Recent reviews by Kitten

The writing is good and the story is enjoyable. I wouldn't rate this as one of my favourites, or say that it's definitively a must-read, but it's definitely among the better titles. This book seems to offer a lot of variability although I suspect the main story beats always stay the same. The main stats are assigned at the very beginning of the game and in that very same beginning you get plenty of opportunities to fail checks. I believe this is the only game where I felt the need to restart a couple of times until I understood exactly how the author wanted me to play.

It's boring and entirely forgettable. It has a story and a setting but it's flat and not immersive. One would think it is on purpose since the main purpose of this book is clearly smut. But the smut is not engaging either. I got it on sale, so no big deal, but don't be like me and just play the demo first.

I'm just sad this never got a sequel.

Whiskey-Four is a solid action-packed action book, very action-y but perhaps not very choice-y. Although the game does have a great amount of endings and epilogues, and a couple of stats it keeps track of in the background, outside of the endings the choices don't change the story very drastically. I had an absolute blast reading this book regardless and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys the fantasy of being a seasoned operative on the clock to stop the baddies in a gritty sci-fi setting.

Unbelievably bad writing. I can't stress it enough, it's baffling that this quality of dialogue was allowed to come to pass at all. I'm enjoying the gameplay and dreading the cutscenes, because every other line brings immeasurable amounts of disappointment. I finished the game and it doesn't get better. Choices don't matter. Siege of Weisshaupt is a fever dream. One of the side quests literally borrows lines from Lion King. The supposedly amaaaazing ending really is not and the whole game culminates in 4 shades of the same thing. They couldn't even get the epilogues right.
https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3358423105
Combat is fun. Exploration is enjoyable. Gameplay loop consists of exploration, combat, and puzzles. Puzzles are fine. Some of them are mind numbingly easy, others make you think a little bit, all of them are there to just stretch out play time.

This is a very competent and polished game when it comes to gameplay, accessibility and quality of life features, and technical state. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend it at all, because for a story driven game, the writing is not just utterly incompetent, it's bad beyond salvation and any reasonable being in charge of it should have vetted it in all of its entirety. But somehow no one did.

Not Game of the Year. Meow.

My new favourite comfort game. Music slaps, gameplay slaps, and the Unknown is a badass female lead. I can slay demons while vibing to the music and vibing to the music helps me slay demons harder. Money well spent.

My Vow to My Liege is really quite good. The story, the production are all on point. I'd kill for someone to turn this into donghua but a visual novel is the next best thing so I really can't complain. Definitely recommend playing.

Below I'm going to throw down a couple of thoughts, just so you know what to expect:

- Character Name: Must be named in Chinese. I don't know Chinese, so I just left the default name. Honestly, if you're in a similar position I recommend you do that because the default name is voiced by the voice actors, so it's pretty nice.
- English Translation: It's quite good. It's really good for most of the game, and though it starts to fall apart by the later chapters, it's only to a small degree, and it never becomes incoherent. On top of some grammatical mistakes, typos start occuring later on. As an example of what I mean by typos, some words canbemissingspaces between them, and on a couple of occasions I encountered two lines of the same dialogue in a row (so basically a line was missing).
- The Royal We: The MC is a King so in formal situations / in public she refers to herself as "we". Where appropriate, she refers to herself as "I". Makes sense.
- I can't count, but basically the first 10-ish chapters of the game is "Common route", and the rest is the romance route. So it's pretty easy to replay to get to the other LIs.
- The skip function is *slow*. The text skips fast, but transitions are unskippable. Using an optimised guide that tells you where to save feels like a necessity if you don't want to age by 43659636 years while waiting for the skip to do the skipping.
- You need 3rd party software to capture screenshots as F12 doesn't work. I read in the Dev FAQ in the discussions here that they were working on fixing that, but that FAQ was posted in 2020, so I doubt that's going to happen.

Thank you someone I don't remember who sorry 🙈 for gifting me a copy of this game!

Reading accessibility options:

Default font size: ............. Medium to small
Ability to change text size: ..................... No
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I backed this up on Kickstarter. I played all routes except for Yuu, and I believe I have not completely finished that one route with the robot guy whose name completely slips my mind.
(Btw, the game description should probably be fixed, as all of the additional 3 routes have been added to the main game, they are not "to be released" anymore)

I enjoyed Gilded Shadows, because I like the fantasy of this world, the protagonist, and the romantic interests. I love the developer's style, creative settings, their writing is always on point, and they will always be on my radar as one of my top favourite indie otome devs. Gilded Shadows is 100% worth reading, as well as Steamberry Studio's other works.

But I don't think I will re-play Gilded Shadows, and if I do, I will be heavily skipping chunks of text. I actually still want to finish the routes that I have not, but they were released waaaaaaay back, and I still can't bring myself to it due to one simple issue.

The text is oversaturated with exposition through dialogue. A lot of the time - and in some routes, most of the time - all people talk about is worldbuilding: the politics, the social relations, the history, the esper powers - and at best it doesn't sound natural at all, at worst it kills momentum. It's almost like I'm being recited the codex through character dialogue. The robot guy's route - I remember, Quill! - became a complete brick wall for me because of this, and even my favourite route, Reuben's, was soured by overexposition.

25/05/2024 EDIT HERE: I actually finished both Yuu & Quill's route's passionate endings so I'm done with the game. I feel like that last paragraph sounds a lot harsher than I meant it to be. What I want to say - it's still very very good, but as a reader I found myself at times frustrated with how exposition affected the flow of the text, and that in turn made me feel negativity about it. And not every route had that problem to the same degree. As examples I'll mention the last 3 routes that were released, which were the last ones I played, so I remember them better. Yuu's route, in my opinion, did not have any problem with exposition at all. Quill's route, as I mentioned, suffered from it the most in my opinion - but I understand why! Quill's (and Reuben's really) route was basically like a completely different book altogether, it explored a completely different part of the setting, and also dealt with a lot of in-universe politics by virtue of characters being involved in said politics. That is a lot of stuff to tell in just one route.

Having played the demo for the next Steamberry VN When Stars Collide on their itch.io and seeing it have the exact same problem, I wanted to mention this, because this seems to be something systematic, and I hope the author sees it and can maybe see what can be done about it. Just an example, when (spoilers for the demo I guess) a newly awakened alien from an ancient secretive race gets into polemics about how their race was historically misunderstood and why and what they did and their history with other races and ALL THAT during the first meeting with the crew of the ship they awakened on centuries after they went to stasis, it really, really slams the brakes on the flow and takes you out of the story that is intriguing and has so, so much potential.

Reading accessibility options:

Default font size: ................ Relatively large
Ability to change text size: ..................... No
Ability to change font style: ................... No

Game of the year. Meow.