Best game on site. Hands down.
Pale Carnations is a game that will absolutely keep inexorably drawing you back for the latest amazing and excellent updates, albeit with mixed emotions: utter joy at the potential within the insanely well-written creatively twisted sexy scenes and incredibly engaging character developments, but also (unless you completely lack conscience and empathy) with a sickening dread, a clawing fear in the pit of your stomach, towards the potential tragedy, heartbreaking loss, degredation, and shattering of all hopes leaving individuals resigned to their cruel fates, that is a dark cloud ever eagerly looming over the perpetually-at-risk characters.
Pale Carnations is effectively an incredibly well-written slow train wreck that you simply CANNOT look away from. It brings to mind a meme from an excellent show that I will paraphrase here:
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"The letter 'H' in 'Pale Carnations' stands for happiness."
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Of course, there IS no letter 'H' in the name 'Pale Carnations', so there you go: bittersweetness rules the days and nights.
It cannot be overstated how well-written this game is. This is absolutely professional level stuff. It is highly probable that the author has prior professional writing experience outside the H-game industry. Not only is the dialogue sparkling, creative, witty, and very much indicative of the literati, the characters are deeply engaging and sympathetic (except for the ones we are supposed to hate unconditionally, and even then there are some interesting aspects to their characters), the scenes are incredibly engrossing (and oft indicative of direct, real-world experience in many, many cases), and the management of all the various branching quests and inter-involved interactions of the various characters is something that no one new to writing would be able to keep straight in their heads, yet the author here seems to have no problem with it, at all, handling it masterfully at every turn.
The artwork is also quite excellent. Honey Select is used as the base, tweaked quite successfully to work well within the context of the story. The heavy stylization of the Illusion system works well here, and the artist has managed to make character expression shine through, to the point where you can often get the gist of events and character responses and intents, even without having to read the dialogue (although the dialogue is, as abovenoted quite excellent). More, the girls are pretty much universally hot as all hell, as a result: a VERY welcomed feature.
Again, you will absolutely love and look forward to the twisted and tantalizing tales that will arise within this game, but you will also likely feel fear at the potential negative outcomes of events, since you will almost certainly become personally attached to quite a few of the girls while ever knowing they are not inherently headed towards fun fates, especially given that quite a few of them walked themselves right into the situations they're in quite willingly.
You can, in the short term, make a difference in what happens, but there are a great many machinations already in place behind the scenes working against the MC keeping safe the ones he may well come to love. Pretty much every girl in this game is heavily at risk, and the MC pretty much has to watch events unfold: although he can make definite changes here and there, these girls can all easily still head towards highly unpleasant fates, and both he and you may well come to be attached to those ladies, so it can be grueling, as you know you likely can do something to bring the ones you care about through safely, but are going to have to walk the razor's edge, and possibly risk it all, to do it.
All told, an incredibly well-crafted work.
5 stars, without any doubt.
