Athanasy

Athanasy is a visual novel taking place in a depressing dystopian society, existing within a city that's entirely separated from the rest of the world. The game's world hits us with two obstacles at once - a deeply totalitarian system, where a minor mistake leads you to a catastrophic fate, and horrific biopunk elements and body horror, where disfigurement and mutilation are a normal part of the system. This VN features choices, and they do begin to branch out from early on, leading to entirely different story paths. However, some of those story paths can be accessed again, and your first-time playthrough might vary differently. For example, one of the story paths could be accessed very early in the game, but that same story path can then happen much later into the game too. In the former case, you could end up missing a good 50% of the game's content. For this reason, I recommend to save your game just before each choice, and then try them all out. It's hard to predict which choice will "work out" in particular situations without you being taken in by the authorities. It helps to try out different paths in order to really get a grasp of what's going on and what happened in the …

This is a very difficult review for me to write. On paper I love a game like this & I explicitly bought it because it was recommended to me. However ... this is no Steinsgate be that positive or negative. For starters, the game doesn't really let you emotionally bond with any character - it tries to but it doesn't quite work. The encounters are too brief, the characters too somber & unengaging & the few people you can get "close" to even at the best outcome, don't add a lot of emotional weight. The game basically banks completely on the "horror" theme & uncovering the truth. Except that's where it also fails. You see, what the game doesn't tell you is that almost every choice you make pushes you down a specific path to a specific ending. Some early endings are already incredibly revealing & ruin a lot of the mysticism that you can uncover in the much longer paths. It doesn't take a genius to realize that this is bad game design! And this is why I cannot really recommend it. The game fails to properly pace how it reveals the truth about the world. It reveals stuff in giant floods at a time where you suddenly learn far too much based on "wrong choices" instead of giving a fast "b…

Very cool dystopian body horror VN. The plot is very good, as is the art, and there are a good number of endings to sample. A lot of the story paths overlap with each other and intersect at several plot points, so I didn't care to go for every ending. The story kind of jumps right into the universe and does a bit of worldbuilding before the real narrative begins, but the lore is very well thought out.

This is a very interesting story. The endings are all pretty unique, your choices definitely matter to the final outcome. Creepy dystopian setting with a lot of mysteries to uncover. My playtime was on the shorter side, because I did not play every ending all the way through. The endings are mostly kind of dark, on my first playthrough I got an ending that was "reasonably good" and did not want to explore every worse ending. But I will say that every ending has a lot of unique story parts, and you can really only get the full picture by playing through a few of them. There's 9 endings, I played 6 of them. I would say it takes 3-4 playthroughs to get the full picture of what is really going on in the city.

7/10 choices 10/10 vibe

Reminds me a lot of Sarkicism from SCP xd Bought this on sale, Anthanasy exceeds all metrics of my expectation. A must-try if you are into visual novels. There are very minor (I mean like, very minor) translation errors and untranslated scripts if you are playing in english, but they are pretty much neglectable.