Update Forty-Seven: 14 September 2017

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Eliza: the Innkeeper - Prequel is a free demo/first act meant to be played before the commercial game Eliza: the Innkeeper. It’s a rather average visual novel that attempts new, interesting things while failing on basic staples of the genre at the same time.

First: the good. The art is pretty overall. Some of the CG art can look a little weird, a little uncanny, but the sprites are cute and the backgrounds are lovely. What this game does that other visual novels don’t is include a lot of non-CG specialized scenes - like a still in an anime, the characters are in the world doing what’s in the story. If two characters are talking in front of a clothesline, rather than have a backyard background with the two sprites on top, the characters are drawn into the background, special each time. That takes a lot of work and effort and it pays off. This VN is more gameified where each choice you make influences good+evil points and gives you certain traits (like, pick three good options in a row and you unlock the ‘Sweet!’ trait).

The bad: The writing is… pretty average. The localization isn’t stellar, with stilted word choice being the norm. The characters are kind of goofy, and the central conflict seems to be a love triangle between a Prince, a Merchant, and the eponymous Eliza. There’s no clear protagonist, though, and you make choices for multiple characters in one scene in a rather jarring way. It’s a little dumb in a way that’s standard for the genre. It’s an average VN, writing-wise.

Long story short: I’m glad this was free, and I’m being generous because this was clearly marked as a demo. I hope the dev team took the time to polish what they had here for the commercial release, because there are things about this game that are interesting, it just needs about three or four more passes. Whether they did or not, I’m along for the ride - I bought the full game before I knew there was this prequel demo. Well, at least it was on sale!

Next up: It’s hard to go wrong with an ebi-hime VN!

See you soon!