Corridors of Their Memories

[h3]Corridors is a classic Ren'Py visual novel with a slightly unconventional setting: Piece together clues surrounding an attempted murder by reliving the victim's memories. The art and music are of high quality, and regardless of whether premade assets or not, are used well. That said, the game's incredibly short length and less-than-stellar translation, coupled with a cliffhanger ending, leave the impression of a paid demo rather than a satisfying adventure.[/h3] [i]Since steam forces a rating, choosing not recommended on the basis of value. However, this review is intended to be strictly informational.[/i] Corridors has a lot of things working in its favor: Intrigue, suspense, even an "Inception" inspired setting. Working against it, however, are a limited cast, dialogue that might be lost in translation, and a lack of meaningful choices with a supporting narrative to go with them. It's so short that if you use the fast forward feature, you can reach an ending in literally a minute. Even if you slow down to read, your time to complete won't last much more than an hour, since there are only three main choices to make. This is simply too little to justify the price of admission…

I don't usually post reviews right after finishing a game, but I just had to this time - I just had to say that this game feels like a prologue for a way longer, true story. I hope that it's really the case, because I really, really want more out of this. Everything's set up for it - the story just needs to be written. About the game itself, I had a lot of fun, albeit within a short time. I'm not really good with solving mysteries and usually rely on walkthroughs to give me hints, but this is one where I told myself that I shouldn't use a walkthrough and try my best to find out for myself where I went wrong. And it's satisfying to finally reach the point where the player is told that everything had been done perfectly. All in all, it's a good game for someone new to visual novels to ease into visual novels with mystery plots, but this is also one that will surely leave the player wanting for a lot, lot more.

Russian af, but in a good way. The writing is really gripping and psychologically and emotionally gripping, you have to replay it to get the full breadth, but it's engaging and well worth it. Quite a bit darker than most psychological detective games, somehow. 8/10 but the English translation is a little wonky. Only for visual novel detective psych fans.

Corridors of Their Memories is a badly written and badly translated Visual Novel with a detective theme as you solve crimes by investigating people's memories. While there is a tiny element of actual gameplay through some inconsequential choices, this is mostly a visual novel, AKA a book, only worse because instead of turning pages after several paragraphs you have to click through every single sentence. That's right, shovelware game developers managed to make reading into a complete manual chore. Now, as a developer, if your business plan is to ask money for a paid product which is aimed to compete with free public libraries, Project Gutenberg, and every other place you can get books online for free (which is a lot), [i]instead[/i] of making an actual video game, that's a failure right out of the gate if you want this work to be recommended to PC gamers on Steam (which is for games, not unpublishingly awful books that you have to click through every sentence just to read).

Boring Game. I have deleted it from my account. Glad it was on sale.

The usual dime-a-dozen visual novel, with a barrage of spelling and grammar mistakes, which most have probably learned to ignore by now. Catch it when it comes on sale, but there's nothing super special about it, really. I managed to get all 3 endings in under an hour of playtime. It's not terrible, but it's not great either. Decent for an hour of killing time, I suppose.