The event has been going for ten years, and there are some true gems produced every year.
Itch.io is chock-full of indie visual novels, from somewhat traditional titles like One Night Stand, a story about the aftermath of a drunken night that ended in sex, to the weird and unique adaptations of the genre, such as Digital: A Love Story, that takes place on bulletin board systems, the chatrooms, and forums of the 1980s.īoth of these games were born at NaNoRenO, an annual jam that brings together the English-speaking visual novel community to create their own games. When you choose to go deeper down the rabbit hole of visual novels, look to the communities that both make games for and support the genre.
(Unless, you know, the core concept of only ever hanging about with feathery friends gives you chills.) It's all a lore more menacing and unsettling than a game about dating birds has any right to be. On top of that, the game gets pretty dark pretty quickly, with bad endings that result in the player character's death, as well as a whole second game mode revolving around St. In many ways, it parodies the expectations you might have of dating simulators, focusing not on inflated busts but the characters you get to know. PigeoNation's Institute, you get an insight into the world of the intelligent birds that attend this prestigious school. Obviously.Īs the only human attending St. If SC2VN really does seem too mundane for your tastes, though, how about something that really is unlike any other gaming experience in any other genre? Hatoful Boyfriend is a visual novel essential. Gone are the days of the genre being a small corner of gaming exclusively for those who could read Japanese: here are some of the best gateways into the world of visual novels. Dip just a toe and you can be rewarded with phenomenal writing and gorgeous artwork, both underpinning intricate stories with twisting paths controlled by the player. It doesn't take long for the curious to discover masterpieces that have finally been translated into English in recent years, and to move onto further interactive fiction that has been inspired by the visual novel genre. Gravity defying breasts, school uniforms, girls that appear to survive on the attention of the player: eroge games, for better or worse, have attributed to the rising popularity of visual novels and the related dating simulators, for reasons that should be fairly obvious.īut beyond the smut and the grot, there's so much more to visual novels. If you've ever browsed Steam for so long that you've stumbled into its darker corners, you've undoubtedly seen some of these games. Typically called "eroge," the more adult market-focused visual novels feature Japanese-drawn pornography, which has become known globally as the catchall of hentai.
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