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.

What an absolutely tragic, beautiful experience all around. I figured I would enjoy it based on the general vibes I got from it before it was picked up for localization, but I didn't expect it to consume my thoughts as it did. This game has soared into becoming one of my top otome of all time ^w^

The visuals and music are very high quality and gorgeous. The character designs are top-tier as well though some took a little bit to grow on me (namely Mathis's and Lucas's).

And as for the writing... phew, what a ride this story was. It intrigued me right from the start and never once bored me. The mysterious and dark nature of the setting were well-established and the foreshadowing was intricately woven through both the common route and all the characters routes. The world-building was also great, reminding me a bit of Olympia Soiree (another all-time fave of mine). The subject matter definitely isn't for the faint of heart, but I gotta say I was expecting waaaay worse on that front based on all the trigger warnings that people were putting out... or maybe I just have a high tolerance, lol. Yes, there was lot of blood and violence and despair as advertised, but I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of "cozier" moments (usually when Ceres was bonding with the LIs) that happened in between the despair. It does touch on some scientific topics... which are outlandish and best not taken too seriously, lol, but I can't say it bothered me too much.

Now as far as the forced bad endings before you can get to the better/bittersweet ones goes... I get what they were going for and I totally see why people would complain about it. I generally don't play bad ends in otome myself unless they're required for CGs/etc. But in this particular case and largely because I was pre-warned to the format, it didn't bother me too much. It's quite a test in delayed gratification, but it made it all the more satisfying to unlock the Salvation endings.

Regarding the Le Salut route... I do dislike that it had an unskippable prologue that lasted for a chapter length of so; felt unnecessary to rehash details that we already knew. But the further you get into the route, the better it is with reveals dropping left and right. Some were fairly predictable, but others totally blew me away :O Overall, I think the route wraps the story up well and even has a more satisfying conclusion for some characters than even their Salvation ends, lol.

Now onto my best boy rankings~
1.) Scien - he absolutely took me by surprise because he's a character type I normally don't go for in otome games. He has a god complex... he's arrogant and discourteous and largely treats Ceres as his (literal) personal maid at the start; I definitely wouldn't want to date this guy IRL, lol. But there's something about his confidence and voice and bluntness that wore me down until I was fangirling at his mere mention ^^""" lol. He's arguably the most important character plot-wise in the game too.
2.) Yves - literally impossible to dislike him. Love his story and his upbeat-ness which contrasts so nicely with the despairing elements of the story. If Scien didn't exist, he would have been my #1 boy from this game~
3.) Lucas - a sweetheart through and through though the student/teacher thing with Ceres was a little odd; I couldn't really grasp the logistics of it either with them being so close in age .w."" It's... a shame the writers seemed to hate him particular ^^""" lol
4.) Ankou
5.) Adolphe
6.) Mathis - I don't hate him, but he's my least fave of this bunch. Great voice acting and twists in his route, but he feels too shota for me to consider him a LI.

So...yeah. Loved the heck out of this one and I'm begging on my knees for the fandisc to be picked up for an English release this year >w<