Update Two Hundred and Eighty-Nine: 5 March 2019
the Mind's Eclipse
10.4 hours playtime, ~3 hrs actual, 9 of 9 achievements
8.5/10
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Oh man! What a pleasant surprise! This VN is mad good!!
Its beginnings aren’t terribly original—you awake in a decrepit hospital with no memories and with only an AI to help guide you out before the hospital loses oxygen. Everyone else you meet is dead. Everything is crumbling. Why?
Where the game goes after that is interesting, and tackles questions I see a decent amount in sci-fi about life without death in interesting ways. The writing is tight and punchy, and the rate at which information is revealed is the right one, with the right rhythm and pacing. Smaller substories end up feeding into the larger one in exactly the right way. Your AI companion, L, provides the perfect compliment to the dark tone by being a breath of fresh air, sharp and irreverent but never annoying.
This is one step shy of a point and click adventure game, and it’s rewarding navigating the world and exploring the map to find more information in the world and in messages you find. I loved the art style, and found that even though its loose, everything was easy to make out and navigate. The CGs in particular are great—there are several dozen of them, more than I’ve ever seen in a VN before, and they’re incredibly evocative. Major major kudos to the two women who made up the main art team! (It’s a shame, because the image they chose for the large banner above is one of the weaker pieces in the game)
I started and finished this in one day because I really wanted to find out what will come next, what will come after that, what else will I explore, and that’s a great feeling. Because of that feeling, I am more than happy to include it on my Visual Novel Masterlist!
Next up:
See you soon!
totally wishlisting this game based on your review, it looks way cool. but still lmao at the protagonist named Jonathan Campbell. is he any relation to… Joseph Campbell???? xD xD xD
BRUH that’s what I thought? I would fucking fistfight Joseph Campbell in the street (“‘Women are the destination,’ eh, you grimey old motherfucker? Then I’m about to be your final destination.”) so I was prepared to be Big Mad about it…
But it seems there’s no relation (although the director of the game is also named Campbell!)
I’m always really happy when I hear people wishlist games because of my reviews because I’m in league with everyone’s backlogs to make them grow, you’ve fallen right into my scheme!
omg i’m so glad someone else caught that and had an issue with it!!!! i like his Masks of God series because it’s just a collected overview of the various mythos in every culture at certain points in time, but as soon as you get to the stuff where he interprets shit it gets sexist and gross. dude should’ve stuck with writing textbooks, we didn’t freaking need a hero’s journey write-up for nebbish boys to wet themselves over, uuuugh.
ooooh sharing a name with the dev makes total sense. i’m still waiting for someone to make a transhumanism VN that’s entirely based on Kurzweil’s ploys for immortality and name the lead character Ray-Ray.
backlogs are like cultures captured in petri dishes- gonna grow until someone douses it in bleach, and we as a collective userbase are obviously all out of bleach.
Yeah, exactly. Being able to convey information/study/research into a textbook is a completely different skillset than actually analyzing and interpreting what he’s talking about. His whol fuckin thesis is wrong and reductive.
I minored in screenwriting so I had to deal with his formula a LOT and I hated it from the beginning.
ahahahah did they drill into you to SAVE THE CAT and ALWAYS WORSHIP ROBERT MCKEE? i took screenwriting seminars at UCLA when i was a teenager (family was trying to get me to go to film school, long horrible story that isn’t important to this anecdote) and it was full of dudes breaking down Star Wars into beats and bragging about finishing Hero With A Thousand Faces without being told to do so beforehand. can’t imagine having to do enough hours of that to actually get a minor degree without going mental.