Has Heart, but also a lot of Flaws
Bare Witness is a fun play that delivers on all the necessities of a decent, semi-memorable adult VN. There's an abundance of attractive love interests, a decent variety of cast and situations, and enough animations to keep the scenes going. I'm glad to have found it.
The artwork is very nice, which is probably the best word to describe it. None of it lets down the experience, but also very little of it is exceptional, meaning don't play this game if you need to be blown away by the visuals. It'll get the job done, and there are ever some scenes that are very good, but it's all pretty generic. Lighting and textures are average, though there's at least some appreciable consideration for them. Some faces, like Heidi or the brief cameo of Mira, can look a little strange, but there's some care put into their expressions and posing.
The overall premise of the story is not unique: it's another "young man sets out on his own to start a new chapter of his life" story. He starts school and meets a host of beautiful women who are all over his dick instantly. Despite being bland, goofy, and utterly unexceptional, the game treats him as if he's a Golden God with a Midas Dick. It's the same power fantasy we've seen countless times before, though at least this one is done reasonably well, without drowning us in exposition or treating the audience like we're idiots.
The twist comes from him being in Witness Protection with an active crime family hunting him and his father. It only kind of works, as most of the time it feels tacked on. You never even see him meeting with local PD or any marshals. Everything is handled through the dean of the MC's college, for reasons nobody understands. Nor does it show how he's sustaining his lifestyle. He's not employed (something expected of most adults in witness protection), nor does it show him getting money from his parents. Yet he's able to buy things and [presumably] afford rent.
Everything about the witness protection arc just feels kind of useless and arbitrary. It's either there solely for plot contrivance or convenience, or as a vessel for the MC to show the barest amount of emotion.
Even when his father is ultimately killed, it just doesn't land. The MC is sad for a bit, then there's a time skip, and it's barely brought up again except as a vehicle to express MC's manpain, usually with immediate sympathy and sexual healing to follow.
The writing is passable, but takes a lot of porn liberties. The MC is simply assumed to be uncontrollable horny by default, especially at the idea of lesbians (because they exist to titillate men, obviously...). Him being creepily interested in the idea of his roommates sleeping with each other is viewed as a positive quality, at least for the sake of advancing his relationship with them.
He's also immediately walking around in his underwear in a house where they loudly have sex the first night he moves in. Valeria is instantly willing to jump on MC's dick and claim him because... he's single in a bar? No clue, just tack it on to the growing number of conveniences brought about by the game's power fantasy premise.
Everyone is already in love after a couple of dates. Relationships move at mach speed in Plattsburgh, apparently, because no one finds this weird. The game also seems to encourage this breakneck pace, because the only choice in the game is go along with it (earning positive points) or rejecting the girl (negative points or ending the route), which ostensibly defeats the point of playing the game. If you do go along with it, and of course you will or you'd be playing a different game, be prepared to be drowned under an avalanche of I love you's from every girl involved.
Thankfully, the characters are all acceptable. In the giant pot of middling soup that is adult VNs, they're probably above average. Valeria is a highlight, as a mysterious and intelligent older Latina woman, though somewhat underused in the story that defaults to reducing women to their trauma and sex appeal. Mora is relatable and sympathetic, though it's difficult to identify her personality beyond workaholic (by necessity) and tabletop nerd. Zenda is a well-traveled posh girl with a domineering exterior but a gooey center. The other characters are a little less well rounded, but no one is egregiously written. They'll keep you in the story and not a whole lot more.
Most characters in the game have a few personality traits or quirks and they're consistently played up, but relatively few dimensions outside of that. That's how you get constantly horny Heidi, or never swears Sadie (outside of all the times she does), or always gaming Athena. I get it, since all of the characters are completely smitten with the MC and are all a part of an ensemble cast, it's difficult to give them a variety of traits and a depth of personality, but they need something more than just "hopelessly in love with MC" to draw you in.
The game delivers on having a "harem", or rather a poly relationship with the MC in an established relationship with up to 4 women at the same time. But as much as the developer wants to harp on "the tag is right", it's not really a harem game, emphasis on the game part. The distinction is akin to a role playing game and a game where you have some random player stats.
A harem game expects you to romance all or most of the love interests in a single playthrough. It doesn't mean, "there's a poly relationship somewhere in the jungle of LIs, along with a bunch of other girls who are unwittingly exclusive." Games like Bare Witness too often presume their content is interesting enough that players will make a half-dozen playthroughs for each combination of girl.
Yet, they rarely are. And this game is not an exception.
In fact, several of the best love interests—Valeria, Zenda, and the often-sidelined-but-still-on-the-splash-screen Nicole—are completely absent on the harem route. Even if you get in a relationship with all 4 girls in the poly, you're missing a huge chunk of the game, and some of the best scenes in the VN. Meanwhile if you pursue Val or Zenda exclusively, you miss out on a supermajority of scenes. It's ultimately very disappointing.
Games are all about the user experience. Realism is good, though consistency is better. It's easy to suspend disbelief if the game follows through on its premises, even if there's some liberties taken in world building or character arcs. The important part is that the experience of the player is preserved.
For instance, you can have a game that requires choice between love interest A or love interest B (in this case, Zenda vs Val or Athena/Heidi), but the choice itself should be made apparent to the player. In the moment, not fifty slides in the future when you're forced to close a route. This is especially true in a game where the love interests represent the majority of the gameplay. Arbitrarily locking players out of content they want to see is simply not fun gameplay. And a game will always live and die by its gameplay merits.
I don't have a problem with a game saying that you can either romance Valeria or Zenda. But it is frustrating when there's zero indication that these are competing routes (in fact, just the opposite, with how much Valeria insists that it's just casual fun) and then, all of a sudden, they're competing and exclusive. If the developers don't want to submit to the ultimate harem power fantasy (despite already writing a power fantasy MC), it would make more sense write two competing routes: a harem of Athena/Heidi/Sadie/Mora and one with Valeria/Zenda/Nicole, and you would only need 2 playthroughs to essentially see all the main content. As it stands right now, Zenda and Val feel like loose appendages in an erotic novel that depends on its LIs.
This feels especially egregious because the main poly contains some of the least developed women. Athena likes video games. Heidi likes dancing and sex. Sadie is a cousin who want to get in shape and is head over heels for the MC. So much of their personalities are wrapped up in liking each other and liking the MC that they can sometimes come across as flat, especially in contrast to the more meticulously developed Zenda or Val. But if you pursue either of those two you're essentially locking yourself out of at least 75% of the rest of the game. It's a feels bad, either way.
I understand the developers' desire for their game to have replay value, but ultimately these decisions hurt the game more than they help it. A linear VN without stats, RPG elements, roam, variance, or radiant events is simply not a good vessel for getting someone to play the same game through many playthroughs, especially one with the harem tag. No one wants to see the same scenes over and over because of FOMO for another girl that they thought they should've been able to romance in the first place.
The other major flaw with the game is its pacing. There's a number of timeskips between the chapters. While you can appreciate that the game doesn't try to condense a whole-ass marriage into a week's time, having an arbitrary title card with "several weeks later" doesn't really do anything. Not to mention it creates this kind of staccato storytelling where nothing fucking happens for weeks at a time and then six events happen in a week's time. It would be much more reasonable to intersperse events more evenly and let time pass in the background.
Instead, it tries to combine real time (e.g. the MC experiences each day during the non-skipped gameplay) with months of time skipped in between, and trips on its own feet. Combined with how quickly all of the LIs fall in love—not to mention the MC himself, if he's playing their respective romance route—it still feels rushed, even with the timeskips.
Having said all this, the game has a lot of nice qualities. There's an earnest, genuine attempt at telling love stories here. It tries to make the characters sympathetic and likable, replete with showing them go through actual emotions, and there's some genuine tender moments. While there's an abundance of lewd scenes, the developer also puts effort in setting them up and writing through them, so they don't feel out of place or abrupt. There's also a decent variety of scenes, so it genuinely feels like the MC is exploring and living out his life in this small college town with his multiple girlfriends.
The game is worth playing because of the amount of effort that clearly went into the creating it. But the storytelling and characters could use a little bit more seasoning. The developer is one to watch, especially if they improve in a few key areas.
A solid 3.5/5.
