VN - Ren'Py - Completed - Midnights in Gaudium [v0.8] [Spaceman's Peanut Can]

Once in a while, I play games like these where the text just drags on and on and where the story and the characters aren't compelling whatsoever. I thought that maybe that if I stuck it out, I would understand the vision that the developer wanted to create, but after several days of mashing the spacebar and making token, meaningless choices, nothing really clicked and I checked the script, only to find out that I had only made it halfway through the story. At that point, I knew that I had wasted my time and decided to quit. I wrote this review so you can save yours.

For 99.9% of the population, don't even bother wasting your time on this if the overview or ugly renders don't appeal to you. For the remaining people, play it for a brief amount of time and decide if it's still for you. Judging by the other reviews, it seems like this was the most popular and wisest choice.

Don't be me. I would rather play those grinding sandbox games than these type of games, where at least in those, they'll pull you in with good renders and some payoff, if not only initially and eventually tapering off. Here, there's only pain during actual gameplay and even more pain after you realize went through that pain for nothing.

The pace at the beginning is really quite slow, and there isn't much character development to let you know who's talking, and most of the characters don't seem to have any clear motivation for how they're acting. The outdoor scenery in the first section is totally abstract, which made me feel like I was in a black-box theatre for a 20th-century modernist play, but the story is no Waiting for Godot. The LI's are cute, if fairly stock, and the more-realistic backgrounds are fairly stock as well. It might be an interesting story if the dev cut out some of what seems like interminable banter, particular at the beginning -- one of the aspects of storytelling the dev might make better use of is compression of time, which might help keep the story interesting. I don't know if I can make it to the end of the current version, but if I do, I might follow this, since there are loose ends all over the place that might make more sense further on in the story.

Review for Midnights in Gaudium v0.8:

I played this game for a few minutes and just decided it isn't worth playing.

It's a visual novel, but the visuals are terrible. The preview pictures were obviously cherry-picked because the renders in the game are very low quality (blurry, grainy, blocky), the character poses frequently make no sense, and nearly all renders have backgrounds that are even lower quality and appear to be incomplete (e.g. rooms that are empty or mostly empty or designed in a way that doesn't make sense).

The story and writing seem like they were crafted by an adolescent instead of an adult, so it failed to hold my attention when the visuals could not.

Dont even know where to start...
Characters are one-dimensional and bad.
Renders are ugly af and bad.
Story itself is idiotic and bad.
And writing is fragmented, boring and you could guess it - bad.
Terrible waste of time, not recommended to anyone.