Fantastic visual novel. Easily one of my favorite VN of all time. It is a slow burner though, it's quite heavy on the slice-of-life stuff. I mean you can spend like an hour on a random baseball match that has no real significance except giving some characterization. However, it's still all worth it in the end. Since once shit goes down, it goes down hard. Don't let the cute girls fool you, this is quite a gruesome VN. While there isn't a whole lot of visual gore, it is describe as a "Sound Novel" which means it's very heavy on building atmosphere through music and sound. Also going quite descriptive on the details.
If you feel like it's too much of a slow burn, I recommend
Umineko instead (same developers, same universe but different story). While it's also quite slow, I feel that it's much better paced. It isn't as heavy on the slice-of-life, and due to the structure of the game (can't explain the structure, cause it would be a spoiler) it allows them to almost always have shit happening. It will keep throwing twist after twist at you, and it's fantastic. It also helps that the OST for the game is one of the best OST out there.
While Higurashi is
one of my favorite VN of all time, Umineko is
the best VN of all time in my opinion. I even liked it so much I included it in a image of our game
Minor spoiler about the structure of the two games
