I have to hand it to Virche for its sheer confidence in itself: it expected me to complete over 50 hours of reading, a full repeat of the game’s lengthy introduction, and all routes before giving me a single good ending. And clearly, I did that. I played this game to the point of viewing all endings, CGs, and text.

My impression was lukewarm at the start — even quite negative at times — but the big and little mysteries and their assorted clues that started piling up kept my attention. It really does give you just about everything you need to guess what the truths are behind the story, and I respect that too. I picked up on a lot of them, but I was very pleasantly surprised that I missed things and eventually got caught off guard as well.

Virche does rely a lot on pseudoscience, however. If you try to predict the story based on real-world facts, good luck. It’s best to just roll your eyes and move on when these things come up, considering it threatened to take me out of the story several times. The world of Virche does whatever the hell it wants with terms and biological realities, and you’re just along for the ride!

While it’s common for otome games, I have to voice my usual problem: where are the girls and women? Why doesn’t the protagonist get a female friend/acquaintance her age? There are so many recurring male characters with sprites, including non-love interests, and only two female characters. The female characters that do exist, sprite or not, get quite the unpleasant treatment by the narrative. While they suffer plenty too, the male characters get far more agency to work with.

The protagonist is one of those suffering, struggling girls, and she may or may not make the experience tough for you. To be blunt, she’s a deeply depressed doormat. Her backstory justifies her willingness to accept a lot of abuse, but it could be unpleasant to watch for certain players. And she gets a lot of abuse from so many characters (including love interests, whether they want to do it or not), from verbal abuse to physical violence to murder.

The romance may also be hit-or-miss. The love interest could be a lot older than the protagonist, or someone she calls her brother, or this or that other questionable spoiler thing. They are heavy romances, to be sure, filled with suffering and very little sweetness or spice, but still a whole lot of devotion to the protagonist. As dark tales (rather than something to dream of), they work.

I have mixed feelings on Virche’s approach to love and how people feel it, but I do give it two thumbs up for including a significant male character with feelings for another male character that is never the target of homophobic abuse. They all have bigger problems, fortunately(?).

As for my experience physically playing the game, there were only scattered typos in the text that didn’t intrude much, and it generally flowed well. I hated the way the screen would go bright white before and after every flashback, though; I probably already remembered what happened in the past and didn’t need to get blinded while being reminded of it. Getting different endings was often more tedious than it needed to be, sometimes seemingly requiring the entire route to be skipped through again to enable a different one to happen.

I appreciated the skip-to-choice button, as slow as it could be sometimes; the easy to access and understand flowchart; the gorgeous CGs; and the clear, definitive “you’re headed for a bad ending” screen effect it did most of the time that was going to happen. It makes the screen all glitchy for a few seconds, which is really difficult to miss.

The music deserves an honorable mention as well. While not something I’d listen to outside of the game, it really works in context.

My recommendation: play Virche Evermore if you want some truly wild and tragic times with beautiful male characters.