Death Moon

Sorry, a big one, but I really want to give this a proper review.

It’s.. a curious little game. It’s both surprising and not to see the low rating. Well first of all it’s not even a porn game. It has sex scenes I guess but that’d be like saying that any movie with basic nudity is porn.
Second, the actual concept of the game is very interesting and made me want to actually support the dev, considering it’s very unknown, or at least give it critique it deserves. The artwork itself is great and everything looks very competent for a tiny indie game. The character designs are also very nice tho may seem a bit derivative of some other media.
However, I guess that’s where my praise will end.
First, the game really doesn’t want you to enjoy playing it like every other normal visual novel. There’s no skip button, the clicking through is rather slow, there’s 1(!) save file. And on top of that you can’t save wherever you want. I mean you can, but when you’ll load it will load the beginning of a scene, not where you saved, forcing you to slowly click through sometimes considerable amount of text before choices. And I wouldn’t even mind it if the game wanted you to live with your choices but it also wants you to replay stuff by specifically saying stuff like “you got an ending number x reload before last choice and see what happens in other case” which leads me to the next issue which is the game’s bizarre structure.

Here will be SPOILERS: Okay so basically the game itself is a time loop, which makes most of the bad endings seem weird, considering they should just trigger time loop and make the story continue, but whatever. The first two loops are very intriguing and tell a linear but engaging story. But what happens next is extremely confusing and weird.

The game world disappears and says it loads a new seed or something, which tells you it’s some sort of simulation. Okay, not the first time it happens, but what happens next is you’re shown a silhouette and are asked who is that character with 4 female options. I chose the “wrong” option (the blond girl) just because and the game continued like nothing happened. Another loop happened, “good guys won” and MC with Blond Girl (for no reason at all, they didn’t have any connection at all) get send “back home” together where they (without any connection) suddenly have love and sex. Then suddenly the game world disappears again and the same stuff that happened the first time happens again, except with a different silhouette. I chose the blond girl again and it loaded the exam same thing it loaded the first time, which you’d have to slowly click through in it’s entirety to see if anything’s any different. So eh the choice “which silhouette is it” is actually you choosing a “route” and it’s definitely a decision ig considering how game doesn’t want to function like a normal visual novel. A few words about routes themselves: blond girl – completely forgettable route. Temu Makise Kurisu – by far the shortest one. She just murders everyone else immediately, says she’s an unkillable multiversal constant and the world disappears again. Sylvie is by far the most robust one and the one that is actually somewhat satisfying, if only the saves worked well in this game. You two get the killer roles and kill everyone else together, then when you get send home with her (I don’t know if it’s a planet, a universe or whatever, but all “outside world” seems heavily militarized) you get killed by.. yourself or someone who looks like you (or maybe just you from that particular universe).
The “True” route with Astrid is weird. Like you can choose it as your first and get an actual “good” ending, which will probably be extremely anticlimactic and it still is. It doesn’t actually answer anything, doesn’t connect any dots, nor explain why is that even The Ending. Are there more endings in those routes I haven’t seen? Is there a true true ending that actually make sense? Does order of choosing them matter? Does choosing the right silhouette actually do anything? I don’t know (the gallery shows scenes that I’ve never encountered so.. probably) because answering those question would require me to slowly mindlessly clicking through these 4 routes once (or more) again to hope that something changes and I’m not doing that. At the end, it never recovers from dramatic structure switch, it’s also very short (you can probably complete every route in an hour or so), it introduces a ton of concepts that never really get explored properly or connected to eachother and you barely get any information about the characters. It feels like about 5-10 percent of a much bigger chonkier game. Maybe some lore YouTuber could make sense of the tiny snippets of story you get here, but it shouldn’t rely on it, or at least give me the tools to allow me to do it myself properly, like multiple saves, skipping, etc. It’s a shame, because I really really wanted to love this, but I ended up very disappointed.
Still props to the dev.