I've played Bare Witness only once and this game easily became one of my favourite despite all its flaws.
Let's start with
story. Is it interesting? Well.. Not THAT interesting but still pretty solid and engaging to worry about MC and his situation at least a little bit. The cliffhanger in last chapter is kinda intriguing and dangerous at the same time, considering information that we get to know a bit earlier.
The
main problem about story - timeskips. I'm not a huge fan of timeskips to say the least. Bare Witness used this feature a few time, instead of continuing to tell the story (it's like all the actions happened behind the scenes with no reason whatsoever. I really wanted to experience all the MC's pain/sadness/joy etc. but all I got - "6 weeks later").
The
next problem is constant abruptions during some dates with characters. Again, it's like developers didn't want to show all the things happening during/after date and because of that, all we got is black screen and move on to the next event.
Another problem arises from previous two problems - development of relationship with characters. Because of timeskips and abrupt moments we haven't enough depth in main LIs, since most of the actions happened without player at all.
Don't get me wrong,
characters in Bare Witness are really awesome, there is variety in their personalities and looks, no doubts. Also I like little details in overall looks of a few characters (like piercing and freckles).
Most of the characters has quite lovely, funny and unique personalities and some characters even exceeded my expectations about them.
But there is a "small" problem about these characters which I mentioned earlier. Some events/dates ends pretty abruptly, while those timeskips makes things even worse. I REALLY love almost all the characters (especially Athena, Mora and Heidi) but there is small feeling that I don't really know them as closely as game shows it. It's like there was indeed some "chemistry" between characters but developers didn't show it and we moved on to sudden kisses and sex scenes a bit faster than I'd like to.
The dates/events with all the characters are really interesting and more or less "unique" among the events that most of the AVNs are showing.
A few words about
visuals and animations. I'd say it's more than acceptable, renders are really beautiful and close-up faces of characters looks fantastic. There are some background details in scenes aka other people in university/shop etc. which is obviously good point and it adds a bit of immersion (some of the games that I've played completely neglected this aspect, leaving all the events and scenes almost without any additional people/objects).
Animations are good, although nothing too special. I'd like to see more poses and speed variations, since many scenes felt a bit repetitive.
As for
music, I can't praise it very highly but I can admit that I've really enjoyed like 80% of tracks and I've already added most of them to my playlist. To be honest, a few of them were a bit distracting from the scene itself but not too much. I haven't "mute" sound even once during whole playthrough.
Almost forgot about
writing. I'd say it's pretty good but you shouldn't take my opinion as 100% truth, since I'm not very picky in this aspect. I'm satisfied with any writing (of course with exceptions of extremely bad writing) as long as it's not becoming too "cringy" or unrealistic and I haven't felt anything like that in Bare Witness.
Overall, I can say that Bare Witness is a very solid game with awesome graphics, gorgeous and interesting characters, more or less engaging plot and great music.
This is one of the few games where I wasn't bored of "oversweet" moments e.g. "I love you" every 5-10 minutes. Perhaps it's because I really love main LIs, unlike previous games with similar moments.
There is a bit of humor here and there, some of jokes were "meh", some of them were successful and made me giggle a little bit.
Also I really enjoyed all the cute moments in this game and I was genuinely happy for MC and LIs during some events. Sometimes I would not stop smiling and enjoying certain moments for 5-10 minutes.
Can I recommend this game though? Definitely yes, most likely you won't be dissapointed after playing Bare Witness.