咒影 Curse of the Shadow

I think it's more fair to say this game is mid. However I do have quite a few gripes with it, which is why I'm leaning towards a more negative opinion. I will say that translating from Chinese to English seems to be difficult from what I've noticed. The English text usually tends to sound very convoluted, which is unfortunately the case for this game too. There's a lot of repeating phrases and occasionally they placed too much importance on describing irrelevant things in detail. This in combination with various grammar and spelling mistakes made it a drag to read. Especially at the beginning it put me off really bad. On top of that in newspaper sections the English text doesn't seem to be properly adjusted to the UI. One line was also left untranslated in Xia Sixian's (?) route iirc. Regarding the actual story content, I hate to say it but it would've been better off without the BL aspect. In my opinion the romance is rushed and not well integrated into the story. There's not much BL in the first place but specifically for Xia Sixian it happens at the worst possible time imo. The bad endings were more interesting than the happy ones. This is also more of my personal taste but I found Mingjing very lackluster as a MC. To me, he doesn't really have great chemistry with anyone if I'm being honest. (I genuinely found the idea of the love interests getting together more entertaining lmao) Only one of the love interests is intriguing and I feel bad for the other one because Chen Xi doesn't even get a kissing CG. Aside from that the story was overall okay. Visually speaking the art and UI are very pretty and fitting. There's quite a lot of CGs for a visual novel with such a low price. I won't say I regret buying this game but that's about it.

nice a̶n̶d̶ c̶h̶i̶l̶l̶ after work/ weekend horror story edit: the story turned out to be quite dark and heavy - in a grounded way. if you only consume absurd, supernatural horror and squeamish about the realistic horrors that happen to some of us - i would think it over before playing

I have serious gripes about the English localization, but it's adequate enough to convey the story. Easily worth the 4 dollars if you like Horror and BL. The game's description is accurate with it being about 85% horror to 15% BL. To be specific about the localization issues... some UI like in the save menu isn't translated, the game name isn't translated in the steam library which makes it very difficult to search, there are numerous translation errors with most being unusual tense choices, a couple lines that don't really make any sense, at least one line that wasn't translated at all, and when the protagonist can't understand what someone's saying the game gives you Chinese sound clues (parts of Chinese characters) instead of an English equivalent (fragments of words from the phrase translated into English). Despite these issues I don't think the average player will have any trouble following the story.