The Divine Deception

After playing Zodiac Trials, I knew I had to play this game. I wasn't really sure what to expect going in, and starting out in the first few hours, I was still a bit lost. (You'll understand why when you play for yourself!) I'm so glad I kept going. I'm not really sure what else to say. I loved it. It's a conspiratorial mystery told from the perspective of many different characters. 10/10

The second game I played by Themisian (I'm not exactly sure of the chronological order). The production remains basic, which will probably put a lot of people off, but I'm of a mind that, in a game, story / gameplay always trumps graphics / audio. The writing in this one is not as good, and while I enjoyed it at first, in the end it felt both lacking direction and structure and yet also strangely linear and restrictive. I attribute this to the game's rather unique design where you pick and choose what order to play the chapters in. While this seems cool at first, a game this long inevitably struggles to make this work, and ultimately it feels like the intention was still very much for it to be played in a specific order. Certain things get spoiled, you get locked out of gambles, and the game even tells you off for refusing to play it properly. Additionally, it felt like you didn't really have enough clues to be able to guess at the big plot twist at the end, which felt kind of contrived and absurd in my opinion. Overall, an interesting concept with some good moments, but a game perhaps too ambitious for its own good. 5/10.

Drawn in by the gambling mechanic, but ended up boring and hard to follow. Some shoehorned in minigames fall flat as well.

This game is just a gem. I have been putting off playing it for unknown reasons and I'm so invested right now it's all I'm thinking about. Incredible narrative and characters that keeps you hooked UPDATE : Finished the game. It was simply incredible.

Divine Deception is pretty ambitious. You have seven intersecting narratives with characters crossing over between routes. It's fun to see the connections and piece together the timeline of when each scene is happening, though not required to understand the story. The game has some unique framing compared to other VNs I've played. One part of this is the framing of the narrator who gives commentary between scenes and also allows you to bet on what you think will happen in the story. This is a great idea and the game interacts with your choices in this narrative in a way I really enjoyed. There are also mini-games that come up mid story that give you opportunities to earn additional chips to gamble with. These are all quite bad. Part of it is the difficulty, part of it is that they hurt the story's pacing, but the biggest part is they're all super janky implementations in a visual novel engine. I bounced off of The Divine Deception on my first attempt, and I think a big factor of me enjoying it more on my second time was flat out skipping half of the mini-games. But aside from that, the actual story part of the VN is good enough to make it worth it.

EDIT: finished it, story only got better and better near the end. Absolutely a must-buy if you like intrigue stories with clever mind games. Ignore my play time, I had the game running in the background at some points so it's artificially inflated. Probably one of the best VNs I've ever played and I'm not even done with the story yet. I bought this one together with the Zodiac Trials on sale and some of the reviews here mentioned to play this one first so I did. It's not a death game by any means but it's a story full of suspense! I love the multiple perspectives you can follow and discovering how info from one branch carries over to the next is really enjoyable to me. Panthea is a very solid setting with a well-fleshed out power struggle and compelling characters. The writing is strong and funny, though there are some characters who I think are a bit overdone personally. Still, that doesn't stop me from reading for hours on end. The game's pretty long, you can definitely read for 30+ hours if you're faster than me. The minigames also spice up the gameplay quite nicely even though you aren't required to play them and can opt to skip them instead if that's not for you. You'll get y…