Advent: Dawn

I enjoyed this one. Visual novel with branching timelines, interesting characters, and an over-arching mystery that goes hard into mythology but also holds together given the underlying supernatural logic the story exists in. Took me about seven hours and I'm glad I spent my time on this one.

Strange Case of Mr Frankenstein What a strange playthrough this was. Took me a while to get through it, because it felt as if the game was holding a distorting mirror before me all the way to the abyss, distracting me with uncanny familiarities and slowing down my progress. For I was stopping every other step and writing down all the odd coincidences and synchronicities, checking if my perception had gone haywire, if I contracted some weird psychosis from all that purple glow. The feeling of déjà vu was at times too much, and I wasn't always sure if that was a good or a bad thing. Sometimes it felt as if I was under a neurological experiment, testing if I can be manipulated by all the bizarre recalls; trying to force resonance on me by stuffing the game with all the things that should appeal to a certain kind of player - on paper. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start from the beginning. Advent: Dawn is Spire's third visual novel in this loose pastiche of classic Japanese VNs, and in some ways, it's their best one yet. In other ways, it's the most frustrating of them all. It takes place in the Enigma universe, but you don't need to have played that first game before this one as it's only a loose sequel; but now in that common anime package we've seen in Synesthesia. After the Enigma's grey dystopic ground surface world, and soaring to the bright colourful heights of cosmological abstractions in Synesthesia, we're now going underground, descending into the dark mythic underworld of shadows and ghosts, plunging deep into the womb of the Mother Earth. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3768068245 As you can imagine, the setting alone almost dictates the change of genre as well, as being confined to suffocating enclosures with no exit is ripe for descending not just the circles of geological history, but also sanity; playing with tension, paranoia, claustrophobia, being face to face with shadow(selves) and ancient archetypes. In other words: mystery and psychological.. stuff. Right off the bat I've noticed better pacing than before and almost no, or very little, technobabble (there's no encyclopedia this time either). Needing to keep things hidden and veiled certainly helped reign in the more excessive tendencies towards the rigidly studious and technical exposition/info-dump in the form of sudden scientific lectures in the middle of the plot, of which Enigma was the worst offender. Make no mistake, this is still sci-fi in a way, with lots of intriguing concepts; which is again the biggest strength of this series of visual novels of ideas. I found the mystery build-up engaging, and the route structure had a big hand in it. Across 3 games, routes have been slowly deepening; there are now actual multiple routes burrowing deeper than before, into the forking tunnels, passages, caverns. Well, there is an attempt at illusion that you can get lost in these crevices and crannies, but actually you're guided by the narrative and semi-enforced order of play, ensuring you follow the predetermined story beats. Which are scattered throughout the cave, including different flavour and theme per route, various puzzles (yes!) - all carrying pieces of the mystery, paving the way for the true route. Sadly, the ensemble cast is woefully underutilised, as you can only take the girls spelunking, greatly cutting down any promise of really going into (mis)trust between characters.1 "I can't stop these forced echoes" So far, so good, so what's with that dramatic opening? For the full understanding, I suggest you read the uncut review/analysis linked below. Suffice to say, I can see what the author was going for, new things were tried; but the execution is very uneven. The focus is more on the atmosphere this time that the inconsistent writing just can't carry. It goes from modestly evocative to stepping well into purple prose; which then becomes accented by relentless repetition.2 Every route has a theme, and to make s…

The initial concept of this game was intriguing and full of promise, but the actual execution frankly disappointed me. The biggest issue is the absolute lack of pacing or meaningful events. While the developers included multiple story routes, it quickly feels like a cheap illusion of choice. Regardless of the path you take, nothing genuinely interesting happens. The entire gameplay loop boils down to endless, dry conversations with characters and monotonously wandering through the exact same cave over and over again. To make matters worse, the writing suffers heavily. The characters' decisions and inner thoughts often feel illogical and leave you with more questions than answers, making it impossible to care about the story. It is simply a boring and tedious experience. I really wanted to like it, but I cannot recommend this game.