Livber: Smoke and Mirrors

"Livber: Smoke and Mirrors" is a short VN game with a disturbing psychological horror story about love, trauma and mysticism. It does an excellent job at creating the atmosphere that pulls us in with its creepy art and emotion-filled music. The story doesn't pull punches when it comes to unsettling mysticism, gore and body horror, and it truly hits the "psychological" aspect of the horror, unsettling us with its backstory which gets unravelled piece by piece. Although this is predominantly a psychological horror game in an eerie dark fantasy setting, it is also a beautiful story that's focused on love and letting go, about two souls that found themselves in difficult circumstances, where hard choices had to be made, and what it means about the present moment. Don't expect it all to be clear cut and on-the-nose. A lot of it will require you to piece together the meaning on your own, and even by the end you might still keep asking yourself questions. It helps to try several endings to understand more. And speaking of that, there are plenty of choices to make, although majority of the story is fairly linear, and, aside from a couple of early endings, most of the endings result f…

The game is fine. I don't think it's as stellar as some of the other reviews make it out to be, but it's fine. I am writting the review mostly because the games seems like a passion project, and it deserves a bit more of visibility even if it has it's flaws. I don't like assigning numerical scores, but... 6/10? I don't regret playing it, but I don't think I'll remember it for very long either. It's a visual novel with a few branching paths (not as many as the small GIF in the store description makes it seem), where you choose dialogue options and a few actions from a text box on the right side of the screen, accompanied by background music (but no voices) and a decent number of high-quality still images. Despite the apparent low budget, it doesn't seem to use any AI, so that's already a plus! The prose is flowery, but it suffers from some repetition and redundancy (beyond the occasional grammar and spelling errors), perhaps because the English text is a translation. Overall, though, it's perfectly readable and enjoyable. The narrative map makes it really easy to get all the endings if you want to, but I got tired of replaying the final sections after a few runs. Still, it would…

Suffers from significant localization issues. The result is the text is filled with purple prose that doesn't make any sense ("bury you with her breath"?) and choices/lines that are extremely confusing or vague and it's impossible to tell if it's on purpose or just a translation error. This is a significant problem for an entirely text-based game. $10 and you can finish it in ~50 minutes, and then you get to go through blind picking options for awhile trying to figure out how to get all endings. World building seems interesting but sadly is not explored. Everything in the story exclusively acts as a metaphor or an allegory and so the story makes no sense as *text* but only as an elaborate analogy. The story desperately needed to be longer, with a better localization, and with more grounded storytelling instead of making everything pseudo-real and a metaphor for something else. Trauma and abuse can be confronted and gut-wrenching without having to make them *literal* characters who get to just tell the reader directly what they should be feeling.

I hate giving this a negative review because, objectively, the game is well done and cohesive. You spend most of the game exploring different rooms and experiencing some nicely branching dialogue. The art, the music, the direction, it's solid. I don't have a problem with the translation at all, and while playing I was actually pretty impressed with it. It can't have been an easy task. So, if possible, [b]please consider this more of a "neutral" review. The game just wasn't my cup of tea.[/b] I'm only leaving my thoughts here because, well, my opinion isn't represented in the current negative reviews. Let me begin with a genuine compliment: the experience feels like you're floating through a grotesque circus of flowery poetics. You'll spend the first part confused, the second part gathering some strong and surreal hints to what's going on, and the third part facing the reckoning of everything that came before it. Reaching the third act for the first and second time was, to me, a fun experience. The main problem, however, is that I just do not sympathize with the two main characters/conflict. It is a fundamental value of mine to not tolerate ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, to put my foot down when nee…

Came for the mysterious hot living dead witch girlfriend, stayed for the delicious grief meat. Gross, gothic, emotional, and genuinely memorable. The branching can get a little exhausting and I wish the cosmic horror angle had more payoff, but the core story about guilt, memory, and refusing to let the dead stay dead really got under my skin. Not flawless, but absolutely worth the trip into the basement.

I haven't finished Livber yet, but I'm already really impressed with it. The art style looks fantastic, the atmosphere is captivating, and the story has managed to keep me curious from the beginning. I actually bought it through the bundle with Luce Spenta, and honestly, pairing these two games together was a great decision. They complement each other surprisingly well. So far I've been having a great time with Livber and I'd definitely recommend giving it a chance if you enjoy story-driven indie games with strong visuals and an intriguing world!