Recent reviews by æther

I'm going to pet all the Pals!

I really loved CORPSE FACTORY. Without all the times I went AFK with the game open, it took me about 8~ hours to complete.

This visual novel leans more towards a kinetic novel due to how few choices there are. The character art is beautiful, and the background art seems to use a bit of 3D or something? - but it worked well with the character art. I also enjoyed the voice acting when I had it on, it ended up being much better than I expected. The soundtrack was very fitting for the scenes as well.

I really enjoyed the writing in this VN, it wasn't a very predictable horror/thriller, and the way that the mental illnesses were written was well done. I know that mental illness is a weird thing to specify, but it is front and foremost and I just appreciated the way it was written/progressed throughout the story.

I know some other reviewers felt like the story was slow but I personally enjoyed the pacing, there was not really filler and the story was pretty consistently progressing in one way or the other. On the other hand, I do think the story could've been a little longer and gone into more detail for some things.

I'll also make a shoutout to the UI for this game, I really appreciated the hotkeys being shown next to the menu options. Simple and effective. You can also use scroll wheel to progress the text, which I prefer to use compared to enter or clicking. If I had to make a suggestion, to have the text either not progress forward, or go backwards (if possible) when you scroll up (it progresses forward if you scroll down OR up.) Sometimes I accidentally scrolled through two dialogues and kept having to go back to the log.

Overall, CORPSE FACTORY was completely worth my time and money. It was a great game all around and I got what I wanted: a twisted, psychological thriller.

I'm not very skilled at roguelites but I've managed to make it all the way through this one! Once. But I'm trying again...and again, and again. The game has wonderful replayability, whether you're going for upgrades, for more lore, or even just decorating your room. I could generally see my growth through every few runs, which was pretty neat. Now I just really want to get to the rest of the lore in the game, there are so many intertwined stories.

The art is amazing and I really felt like the designs fit everyone. I did enjoy the music, though I often play with it off now as I do other things in the background while running through. The combat is quite enjoyable and easy to learn the basics for. There's a handful of different weapon types with completely different playstyles, and then depending on what Boons (upgrades) you get, you can change your playstyle further. If you don't know which weapon to use? Just use the one that gives you additional Darkness (used for permanent upgrades) for that run!

If needed you can just leave in the middle of a run; you'll start off at the beginning of the last room you were in. You don't have to restart the whole run. I really appreciate being able to drop in and out of the game easily.

Also, you can pet the dog. He's a good boy!

10/10 prologue story, love the art and VAs

Would get sister zoned again and pay money for it

I wish I could give a mixed review instead of yes or no here. I am leaning towards no since this game is just so tedious to get to the good stuff. The good stuff is very good but it's just so buried.

If you're looking for something similar to Our Life, this isn't it. This game is very tedious with all of the daily min/maxing you have to do. Even if you use cheat codes, it's STILL somewhat tedious and the amount of time you spend to get one piece of story, or learn something new about a character, or go out with someone... This system was really just not my thing.

For the characters, everyone is a jerk here, that's what I signed up for and that's what I got. The main character is the worst though, and not in a good way. Her humor wears off quick after she tries to throw herself at any guy that moves and breathes as much as possible. For the other main guy characters that I have had time to pursue or hang around with, I did really enjoy learning more about them and being able to see past that jerkiness.

I have no complaints about the art or music, and the voice actors are great too. The partial voice acting works fine. There seem to be some voice lines with lower quality (buzzing) but it didn't bother me too much. Those were very rare. The writing is good and I didn't see any typos.

The last thing for me, and I'm sure it sounds petty: Dialogue with frequent swears... all censored! I thought that was going to be an option I could toggle. It's not. There's no option to disable the text censoring. You have to deal with asterisks constantly from some of the characters. It really, really takes me out of the game seeing that. What the f**k?

With all this said I really want to learn more about the characters. I like them. But it's going to be a long term project since it's so time consuming and tedious...it's hard to want to "play" this game.

This is probably the most wholesome VN I have experienced in my entire life. I'm in my 30s so I honestly didn't think much of a "growing up" VN...but I am glad I was able to experience it. I had someone like this in my childhood that I was sure I'd be friends with forever, but things are always changing. It didn't have to change here though.

The writing is excellent and I only saw two typos in my time of playing the game. The art is soft and colorful. Honestly I had my music off for most of the game since I was doing stuff in the background but from what I did listen to, I enjoyed.

The thing I was probably the most impressed with in the game is how old things will keep coming back. I said that I played the bass guitar. This came back several times. That one time I chose a drink at a restaurant? That came back again too. That one embarrassing memory? You bet that came back up. Your choices end up mattering, whether it's a small detail that will come back up later in the story or if it's your personality that will also end up shaping Cove.

It's great that the base game is free so you can try and see if you like it. I personally only made it to step 2 before I ended up buying all the DLCs. I feel like the full price of all the DLCs for the game are incredibly reasonable for the time you will get out of playing the game, especially since replayability is high.

Looking forward to Part 4 and the Baxter/Derek stories.

I've heard this has an interesting story so I picked it up. Too bad that I couldn't ever get it to launch, after 30 minutes of playing with locale/region settings (+following the support post), rebooting between those changes, running as admin, running in compatibility mode, deleting and redownloading files, and even moving it to my Windows install drive in case there were issues with it being on a different one.

Disappointing.

I really wish I could give this a neutral review. I loved the story itself, the voice actors are great, and the art is gorgeous. There's a dash of the original fairytales in each route and I liked how they changed it up. The main character isn't an empty shell damsel in distress.

However, the translation was quite annoying at times. The main character uses way too many finger guns, and there's random romaji thrown in with English translations in parenthesis after. I thought the romaji thing was a joke at first since the first one was a well-known meme but it just didn't end. Yamete (stop)! Both of these things just really threw the story off for me.

Other than that, the translation was great. There were very, very few errors in spelling and structure, and the writing was overall consistent. There were a few plot holes but that's honestly not unexpected.

I have heard the second episode is more serious so maybe that one will work better for me, but after this experience I will be waiting for a sale.

I have never played the tabletop game but I really enjoyed Heart of the Forest. Overall it was short, taking me about 2.5 hours for the initial playthrough, but definitely has replayability.

For the story, I went through in one sitting - it was very immersive and unpredictable. There were very few typos/grammatical errors. For bugs, I only had issues with the text area scrolling all the way up when I was clicking to go to the next paragraph/line. I believe I was just clicking in the wrong area but I'm still not sure where that was lol.

Overall this is a great game, it's a bit short but has replayability value. I feel like the story might not be for everyone, so it might be good to try out the demo first to get an idea of what it will be like.

The demo was fixed on 01/12/15 and you can now download it properly. Yay!

The demo itself is about half an hour long and is a great introduction into the game and its characters. It gives you enough story to not spoil anything and leaves you wanting more (...and also leaves you at a nice cliffhanger).

I was originally on the edge about Nameless due to the price but once I got through the demo, I bought the full game soon after with no regrets.