BURIED STARS

I'll probably play until I get some more bad endings, but this is one of the most disappointing games I've ever played. I don't think I remember the last time a game dropped the ball this hard on its characters and story. I do not recommend getting this game outside of big sales. Just listen to the OST. Pros: + Good Music + Decent Art + Decent Atmosphere + Game does a very good job of making you want to see the cast suffer Cons: - Nearly the entire cast is objectively evil - The members of the cast not objectively evil are as likeable as throwaway characters introduced in a horror movie to be killed in the next 2 minutes, but we have to spend hours with them - For the plot to work, the characters also have to be unbelievably stupid - Each new plot point feels more forced than the last - A significant amount of time is spent dealing with obvious twitter trolls. Are you in a life and death situation or not!? - None of the mysteries have a satisfying conclusion - The puzzles are barely puzzles - YOU CANNOT SKIP ONLY THE TEXT YOU HAVE READ! It's unbelievable the little amount of things you have to do for a VN to work properly and somehow not do them

I don't very often write reviews, but I felt compelled to write one after this game. I wish reviews began with a broader question than would you recommend this game? because I have very mixed feelings. For the most part, I enjoyed the game and there were bits of story that I found to be really engaging. It was fun to speculate what things being brought up may be relevant later. It was interesting to learn how to respond to specific characters (in the early game I lamented how many times I managed to pick the wrong choice for Seil from only 2 options!). The music and atmosphere could be good at times. There's quite a bit of voice acting - I couldn't tell you how much of that is full voice acted verses perhaps just saying a line in a character voice to give an impression of tone (like the Persona games or Danganronpa may do, as an example). The characters do have character and I liked the different character relationships to each other. I have a friend who is into the K-POP scene and has spoken to me about it before, I think that context helped me a lot - without, I may have found this harder to enjoy. So why am I torn? This game desperately needed another editing pass. I do…

I walked into Buried Stars thinking that I would enjoy it from the sheer amount of times it was recommended to me, but it fell very short of my expectations. The gameplay is extremely redundant, the dialogue in gameplay sections is pretty repetitive and the actual mechanics of it just felt like a bland rinse and repeat over and over again. The log only holds 20 lines of dialogue (at best), which was an issue for me since I rely on logs for backreading a lot. This becomes an even bigger issue with the fact that the localization is definitely a machine translation. There are multiple lines of dialogue that contain misspells, no punctuation, wrong names, or just entire lines that don't really make any sense. The game locks you into a bad end your first time around, which I didn't really understand the point of. This ending was paced too fast for any of it to land on me. When it picks back up from the forced end, It was easy for me to be able to predict the killer. The next plot twist it tries to do was not smart at all. They set up one character to be a red herring only for them to make the actual person behind it an unnamed third party who never gets brought back up. While I did like…

I always liked mystery games and this one is amazing. Love the relationships between characters.

STORY , SETTING and PREMISE initially gave me positive impression, starting with high expectations. GAMEPLAY itself becomes sadly repetitive and boring, because of the communication sections, which fit at first, but after the third one in a row I started rolling my eyes and skipping dialogue. Some characters being absolute deekheads doesn´t help the matter. STRUCTURE of the story is quite baffling to me as well. First game end is fixed and to reach any other ending is to start a NG+ I really did not want to talk to anyone except maybe one person ever again. Wish there was an option to be the killer sometimes. - very low number of animated cutscenes - no romance - no eng dub Stellar emotional deliveries though, but frankly that´s just not enough for me. I´d say this one is not worth more than 10€

My review is going to go into more specifics about the scenario than the steam page, so if you want to go in fully blind you should skip reading this. But these were the details that got me interested in the game in the first place. Buried Stars takes my favorite parts of games like Danganronpa and the Nonary Game - the character drama and tense mystery - but combines it with a grounded, adult cast and tighter pacing and themes to deliver an outstanding narrative. I had some doubts about how engaging the conversation system would be, but the mechanical investment in how characters would react to different conversation topics really let the writing shine. Throughout the game, I found myself torn between whether I wanted to continue to ask the characters questions or move on with the story, weighing how I thought characters would react to certain topics instead of just deciding based on my own curiosity vs impatience. Other choices made throughout the story were similarly engaging, with usually no obvious "correct" answer as I felt like I had to balance everyone's drive to find answers versus the need to keep the peace to survive. Unfortunately, the choices for going into differ…