The Orphaned Soul

A short visual novel about a young woman who was abandoned as an infant and adopted by a couple who raised her like their real daughter. When she reached her 21 birthday, she decided to set off for a journey to find her real parents. This journey depends heavily on your choices and of course, there will be huge consequences that might also cost your life. The writing style is good, as well as the voice over which is only in the intro of the game, the voice actress did a good job. There is a health system that can be affected by your choices, it can be raised or lowers depends on what you choose. Each scene and encounter may have two or more choices, you can take the dangerous route and your health be affected or can, of course, take the safe route which sometimes can be longer. You have the option to save your game before making any choices which are pretty handy and allows you to explore the game even further. Music is beautiful and fitting each scene and area, the beautiful backgrounds are good as well. The only thing I didn't like is the characters design. I also wished the game support steam overlay to take screenshots, but sadly I couldn't take any screenshot during my ga…

This is the first visual novel created by the devs. The visuals are great, the characters interesting, and the plot is good. Choices will affect what happens, perhaps even the difference between living and dying. Try it.

Very short but it is also very well made. The art is lovely and the music for each scene is excellent. It can literally take about 10 minutes to complete successfully, though I managed to complete it only on a third attempt.

The Orphaned Soul 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?". To answer that question: 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 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. The decision tree in the game all leads to the same place, but there's a token "hitpoints" counter that goes down if you make the wrong choices. This doesn't affect the flow of the game, just whether you can get to the end or not. Like a Fighting Fantasy book, but dumbed down and without the fighting. And w…

https://youtu.be/axreS8vYF_8 Branching narrative with only leaf nodes lacks the expected depth for a visual novel and reduces this to simple A|B testing with the save/load system.

Surprisingly decent little visual novel. Artwork, music, and writing are all quite good. The only problem is that it is very short (10-15 minutes per play through) and linear -- your choices really only affect how many health points you gain or lose at each encounter, and the goal is simply to get to the end without your health dropping to zero. I played it through a few times just to visit all of the locations and see all of the artwork. If you can get it on sale for around a dollar it might be worth it.