The game's premise and structure is relatively straightforward. You play as Arvo (you can change his name, granted, but you're playing a very tangible character in the game's story and world, one with his own personality, so I'm keeping it as Arvo for this review), a tiger from Finland, that's going to a cottage up in Northern Norway as part of a university trip there. Along the way, a wide range of characters are introduced, from those that Arvo are familiar with (his childhood friend Mikko, his campus roommate Lake, his idle crush Rune), to characters he hadn't met before (Coach Devon, big guy named Bjorn, cryptid Klaus).
The day passes, Arvo gets to spend time with both individual characters and a few choice groups, and as Arvo tries to go to back to his room, he realizes: he lost his key! And, to make matters worse, the universal room key is missing, so Arvo's going to have to figure out which among the cast he's going to have to spend the night with. After a night-time sequence of stargazing, you're given a range of options of whose route you'd like to explore, and provided you spent any meaningful time with them within Day 1, you'll get access to them, and from there, the game forks off... and starts to lose its a head a bit.
Each of the characters' routes kind of feel like they're done by different people, and they didn't try and communicate with each other with what they're doing, at least for the route-specific content (Mikko, Lake, Rune, and Devon's specifically, and bits of pieces of others) that I've played through semi-recently and I have a stronger recollection of, leading to them being a bit too different from each other. In some routes, the darker, edgy aspects are played up a lot more; in others, there's a lot of focus about queer struggles, both traditional and more modern which the more fascist-leaning among you might find disagreeable; while others still feel like they're missing a level of depth and as a result end up playing off of the cross-route common character scenes a lot more than one can argue they probably should. Also, the quantity of NSFW content varies remarkably between routes; Torulf's route is substantially more horny than Mikko's, for example.
Meanwhile, to keep the workload down (and reasonably so), the Day 2 and 3 content utilizes many more "common" scenes that are shared across routes, which have variations both minor and otherwise depending on which character's route you're doing. While this is not a significant problem in isolation, it does become just a little bit vexing when you're going through the whole game to explore each route, skipping seen text, and you randomly get stopped and forced to start reading again because one character decided to order something slightly different at the teahouse on that route, for example.
As for the overall quality of the writing and prose, I'd say it's decent on the whole. There's the occasional weird bit of grammar and awkward line that reminds you that this game is written primarily by someone whose first language is not English, and from time to time typos slip in, but in general, characters have their own voice, including the narrator Arvo, and the aforementioned mistakes are not what I would consider egregious or especially taxing.
The CGs, being done by an assortment of different commissioned artists, vary notably in look and arguably quality, and each of them intepret the looks of the characters in their own way; some are done by lead artist HQ directly and closely resemble the sprites, while others are done by people who are clear fans of muscly naked dudes, while others are trying to do their own spin on the "comfy young adult" vibe. While you might like the variety of styles among them, I personally am not a huge fan of this and would rather the game's CGs stick to one consistent look, but it's not make-or-break for me. The background art is nothing special, being a mix of 3D computer-generated spaces and edited (presumably stock) photographs; they do their job at the end of the day, so I can't discount the game much for that.
For assorted pluses: the overall presentation is pleasant. The music is primarily a cross of acoustic guitar pieces and ambient synths, giving the music an overall relaxed, laidback feel (and helps to accentuate the contrasts when the scenes themselves decide to mix things up), and the wintry Northern European setting is quite novel.
<OLDHEAD COMPLAINING HERE; SKIP TO END IF YOU DON'T CARE>
The game, to me, though, had started out as unique and very promising, but over the years it bled more and more of its individuality, until it grew into something that I would consider not nearly as good as when it started.
Having its first public build in August 2020, Dawn Chorus stood out remarkably from the influx of furry visual novel pandemic projects that were all collectively making waves at the time: it had a fresh setting of Norway plunged deep into winter; it had a style that immediately stood out from the rest of the pack; there was a nice swath of characters that each had their own unique things going on; and overall the whole game had a comfy feeling, albeit with hints and drops of underlying edge and spice as to keep things grounded. And, to top things off: development was actually steady and consistent! There was a slight NSFW edge, even before character routes were developed in a meaningful capacity, but one that was understated and, in a way, felt believable: a horny dream on the bus here, a bit of light perving and glancing at your friends' genitals in the showers there. Altogether, there was a promise of an interesting visual novel, with its own style and personality. The game made it clear that it was going to be gay, and that there were going to be options of indulging in the game's adult side some more, but on the whole, it was a good beginning.
And the game built on this strong beginning. Over time, a lot more scenes were added into Day 1 to make things flow better and give a lot more character interactions with Arvo (the PC) and the rest of the cast; the sprites were steadily updated from the rather simplistic ones of the very first versions while further developing the game's unique style (fun fact: Mikko was originally an otter in the first versions of the game before the sprite reworks); the routes themselves were actually brought into existence; the main menu was initially a lot more basic and stock Ren'Py-feeling; and overall the game started honing itself and getting a better footing of what it felt capable of bringing (and the only content casualty during all of this was Travis, the tanuki, who got demoted from potential route to side character). It was refreshing in its own way for the game to grow consistently and with a tangible sense of direction, something that's always lacking in games in general.
With this growth, however, there were currents of change underlying it, hinting at something that felt different and alien working its way into the mixture. Eventually, this reached a tipping point, and the game started becoming something else, something that I had not fallen in love with, and something that frankly felt kind of generic. It's hard to point fingers at culprits; maybe new hands got too much influence in the project, or the original developer duo of Keo and HQ/Haku willingly chose to start winging it some more, or their focus/test/patreon group poisoned the whole thing with getting their collective interests into the game, or maybe the developers' personal tastes simply developed in a direction that I find disagreeable. It's also hard to point to a specific version where this happened, given how gradual it was.
And this all culminates into what I personally consider to be the game's shark jump: for absolutely no reason at all, all of the character's sprites are being reworked a second time, slotted for release in v0.36, a makeover of which I hyperbolically consider as being done by shotgun. Gone are the believable body styles and range of builds among the roster; now everyone's muscled out and prepped and ready to be thrown into some vapid bara sex story (ironically like the side visual novel, Broken Harbors, which was initially pitched to be a more in-depth dive into a couple of characters' back stories, and provided too much fucking information in that regard, if you catch my drift). In fact, the characters' looks being redone to have them befitting a more shallow raunchy story creates its own dissonance with the dark, emotional topics that many of the routes explore; having these bulked-up studs thrust you headfirst into their personal dramas and woes hurts the feel of the game substantially.
While the game's growth was good, I feel the change that came with this growth was ultimately for the worse. It now feels like it's going out of its way to try and be part of the pack, when the main reason why I enjoyed this game to begin with was because it stood out with its own look and feel.
<END OLDHEAD COMPLAINING>
TL;DR: While inarguably competent and with plenty of interesting moments within it, a lot of the distinctive aesthetic elements that I enjoyed were steadily watered down over time; maybe you'll find its current look and feel more agreeable to yourself, but as someone that was here early on, I feel it's lost some of its aspects that made it special along the way. Past that, while the writing's alright on the whole, each of the routes go in significantly different directions, and you might find yourself scratching your head when you play through one, try another, and then get something wildly out of left field.
3/5
