- Mar 20, 2022
- 145
- 447
Hi!Hello Dev's( Likho Games )
This is probably the first time I stumble upon Wet Sand, finished reading it today and man I am surprised, it's a hidden gem and definitely worth a read. I'll buy it when the full release comes out on steam.
Quick question,It's releasing on steam next year right?
Anyways here's my review of game:
I will start with the things I love about Wet Sand.
1. The genre: It's hard to find a Visual Novel in Mideval/Adventure settings, Japanese VN's rarely work with this genre and the ones available in AVN community usually lacks in writing and world building( will farther elaborate about this in the next point) so for obvious reasons Wet Sand scores a point in this area.
2. Storytelling: I'll segment this part into two different sub points..
a) World building: The world of Wet Sand seems to be detailed and vast, the map itself is very large and it being a game with piretes, ships and ocean the potential is endless, now it's depends on the Dev's if they want to deep dive into the world and explore it further or wraps it into a small but rather detailed way( I would prefer quality over quantity, a detailed but small world is better than a large but massey one with inconsistent writing)
b) Writing: The writing of Wet Sand is simple but effective, it's capable of engaging the reader with the characters immediately without giving too much inside of them, that's a sign of good writing and engaging story, though there are few problems with dialogues and characters which is not major but if they are to be improved in the future then the experience of reading them would increase 10x times.
*I'm pointing some of them here,
° Fabian(MC) is very vague and gullible at times, he lacks personality and motivation ( I glad atleast the Dev's given us some options to shape him as a character, for example how he gets annoyed by the arrogant behaviour of the princess and how he in times shuts Anna down but it's not enough to make him as Main protagonist stand out among others)
° Lauren : One of my favourite character, I really like her free spirited and caring nature which makes her very likeable, her personality shines among others but then again in her side quest to her her sister, she just comes out as empty and emotionless. The way her manipulative sister behave with Fabian is very irritating and it hurts the most when Lauren dosen't even acknowledge it which breaks her character.
° Anna: You typical annoying LI who loves to be dominated, again it's adds a flavour to the game but please give more options to put her in her place.
3. Visuals: The hand drawn 2d arts are just beautiful to watch, everything from the character design to the attantion to details, colour grading are just chef's kiss and the quality of art improved in current updates.
I wished it had more visuals , there some scenes that falls flat because of the lack of visual but again it's nothing major.
If you want, you can follow the development on itch or patreon. There we wrote that we increased the size of the game a bit. In total 5 chapters are planned, now we have started 4 and we don't know exactly how fast the work will go. We will try to make it faster.
Thank you very much for the nice words! It's very motivating (no less than criticism, but with a pleasant aftertaste!).
As for the size of the world - we will not create a lot of content “just to fill” and promise that you will visit everywhere, but a little bit
“though there are a few problems with dialogues and characters which is not major” - can you specify what you didn't like?
About Fabian - yes, he is a fool, and that's ok, because we planned to develop him and show him the way to become confident, strong, responsible. As for more opportunities to show character - the difficulty is in the small team, timing and funding. We would like to give 3-5 different options in any dialog, but we simply can't handle so many different routes and can't tie into a logical story (because every decision should have consequences).
Lauren - we wanted to show that she changes in the presence of her sister. This archetype is based on a real life personality and we found it very interesting how this person's psyche works. Her sister is a great authority to her, but whether this happened because she is a good person or an abuser is the question.
Anna, yes, aggressive and combative. We wanted to show a smooth development of the relationship and so we didn't add a bunch of opportunities to overwhelm her. As the plot and their relationship develops, there will be more opportunities.
As for additional visual effects, we are learning. If you saw what the first chapter looked like on release, you'd realize that we've learned how to do animations and other things. Hopefully, closer to the finale, we'll add a lot of things to the past content so that the story doesn't feel like a patchwork.