SYNESTHESIA

Synesthesia is like a budget version of The Nonary Games. I don't necessarily say this as a negative, the inspiration seems fairly clear and there's a lot of passion that went into the creation of this game. While the sprites and voice acting are clearly low budget, and the writing is a bit stiff, the overall narrative is interesting and keeps you hooked. I will say that a large chunk of the experience is fluff, there's several scenes that, I presume, are only written to make the characters seem more endearing or fleshed out, but unfortunately those are some of the weaker aspects of the game. When I said the game has an interesting hook, that's despite the writing and less so because of it, and precisely that makes you less engaged in any of the plotlines that aren't directly relating to the main mystery at hand. Naturally, there's a lot of suspension of disbelief necessary to excuse the narrative confinement happening. The game makes little effort to excuse the fact that the majority of the plot just so happens to occur in the exact same city. Overall I enjoyed the experience and there's a lot of handwaving you can do considering the fact that it's an indie production, althou…

This game is brilliant. Honestly at a loss for words. It's so smart, I feel like every chapter is a science or philosophy class! Do yourself a favor and PLAY IT!

A short sci-fi multi-route visual novel like a to-the-point I/O or Root Double or an infinity game. Cute girls, a fair amount of interesting pseudoscience, lots of hints trickling to the convergence of an overarching plot. Worth playing for the story and at a great price. Visibility: Public Language: English

This VN is more of a shonen than the previous installment. VII Enigma focused mostly on the technicalities of Steins;Gate's D-Mails, and expands on it. It was a fairly serious story with lots of urgency, though it had some big flashback sections in the middle. This VN focuses on reading steiner, and links it to consciousness. There's some light commentary on duality and simulation theory too. The golden ratio stuff pushes the VN into urban fantasy though - somehow the golden ratio is a more important constant than all the others for no apparent reason. "It's the universe's number", I guess...but what about all the other important constants used for critical things? e? Pi? The omega constant? Honestly, e gets a LOT more use in nature than the golden ratio does. Though I guess it would be harder to use e for the spiral thing the VN is going for (Euler spiral aside) This VN has a male student going to school with his friends in Japan. I'm sure you know how this sort of thing goes. The opps roll up, and the MC is like, "We should take down these obvious bad guys". Things happen, and then the typical shonen ending is stopped abruptly in favor of, well, [spoiler]have you seen 2001 A S…

Jase [spoiler] Ending where? [/spoiler] (No ♥♥♥♥) Okay to be serious the game is decent enough, in particular the true route is quite good, but it does fall short in a handful of aspects. -Firstly the dialogue for character interactions is pretty rough/jarring, with the synthesized voices really exacerbating it. With more polished dialogue and maybe some quality voice acting the game would genuinely feel stellar since the monologue verbiage and narration isn't bad. -The heroine routes aren't the strongest in isolation, but do work towards the true end. -Puzzles aren't expansive (and are pretty scarce) which isn't bad, but it's nothing to get your hopes up if you were expecting the next Zero Escape. -Finally the epilogues except the true one, are pretty underwhelming and would have worked better as after credits for the true end. On top of this the Resign and Spiral endings are [spoiler] literally like a panel or two. I wished they were fleshed out. [/spoiler] -Finally Jase sort of is [spoiler] blipped out of the story in the endings. I believe they were implying Jase (or Ziek?) to be snow so it may be content for a sequel. [/spoiler]

Synethesia isn't going to blow your mind, but for the price it's a decent enough game/story for those who enjoy visual novels. The base concept of the story is pretty interesting, though the side elements with the relationship drama feels out of place and shoehorned in. You don't need romance in every story, people! The graphics are fine, with some nifty stuff done around the Synethesia events. The voice acting is passable, though it does sound robotic in places, whereby the tone is completely off for the line that's being delivered, but it wasn't offensive or laugh out loud bad. Jase was the one that felt the most off, but then Jase just disappeared by the end, so I'm not convinced he was even intended to be in it originally and was just shoehorned in near the end to resolve some plot issues. The puzzles are ... there? There's some intriguing ideas presented by the superpower our protagonist has, but it does feel like they could have gone a lot further with this. It's also worth noting that some of the puzzles rely on colour, which I can imagine could be a problem if you're colour blind, but there are in-game methods to just skip them if needed. My biggest complaint would be tha…