Lyantei

I'm rather sad to give this game a negative rating, because it's not terrible at its core. I just have too many issues with how it was executed to recommend it to anyone, especially at this price point. To not waste time, my problems were: - The triggers that start events which introduce characters to you and open their story arcs are absurdly cryptic and hard to find. You can easily miss major parts of the story and without a guide available anywhere, after a while, I had zero motivation to look for them any longer. - Stat management is basic and rather boring. There's only one goal - gather a specific amount of money within a month, and pretty much no interesting side objectives or modifiers. Also, I was sometimes under impression that the help other characters give you, taking some tasks upon themselves, do not always work properly. - The story overall is very short and writing is awkward. The personal storylines of the characters - the ones I was able to find - were cheesy and not very impactful, but above all, they were too rushed to leave any serious impression. The romance was minimalistic at best, and the lack of CGs made it feel empty. If this was a free game, I'd say it…

Lyantei 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 e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit. This E-book features Choose-Your-Own-Adventure elements where you make some decisions that don't do anything to change the fact this is just an E-Book. Nobody finished reading a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because E-books aren't games. And neither is this. This E-book doesn't even have an interesting premise, you just talk …

Lyantei is a casual visual novel from Sweet Slush Games. The main story is about you going to help you're aunt run a tavern, which has you doing different daily task. The story is a bit weird in places and clearly loses some effect in the translation. I wasn't impressed by the story as much as the artwork. The story just seems to try too hard and failed to get the effect it wanted with me. With that said you can tell a lot of love went into the game and several of the 6 main characters are interesting enough to keep you going. Each day you can complete 3 task, while other guest will chip in and help complete task as well. Your basically trying to make the Tavern the best place possible. Reputation, cleanliness, efficiency, food, potions and more are all things you can work on during the day to help the tavern succeed. While doing these task other events can spring up and give you more story and paths to follow. Most of the daily choices I ended up hitting the automate option, and that can get old pretty fast, but I did enjoy the story events that would pop up from time to time and I felt like the choices I made in those events changed my story quite a bit. Overall If your into Gr…

Lyantei has a lot of wholesome interactions with its diverse cast of characters. I played through once with the tavern management, and for subsequent playthroughs I just used the story mode. Unlike most VNs that I have read, Lyantei's story mode lets you explicitly choose which character path(s) to take - a design choice I much prefer over trying to figure out the exact right things to say to unlock a story route. The art, music, and writing are all pretty good. The character interactions are all generally quite wholesome and the story feels quite warm. A very minor issue: a couple of menu prompts weren't translated from the original German. Lyantei seems to have flown under the radar, and I think it deserves more visibility. I enjoyed it. My time counter got messed up somehow, my actual playtime is about 3.5 hours.