VN - Others - Completed - Sera's Adventure -Cave of Destruction- [v1.0] [WATARIlaboratory]

I do think people are kind of just taking the game at face value and it makes sense. It's a guro game but the tags don't hide it as much as the preview images. I don't mind spoiling the entire game because it doesn't take long to beat and its my personal analysis of what I think is going on.

Pros:

• The art is very well-drawn. I’m not a fan of guro, but even that’s paying attention to detail.
• The atmosphere is top notch. You can feel the hopelessness of the situation from the getgo and the more you try to look through the other scenarios hoping her fate changes, the more you realize that it is indeed hopeless.
• The translation is good. It’s a visual novel so it needs to be readable.
• The VA did a great job of making the protagonist suffer. Her voice whenever something gets destroyed or when she’s dying is top tier acting LOL
• Ending 6 is the only non-gory ending. She still dies, but I do like the idea of how some of the monsters aren’t inherently violent and actually are willing to go for a peaceful death. I do feel like this wouldn’t work if the game put more focus on the corpses in the vines. Sara dies believing she’s safe and she goes into an eternal slumber while flowers bloom all around her. It almost feels symbolic and tragic.
• While many think the plot is senseless, I think the point of this game was it being a deconstruction of many RPG games where the female protagonist is trapped and has to escape to the surface. Except if the protagonist was really inexperienced, without good items to survive and everything will kill you if you fuck up once. It feels like Goblin Slayer in that regard of how greenhorns are more likely to be unprepared and killed off quickly no matter how much they aspire to be. Sara just wanted to be useful to her teammates even though she already did her job fine. She was a scout and her job was to literally detect traps, warn her comrades about it and then apply backup in case of an enemy attack. Her job isn’t to kill enemies. Realistically, daggers are useless against a lot of monsters that aren’t goblins or plants because of how it's a tiny blade that can break easily. Her team failed her in that regard on top of letting her go alone. Again, in most RPG games, if you’re the protagonist, you can go into a cave, kill some enemies for experience and then return. Sara isn’t the leader of the group. She’s literally the one that isn’t supposed to fight and they let the only person who can scout out the area to her death. It’s why half of her deaths are depressing because if she was with her group, they could have been prevented (the orc could be fought by the party, the plants could be cut down by the party, the group could have stopped the man from assaulting her etc.)

Cons:

• There’s no good ending. That’s obvious from the horror tag and the fact that as I mentioned above, it’s a deconstruction of the adventurer trapped in an underground labyrinth with no way out.
• The game is super short. If you read the entire thing, it does take a full hour to finish. Otherwise, if you skim through it, the game would be 10-20 minutes.
• A short game also means short scenes. Half of them aren’t even h scenes as some of the scenarios are just brutal deaths and the others have rape before getting killed.
• I think the game should have had an extra scenario where it doesn’t need to be happy. When you finish one route, you return to the title screen with Sera’s corpse on the wall. I think it would have been interesting if the corpse looked based on which scenario you viewed. Once you get all seven, a final scenario should be available (like if you were allowed to touch her corpse on the title screen to view it). At least the POV of her adventurer companions upon realizing that she wasn’t returning.
• A bug I found was that if you look through the gallery and then pick a load game, the gallery will keep popping up while trying to read the text for the scene you didn’t look at.
• Ending 5 honestly made me the most upset because she’s literally at the entrance and then she freezes up like an idiot and gets eaten. I feel like every scenario made sense given her personality, but this one just felt mean. There was no warning of a giant worm beforehand (while there was implication of monsters like the orc and the tentacle monsters). It’s not like the worm even sprayed anything on her. It just ate her and she just took the L. I would have preferred if she encountered it early on, ran away from it and then saw the entrance but then didn’t realize the worm was still chasing her up until this point. I get it, she’s an amateur, but she’s stated to have a good sense of hearing and that worm wasn’t being subtle.
• Ending 2 and ending 7 felt connected but I don’t think the writers did anything with it. Sara finds a mountain of corpses in ending 2 and she spends more time analyzing the situation like a scout should. You get the feeling that there is something in that labyrinth that is intentionally killing adventures assuming they weren’t killed by the monsters or traps beforehand. Ending 7 shows there is at least one insane adventure alive and he chops her up. Does he throw her corpse with the mountain or was it someone else? Monsters leave behind bones and also leave the corpse there but the man clearly knew the layout of the place enough to be able to catch and kill her. I feel like an eighth scenario could have fixed this because it's a waste of lore building.
• I’m not a fan of ending 4 in terms of writing. Sara is supposed to be a scout. She’s good at her job. How did she not notice the trap? She has already seen a lot of corpses at this point so it’s no excuse to be distracted by another one and then trip. Especially with how ending 2 has her staring down the mountain of corpses and having the mentality to endure it. The mentality of that fourth ending is if you’re not good enough to sense the trap, then you might as well die from it which is already mean-spirited as it is given her situation.

I feel like this game would need a follow up of sort because right now, it's missing a lot.

It's barely 10 minutes long if you skip text.

The Steam page has User Tags that claim it to be an RPG - There's ZERO RPG elements in it.

You're given an introduction, pointless story elements, and then are presented with 7 different pictures to click to reach an ending.

Waste of time.

It's rare that we get a guro game, so it's nice to see this game, even if it does have it's downsides. The major issue with the game is that it's short. This is a double-edged sword kinda thing though. If you're looking for a quick and short game, this is a good thing, but if you're not, then you may be let down.

The other big problem is the game has very few h-scenes and instead hopes that just some guro without any sex is enough for most scenes. It wasn't for me, but if a girl dying is enough to get you off, then maybe it'll be okay for you, but I like some sex with my guro. It sucks the game wastes it's already limited runtime on p=things other than h-scenes.

Pros:
-Good writing and interesting scenes
-Guro

Cons:
-Short
-Very few h-scenes, even for its short length.

I'll admit, this is probably a 3-star game, but I'm really rooting for it, because it's a guro game, so 4 stars from me.

*** It is gore and death, the only tags you really need ***

With that said, I'd say it really delivers well what it intended to with some small issues overall.

Pro
1. Art is excellent. Each ending is a very well drawn way to die.

2. VA is excellent. Very expressive, considering the setting.

Con
3. It is a very short game, but as far as design goes it would be nice if it separated the intro from the path choices. Having save files is almost pointless since you only need the one being before you choose the paths and then its all in recollection after you're finished.

4. The music is kind of an afterthought, not really adding or taking away from the setting. With doing all of the paths its kind of repetitive.

*** Again, its literally just gore and death ***