Into the Waves

"Into the Waves" is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This garbage e-book follows the same theme that most high school anime club dropout fan-fictions on Steam do; it's an e-book about the author and his imaginary girlfriend. In this book the author pretends to run a bar and gets visited by his imaginary anime girlfriend, who is a wizard or something. It's every bit as cringey as you'd expect. This was slapped together with the godawful Ren'Py visual novel construction kit... enabling terrible authors to publish books as if they were games when otherwise we might have been spared the pollution. So, just like no professional writing took place here, no professional software development took pla…

Pleasant 2h story, 4 endings and magic-like plot. Though I`m upset we can`t see main heroes even after *event*, I guess devs didn`t draw them. Pity. Really enjoyable time.

An interesting short visual novel about curses and philosophy surrounding the pursuit of a greater good. Most of the characters are only silhouettes yet they are still distinguishable by small details, which is commendable. The design of the one character that is in colour is also quite good, especially the contrast between the red hair and blue, white and gold clothes works very well. A definitive strong suit of the game is the sound design, especially during the more tense scenes. The whispers and other sound effects are very well done and the background music is also quite good. The drink mixing is only a very small part of the game and little more that clicking slow moving targets, sometimes in a specific order. Meanwhile the narrative is a much greater focus. The individual stories of each character overlap well with the main story and come together really well after seeing all endings. There is also some interesting worldbuilding to be found such as how witches work, where their power comes from, how they are different to regular people and especially their limitations. Mixing all of these aspects together this is a decent little game for the low price of free and works well …

Didn't appreciate the flashbangs. P.s Achievements are broken.

A short visual novel (half a hour) with a few different endings and an easy minigame. It was weird seeing Live2D being used with Western-influenced art.

A visual story game with a good starting story but at the end seems kinda rushed. It's a free game so you can't really hate it.