Update Two Hundred and Fifty-Eight: 6 December 2018

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

This is a weird one. ENIGMA: is appropriately hard to pin down. It’s a strange VN - beautiful production value with a really kind of odd and meandering story with no real point. It moves at a faster clip than something like SeaBed, another weird, soupy kind of VN, but ultimately doesn’t come to a satisfying kind of conclusion.

You play as Chester, a young man stricken with an illness that is slowly killing him. He washes up on an island out of time, separate from the world, that has a man-eating forest in the middle. The forest and his illness share a name—Enigma. What will his last month on earth be like?

For a soft-looking VN on the outside, there’s a surprising amount of gore and sexual assault—some of which is women on the male main character, to the point of off-screen rape. I was really surprised and mystified by that, and while it wasn’t done particularly badly, it just was… just… why? I wanted to like this one more than I did, and while it’s on that ‘it’s good!’ cusp, I definitely wouldn’t recommend it for newbies.

God, the production value was SO good. So many sprites. Tons of CGs, all done up great. The writing is pretty good, too—easy and natural. It just didn’t add up to the sum of its parts, unfortunately.

Next up: Holy hell, it’s a crime it’s taken me so long to get to this. Thank you Based RNGesus. It’s time for -

See you soon!