down all the odd coincidences and synchronicities, checking if my perception had gone haywire, if I contracted some weird psychosis from all that purple glow. The feeling of déjà vu was at times too much, and I wasn't always sure if that was a good or a bad thing. Sometimes it felt as if I was under a neurological experiment, testing if I can be manipulated by all the bizarre recalls; trying to force resonance on me by stuffing the game with all the things that should appeal to a certain kind of player - on paper. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start from the beginning. Advent: Dawn is Spire's third visual novel in this loose pastiche of classic Japanese VNs, and in some ways, it's their best one yet. In other ways, it's the most frustrating of them all. It takes place in the Enigma universe, but you don't need to have played that first game befo…

Advent: Dawn is another gripping and deep VN by Spire Games, and it has a very similar style as the previous two games by this developer, in that the story is multilayered, characters are well-developed, there's plenty of science in the setting, and there are philosophical themes that get us thinking. It is a sequel to the dev's first game - The VII Enigma, but its story is standalone and doesn't require the knowledge of that game (but to those of us who loved that game, there are plenty of references). The story has our character, Dr Atlas Everly, and a few others arrive on a remote island, where deep inside a cave a secret research is going on, which is on a brink of some revolutionary discovery. However, a cave-in occurs at the start, and we along with 6 other characters are trapped in the cave, needing to get to know others and find a way to get out of this cave and to survive. Of course, things are never as simple as they seem, and there are many secrets to uncover - secrets of the cave itself and secrets being kept by each character. This VN plays very similarly to this dev's previous VN - Synesthesia. In some parts of the story, choices occur where we need to decide wh…

Sadly, I could never fully get into this game. The premise of people trapped in a cave has some things going for it, and I do like the idea that the game's flowchart is the cave itself. That's creative. But the negatives outweigh the positives for me. My main problem is that the game is very repetitive. You pick one of three paths and all of them are mostly the same, just with a different character. All you do is go deeper into the cave as you chat with the character. This is always padded out with large expsosition dumps, backstory, and drawn out internal monologues. Rarely does anything interesting happen in the plot itself, making for a very boring experience. The twist in the end and the finale were decent, I guess, but they didn't save this ultimately lackluster experience for me.

A very decent mystery game that is indeed inspired by Zero Escape, Umineko, Steins;Gate (and supposedly Ever17 which I haven't played) as advertised. I have thoroughly enjoyed the beginning and ending of the game. I found the middle parts (around 5-6 hours out of the 15 hours it took to complete the game for me) to be mixed in quality (the long stretches of cave exploration and character-focused dialogue was a hit-and-miss for me) but the overall package was very much enjoyable. Spoilery discussion: [spoiler] Luckily, I have found the MERGE route first which ticked all the boxes I need for a good paranoid thriller-mystery and thus I had a very good first impression of the game. The LYRA route was ok but I found the KIMIKA and DARK routes to be dragging for a bit longer than they needed to be. Starting from the AMELIA route, the excellent pacing and twists came back and did not let up until the end of the game, including the newly added hidden epilogue section. [/spoiler] Overall, the mysteries and twists are great, the characters are good (although some of them are more like plot devices which I didn't mind), the pacing is mostly excellent (except for some of the middle routes) a…

The initial concept of this game was intriguing and full of promise, but the actual execution frankly disappointed me. The biggest issue is the absolute lack of pacing or meaningful events. While the developers included multiple story routes, it quickly feels like a cheap illusion of choice. Regardless of the path you take, nothing genuinely interesting happens. The entire gameplay loop boils down to endless, dry conversations with characters and monotonously wandering through the exact same cave over and over again. To make matters worse, the writing suffers heavily. The characters' decisions and inner thoughts often feel illogical and leave you with more questions than answers, making it impossible to care about the story. It is simply a boring and tedious experience. I really wanted to like it, but I cannot recommend this game.

Spire Games continues to improve with Advent: Dawn! The VN has a relatively unique underground setting. Neuroscientist Atlas Everly arrives at a remote oceanic island to do research in a cave, but after a cave in kills his boss-to-be and blocks the exit, he and his brand new coworkers must find a way to escape while uncovering the mysteries of the cave. Advent: Dawn makes use of a variety of common sci-fi and mystery (and even a little fantasy!) plot elements, but synthesizes them in a fresh and interesting way. It falls into the frequent multi-route mystery VN trap of early routes not standing on their own,—and they feel somewhat samey—but what they set up is ultimately worth it in the final route. Other minor nitpicks are: 1.) the speech synthesis is a weird half-measure. It's better than in SYNESTHESIA, but I'd still rather not have it at all. 2.) The story relies a bit too heavily on the events of The VII Enigma. 3.) At times, the prose is purple. Overall though, Advent: Dawn is a fun time! I said it in my SYNESTHESIA review, but after this, I would still like to see what Spire Games can do with a longer script. It's not that this VN needed to be any longer,—I think…