Mi juego Favorito de lo que va del año.
Una VN Rouge-lite y con mecánicas de RPG basada en los juegos de rol tipo "Mafia" o "Werewolf" (la amongus vn para los entendidos). A pesar de sus limitaciones como puede ser la ausencia de doblaje, lo compensa enormemente con cientos de imágenes detalladas para situaciones que solo aparecen una vez; con personajes carismáticos, bien definidos y con un diseño precioso; una historia engimática, no lineal y que provocó que siempre quiera volver una vez más por un nuevo bucle. Además de contar con un final contundente y redondo y sin embargo, deja espacio a la imaginación.
Gnosia es de esos Indies que merecen más reconocimiento. Valió cada segundo para platinarlo, porque al final.
Gnosia me atrapó en un bucle.

I love GNOSIA. I love the vibes, the mystery, and the characters, who are all unique and fun. I loved gradually gaining bits of information to see how the characters tie into the mysteries.
Even got a couple of great, explicitly non-binary characters (notably, the player can also play as non-binary).
I almost didn't take a chance on this, as I'd never gotten into any games categorized as "roguelite", and the concept doesn't generally appeal to me. I feel that there's narrative utility in the repetitive gameplay loop, in really feeling the situation wear on the player. For me, it was a somewhat immersive aspect.
For anybody who enjoys this gameplay despite the repetition, this game has a lot of replay value. After one full playthrough, I'm still coming across a lot of new things. It's kind of amazing.
The computer AI is "smart" and well designed (as a single-player social deduction game necessitates). Catching subtle hints based on NPC behavior is fun, as well as developing one's own strategy in order to influence the NPCs (lying gave me such intense anxiety though, LOL). The different characters each have unique ways of behaving in different situations, and varying inherent (and circumstantial) affinity towards other characters, including the player.
I wish they would allow for a multiplayer mode (separate from the story)!! I would love to play simultaneously with both the computer AI, and a friend.
I also wish I could casually spend more time with the characters. There's so much to work with here!
Cotori's lovely artwork, and the unusual music are the perfect dressing.
It's exciting to see such a cool game come from such a small development team.

Gnosia is a werewolf type game where you play against AI instead of players. Fun in theory, but werewolf is a social game.

The gameplay is fine enough as is, but gets repetitive really quick. It doesn’t help that the ‘discussions’ are just characters throwing random, typically generic and personalityless comments at each other.

Whoever dies or get voted out feels pretty random sometimes, no matter how the discussion went.

There are some interesting bits that you can learn about the AI characters, but you have to go out of your way to create specific scenarios for most of them, which can be hard sometimes.

I personally love most of the character designs, and the music is pretty good too.

I recommend playing in short bursts so you don’t burn yourself out on it.

I usually wait a few days before reviewing a game to let it settle in my mind and reach a more objective emotional distance, but this game has gotten me heated enough to where I had to capture it on paper. Specifically, it’s because this might be one of the worst designed games I’ve ever played.

Gnosia is a hybrid between a visual novel and a social deduction game, where you’re on a spaceship with 14 other people who may be sneaky aliens who want to kill everyone. A discussion happens each day, the humans decide who to put into cold sleep, the aliens decide who they want to kill, and the humans win when all the aliens are sleeping, or the aliens win when they’re at least 50% of the crew. It’s a well-tested design for a party game, but remember, this is a single-player experience. You’re playing against AI whose emotions you can’t read, and whose personalities only come out through a very small selection of dialog lines for each situation. Instead, the socializing that forms the core of the design is simulated by random skill checks: each AI character has a set of stats that are rolled whenever they tell lies, which are then rolled against perception stats. At the end of each round, you get XP to level up your own stats, and the game begins again. And again. And again. And again and again and again. To finish the game, it took me one-hundred and sixty-three rounds of playing the same game over… and over… and over again. The reason why is because you can only truly complete the game if you’ve seen all the character events, which randomly happen between nights depending on unspoken criteria like who’s alive, who has which roles, who trusts who, which events have happened previously, and so on. They’re usually just very short dialogues that give you new personal trivia, and don’t build into characterization you can use in the daily discussions.

So, let me recap the design of this game for you:
You’re playing an inherently social game against emotionless robots.
Your ability to deduce who’s lying is up to random chance.
Other characters believing you is random chance.
Being selected for cold sleep or elimination is random chance, which can prevent you from finishing events.
Events are based on criteria you’re never told of, and appear by random chance. Luckily, they’re only rarely affected by winning or losing, so your gameplay performance is of no consequence.
If you engage with the game by piping up and influencing discussion, you may be told your excessive talking is suspicious, and sent into cold sleep despite being correct. This is due to random chance.
If you stay quiet to avoid the aforementioned suspicion, it may be seen as, in itself, suspicious. This can happen by random chance.

It’s utterly baffling. This game should have choices and deduction, but every mechanic is oriented in a way that takes agency away from the player. You can’t participate in discussions until you’ve grinded stats, and even then, it's up to chance. You can’t choose a character who you want to learn about. You can’t decide how the story goes. It’s all random. The game just happens in front of you as you sit there powerlessly. I re-bound my controller to mash the A button so I could blast through the entirely irrelevant gameplay, which made me finish it 5 hours faster than the average completion time. That may seem like a weird thing to bring up for a visual novel, but again, there’s no story progression or development in the discussions which take up 95% of your time. If you put all the story moments together, they would probably be less than an hour in total, for a game which takes at least twelve hours to beat. If I had to give one begrudging compliment, it’s that some characters can be likable in their events, but when in the next iteration they may hate you because of random chance, I just can’t feel a kinship or build a relationship with them. It’s all so pointless. Even in a game as bad as Heavy Rain, I could at least tell what the point was, why someone would play it and what they were supposed to get out of it. Not with this one. I don’t even know how to conclude this review. The game has no thesis and no point and neither do I. I just hate it.

So, I'm going against the current of average reviews here : this game was just tedious. Initially, it starts amazingly, but as the rogue like aspect kicks in, it's just a pain. There's an heavy RNG aspect in the beginning that stacks against you.

I actually cheated and gave myself levels with Cheat Engine (I just don't like grinding in solo games) and the game was still tedious because you have to get lucky and spawn into a favorable loop where a lot of tiny parameters out of your control are aligned.

I had to restart a loop like, 10 times, for one specific event and I just gave up at that point and watched the ending on Youtube because the story still got me curious.

I found it amusing that my feelings about the Werewolf segments mirrored the trajectory that the protagonist must have experienced: confusion and worry as we accustomed to the first handful of loops, tedium and frustration as the reality of the grind set in, and then a sense of time-god omnipotence by the time we hit level 125 or so and could bend almost every character in the game to our will. I do wish there were more unique interactions in the Werewolf segments that would dissuade the player from mashing through them.

The characters, worldbuilding, and even the compulsory self-reflexive Blickwinkel stuff are just as interesting as what a lot of its contemporaries manage in thrice as much playtime. Kind of puts into perspective how repetitive VNs can be.

MVP is clearly Shigemichi but Otome and Gina and Setsu are great too. I can't praise the characters in this enough, honestly, they are all endearing.

Ending was a bit underwelming but I think I was expecting a lot more story-heavy game when it's really maybe 60-40 Mafia-simulator visual novel.

But the worldbuilding, characters, premise are super fascinating, and tbh I would love to see a normal visual novel in the same universe. The gameplay is also pretty well done - it can get a bit old when searching for the last few bits of information, and I am admittedly already a bit of a social deduction game fiend, but all in all it does a surprisingly good job of adapting it into video game form.

Gnosia me foi vendido como "visual novel de Among Us". A premissa é simples: 15 pessoas estão presas em uma nave espacial e alienígenas estão infiltrados na nave disfarçados dos membros ali presentes. O seu objetivo é participar de discussões, encontrar inconsistências nos discursos dos personagens e descobrir quem é o impostor.

A premissa me pegou muito e inicialmente eu pensei que seria algo como Danganronpa, um jogo de mistério com foco em narrativa. Acontece que Gnosia é algo completamente diferente disso. Gnosia é muito mais próximo de um jogo como Lobisomem/Werewolf que, pra quem não conhece, se trata de um jogo de cartas onde cada jogador tem um papel, e o objetivo é descobrir quem é o lobisomem infiltrado na vila.

A ideia de fazer um lobisomem single-player é interessante e o jogo tenta colocar coisas novas em cima do conceito original, como stats similares a um RPG em que você pode aumentar coisas como carisma, charme, lógica, etc. O problema é que conceitualmente, lobisomem é um jogo muito sobre você tentar ler as pessoas, identificar se uma pessoa está ou não mentindo por meio de como ela age e se comporta. Claro que existem outros elementos lógicos por trás, mas o elemento humano é muito importante também. Esse elemento humano se perde bastante em Gnosia onde é impossível detectar uma mentira por meio de uma caixa de texto e um portrait estático do personagem. Se guiar apenas pela lógica muitas vezes deixa o jogo um pouco tedioso porque se resume a esperar que alguém diga algo inconsistente e pronto, você já sabe quem é o culpado. Muitas das nuances do jogo se perdem aí.

E o que difere ele de outros jogos com premissas semelhantes é que, estruturalmente, ele não segue uma narrativa linear, ele tem uma estrutura semelhante a um roguelite, em que loops ocorrem e a cada loop, novos papeis são dados aos personagens. É como se o jogo fossem várias pequenas partidas que duram 10-30 minutos. Em um loop você é um engenheiro, no outro um tripulante normal e no outro um impostor. Cada loop é como uma partida diferente de lobisomem, então narrativamente... não importa muito quem é o impostor. O jogo não tenta criar um mistério em cima de "quem matou tal personagem?"

Em resumo, o foco é bem menos em mistério e bem mais em um jogo onde o seu objetivo é buscar por inconsistências para vencer uma partida.

Mas então... onde exatamente entra a história nisso? E aí que vem o ponto que Gnosia peca um pouco. Não que a história seja ruim, gosto muito dos personagens e a escrita no geral é interessante. O problema é que, por conta dessa estrutura, o jogo não tem exatamente uma narrativa com início, meio e fim, com personagens bem definidos e motivações específicas. A história é contada basicamente por meio de lore. Durante esses loops, algumas coisas acontecem que podem gerar eventos relacionados a esse personagem.

Por exemplo, caso você esteja jogando de tripulante e perca a partida para um personagem que era um impostor, no final da partida você vê uma cena que envolve alguma informação sobre aquele personagem sendo um impostor. Ou então, caso você e um personagem sejam tripulantes e sobrevivam ao loop no final, você vê um diálogo específico com aquele personagem. Vários desses eventos vão te dando pedaços de informação sobre aqueles personagens e sobre aquele mundo.

No geral é interessante e eu queria constantemente descobrir mais sobre os personagens que eu gostava. Mas a forma como a gameplay e a história são pouco integradas me incomoda um pouco. Eu sinto que a gameplay é só uma forma burocrática de chegar às informações e no final uma coisa não tem exatamente a ver com a outra. As duas coisas separadas no geral são boas, a gameplay é divertida (apesar de repetitiva) e os personagens são interessantes o suficiente para fazer você se interessar neles. Mas a forma como o jogo se estrutura me deixa com um gostinho de potencial desperdiçado, sabe?

No geral eu me diverti com Gnosia e acho um bom jogo, mas pelo quão interessante é a sua premissa eu sinto que o jogo deixa um pouco a desejar. Talvez eu só fui jogar com uma expectativa errada e acabei me decepcionando um pouco que o jogo não era exatamente o que eu queria, mas ainda acho que é um grande problema o quão desconexos são a história e a gameplay.

Its a good attempt at simulating something akin to Werewolf or Mafia, but the mechanics are too lacking for the gameplay to stand up on its own. But while story and characters can help to compensate, they both ran into a lot of issues towards the end that left the broader experience feeling somewhat disappointing.

I still like Gnosia overall (and I certainly don't envy the developers here who had to take such a difficult concept and actually make it work) but there's a lot of room for improvement here. I'm interested in seeing what the team behind this does next because they definitely have to the potential to make something great. But Gnosia isn't there quite yet.

Gnosia is the best game about a guy with a cat living inside of his neck ever made.

A Visual Novel lives and dies on its story and characters, its art and music, and its VIBES. And in all these ways, Gnosia sings the sweetest song you'll ever hear. A social deduction game where everyone is certifiable and your strategies are ever changing, because so are the rules.

What makes Gnosia realltly stand out among its contemporaries is how it handles progression. Not only do you level up your stats as you play, allowing you to build out your character like an RPG, but the world of Gnosia and the lunatics trapped therein are rife with mysteries and riddled with secrets. As you learn more and more about the gameplay systems and how to manipulate the other characters onboard the ship, you become more able to use that knowledge to advance your understanding of the backstories of the characters and world of Gnosia, and that knowledge will further enable you to manipulate the characters in search of the results you're looking for with every round you play. Gnosia's "final boss" is a spectacular culmination of these mechanics, forcing you to execute every skill you've learned over your 20 or so hours with the game with peak precision against a terrifying threat. It's one of the most memorable boss fights I've played in a game this decade, and Gnosia is a visual novel. It's awesome.

Gnosia excels in its presentation as well. The art is excellent and unique and oh man, the music is blissful. Tense, exciting, nerve-wracking, and always enhancing the mood of every scene. The only fault to be found within Gnosia is that locating the game's final secrets may become a bore, but even that feels thematically and mechanically appeopriate. It's a very unique game well worth seeing through to its poignant and memorable conclusion. Cannot recommend it enough.