VN - Ren'Py - Ephemerale [Ch.1] [DENGYOU]

  1. 4.00 star(s)

    MadAng

    The good:
    It has an intriguing premise, original story (for these sort of games) that had me wanting to know more, and clearly a lot of care has gone into it as well as on the characters’ creation.

    Art: The 2D graphic sprites and scene art (cut scenes and sex) are good (although no animation yet) and there’re enough of them to make it visually interesting - flat colours mostly with a bit of shading. There’s also plenty of variety with NPC character designs.

    It has AI generated backgrounds (I read that the AI was trained on author’s own art). It could do with some retouching but seems to work well on the sparse dark mine backgrounds and desert scenes. I am curious how the dev will handle more complex settings such a city, town, etc.

    As an aside I liked the shadow puppets-style scene when one of the characters is telling a story. It’s a creative way to do some unobtrusive lore exposition.

    Game play: choices matter in more than just who you end up having sex with, affecting story. It encourages replays.

    The bad:
    Very bad writing issues. Bad grammar - some text just reads like a mangled translation, where you can guess what the author is trying to say but it reads so poorly that it pulls the reader out of the narrative flow (I understand English is not author’s native language). So yeah, it could really use a beta reader/editor ASAP.

    The MC’s inner monologue sometimes is interrupted by what he thinks the other person is ‘feeling’. Eg. “I bet her mind was filled with thoughts of pleasure and desire...” It would be more effective if the MC could just describe what he sees only or if this came as thoughts from the NPCs themselves.

    Summary: intriguing, original story with good 2D art, spoiled by bad writing that made it hard to follow. I give it 4 stars because it has the potential for it to develop into a pretty good game but the rating might change depending on what the next few updates are like.