Dear Althea
Tijerín Art Studio · 2022 · Romance, LGBTQ+, Visual Novel, Puzzle, Choices Matter
PC
Mixed67% · 15
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Screenshots
About Dear Althea
About this game
This visual novel, full of decisions and repercussions, is a fun reinterpretation of the novel "Dear Faustina" (1897) by British author Rhoda Broughton. Each chapter is filled with beautiful, high-quality artwork illustrating all the situations and moments you will experience alongside the charismatic characters. The art you will be able to see has been made with special care in the representation of the British Victorian era, as well as taking into account the class difference that is present at all times. The video game has 41 chapters, although if you play only one of the 10 routes you will see, more or less, 25 chapters.
Illustrations
In each chapter you can enjoy between 18 and 50 beautiful illustrations that illustrate every moment and situation. In total, the videogame has 780 illustrations made with special care to show every detail and gesture. The result manages to transport you completely to the London of the Victorian era and succeeds in conveying the feelings that the protagonist experiences.
Story
In "Dear Althea" you will be Althea Vane; a young upper class British woman whose life is turned upside down after the death of her father causes her family to fall apart along with her future. She will be forced to choose a new future, a place to call home and a group to belong to. To get there she will have to face all sorts of situations in Victorian London; however, love and romance fortunately abound and will make her quest more enjoyable. Choices matter
You'll find that the decisions you make will change the story from the very first chapter. There will also be many of them that will affect the story in the long run, even when you least expect it. In Dear Althea, your decisions can affect not only your fate, but also the fate of other people; they can also change your relationship with other characters and open up new routes of dialogue that will change the dynamics of relationships. Diverse relationships
You don't have to fall in love with anyone or enter into any kind of romantic or sex-affective relationship in the game; but depending on your choices, you can enter into a relationship with up to four characters that fall within the LGBTIAQ+ spectrum. However, you don't have to choose just one relationship; you can enter into a variety of polyamorous relationships. Consent
In this video game, consent is discussed and encouraged in all aspects of relationships between characters. In romantic relationships there is no obligation to have sex and refusing to have sex has no negative repercussions.
Characters
There is a great diversity of charismatic characters in Dear Althea but there is a clear division between upper class and working class characters, as a protagonist you can decide from the first chapter and throughout the story which group you are more akin to and defending characters of one class or the other can have repercussions.
Puzzles
If puzzles aren't your thing, you can skip them without missing any important plot points; however, there has been a lot of effort put into the creation of the puzzles to make them all diverse. They have been integrated in such a way that they fit both the plot and the period in which the story takes place. Typography
The typography has been designed to help people with dyslexia to identify letters better. Even so, it has been created from the typography that appears in the original 1897 book.
Accessibility
The whole story is narrated in text and it is not necessary to activate the sound at any time. You only need to click the right mouse button to interact with the game and the puzzles. There are no skill or speed challenges.
Endings
There are a total of ten final chapters, many of which are the result of decisions that took place several chapters earlier. Due to the branching of the story. There are no good or bad endings, they have all been thought out so that the ending is satisfying and consistent with the decisions you have made throughout the story.
Duration and text
Counting all possible decisions, the game has more than 112408 words and can last (depending on decisions and reading speed) about 5 hours on average.
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
Sadly, i cannot give an opinion about the story if the game because i had to ask for a refund. The bugs were too many. And some of them serious enough to not letting me play. My save file got corrupted, the dialogue background desappeared (thankfully it came back going to the menu and coming back), when I was seeing one character profile the data of another character popped in a random place, some text was skipped randomly... You know, if they were some minor bugs that didn't make it difficult to play, i wouldn't mind but there are some basics in a visual novel that can't happen... And all of this happened in just the first 20 minutes of the game. I won't risk some of these bugs happening more later like the save file corruption...6 found this helpful
I really want to recommend this review without any reservation. The graphics are gorgeous, the story is, if viewed from a distance, quite engaging, and the choice of a Victorian setting makes it miles and leagues above the typical settings seen in this genre. However, this game has a ridiculous number of the most basic and fundamental of bugs. Spanish text is often left in, the text for dialogue does not load if you reload a save (workaround is to look at the dialogue history aka "backlog"), dialogue is often repeated or skipped, some puzzles (like [spoiler]the game your sister gives you[/spoiler]) and there are typos in many, if not most, lines. If I could give this a mixed review, I would have. Had the reviews been overwhelmingly positive, I would have not recommended it because I really like everything except for the typos and bugs. This is really a diamond in the rough, but I would happily buy every single game with this art and this setting in the future if the devs could just hire a proofreader and somebody to test all the dialogue beforehand. It is extremely unfortunate that this game only got one first impression, and that first impression was, understandably, mixed. Thi…5 found this helpful
A good visual novel with a few rough edges in it. First off, a positive stuff: [list] [*]Pretty visuals with plenty of unique colourful characters and backgrounds [*]Good soundtrack in the spirit of the time depicted in VN [*]An engaging story about personal conflict and social-economic discrepancy in the end of XIX century [*]Simple puzzles allowing to get rest from continuous reading (and which can be safely skipped!) [*]Stylish pictures and descriptions of various clothes and personal items used in those days (I was amazed to learn that such simple things as buttons on a coat could reveal many about their owner) [*]Lots of choices leading to different outcomes [*]Hack mode to help player view different endings [/list] Secondly, aforementioned rough edges: [list] [*]Lots of typos, however not critical enough to distract from story [*]Minor bugs, like sentences being repeated or UI glitching [*]Lots of choices leading to same outcome since developer guides player towards specific narrative (though I understand that creating truly unique paths is difficult, moreover for a small game studio) [/list] It's clear that developer put a great effort into the game and cares about it. All…3 found this helpful
[i]I received a free copy of this game for my curator, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32080131/]Games for Hopeless Romantics[/url].[/i] I encountered a bug that made it impossible to progress through the game. My save was literally on the line immediately before where the crash happens, so reloading isn't helpful. The game does have a chapter menu that lets you restart the game from a specific point (at the cost of losing the impact of all your decisions except a select few)...but choosing the chapter I was in brings up the previous chapter instead. If I had enjoyed the game up to that point, I would be willing to just skip through. The potential is there, especially with how well-done the visuals are, but the game is laggy and the text itself...isn't great. It's written to imitate 19th century English novels (such as the one this VN is based on) but doesn't really succeed at it, often being more confusing than an actual 19th century novel would be. This isn't helped by the repeated pronoun confusion: narration is usually in third person ("She is...") but abruptly shifts to second ("You are...") or first person ("I am..."), sometimes multiple times within a single s…
DO NOT BUY THIS GAME First time playing. Crashed on load, asks what language i want every time game starts, terrible FPS in main menu, crash on new game, crashed after exiting options menu, esc closes game rather than opens menu, game dialogue plays while options menu is open. Game loads into menu, cant leave menu. unlowerable LOUD menu sound effects, Bad dialogue translation, spelling mistakes. Cross dressing characters, everyones a lesbian, if these girls went out in public in Victorian times theyd be stoned to death. I would ask for a refund but its far too late for that (bought at Xmas time). This is not a point and click adventure, this is a static visual novel with no animation, do not be fooled by the trailer, you just pick dialogue text choices.
https://youtu.be/5nbQ5DWldLM Translations issues are immediately apparent and frequent enough to distracting. Despite all that, the story and characters are compelling and well written to match the intended era.
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