Lily's Night Off

Lily’s Night Off is a sequel-ish to Lily’s Day Off & it’s an amazing one at that. While Day Off can come off being bit of an acquired taste due to the experimental and “cheap” nature of it, I’m glad to say that Night Off has improved a lot upon the standard Day Off formula. For once, the artstyle seems to be way better than the Day off, though the usage of fanarts for the endings can come off feeling rather jarring due to the inconsistency that’s present in using them. We have also moved pass the phase of using royalty-free music as the soundtracks for the game was composed by Vect and they’re great! The soundtracks perfectly capture the fun, goofy, and rarely serious experience of the game and having them in hugely contributes to a better experience. The soundtracks are available to be stream + downloaded over on Vect’s bandcamp though the game also offers a built-in music player featuring all of the songs. A lot more QoL features have also been added such as autoplay, backlog, the aforementioned music player, and probably a lot more that aren’t really on top of my head at the moment. Unfortunately (or fortunately to some), Night Off also have the same issue as its predecessor being that the game is pretty short in the way that the I managed to 100% the game in under an hour with an about above average reading speed. While I’d say that the experience is a huge improvement over Day Off, if you have other games that you’re interested in then you might be better off buying them first while waiting for this game to go on sale as the base price of $7.99 can feel bit steep when compared with the amount of content that the game offers. Going back into the gameplay side of things, the skip feature also works just like in the first game where the skip button needed to be held as oppose to being enabled/disabled with a single press, however just like in the first game there doesn’t seem to be any option to immediately skip forward to next choices as well as a save/load system (though I guess since the game is pretty short you probably don’t really one in the first place, but still). Another one of my gripe with the game is that a bunch of the endings can come off being repetitively edgy which I assume is done for the sake of shock value. I can’t really get into too much details in fear of spoilers, but I’d just say that while goofy endings are pretty much a given for the Lilypad Lily series, seeing endings that are just same-ish with each other over & over again just feels boring and loses the effect of the shock value. To me it feels like they’re only really added to pad out the amount of the endings as some of the endings ended way too abruptly even within Lilypad Lily standard, but it is what it is. The constant loading screens are pretty annoying too as the loading time is perfectly in the middle of not being too long that it’s extremely annoying, but at the same time not being too short that it isn’t an issue either. In addition to that the loading screens also seems to chug the game fps, though the fps seems to be relatively stable during gameplay, so I’m willing to look pass it. Some people have also reported experiencing bugs with the game, but I haven't really experienced any so either I just got lucky or they have thankfully been patched out. Lastly, for those wondering you’d need to play Day Off first before starting Night Off, I’d say not really? (with an asterisk). While I’d argue that having first played Day Off might enhance your experience with Night Off due to the familiarisation with Lily, the occasional references/jokes to the first game, alongside knowing the “vibes” of the series altogether, in my opinioin, Night Off still passes perfectly as a standalone game due to there not really being any extreme connection with the first game. Simply put, if you like Day Off then you’d love Night Off If you dislike Day Off, then Night Off still warrant a play In conclusion, when compared with Day Off then Night Off come…

Very cute visual novel! cute art and characters! cute UI and soundtrack! funny stories! i am happy! immediately going to play the sequel Three Wishes as well now!

Nice, unexpected, cute and funny short visual novel. good sense of humor, fitting music, and great use of subverting expectations.