One day I’ll have the motivation to actually give this more of my time, whenever NMS gets a new big update I try to go back and quickly remember why I’ve never really clicked with it to begin with. Not really against the game itself, the survival gameplay loop of visiting random planets for resource gathering or getting into base building or what have you just isn’t for me I guess. That said if you do love these kind of games and clearly many do, it’s about as refined as could be at this point and honestly a pretty impressive space sim. It had a very bad launch of course, but by now Hello Games should be applauded for the substantial support they continue to give it without charging anything extra too

Seeing Until Then it’s easy to make parallels to A Space for the Unbound, coincidentally another “emotional story heavy slice of life pixel game with supernatural elements and cute minigames” as I would specifically describe them. That’s not a bad thing just a funny observation, I really loved that game too so was curious about this one and quickly gave it a shot after hearing similar praise for its story

Must admit I have mixed feelings though. I’ll start at the premise, Until Then’s set in a fictional version of the Philippines, and centers on a student named Mark and his friends as they go about their high school lives following a vague global tragedy called “The Ruling”. Mark lives on his own as his parents work abroad and a slacker with his classes, but has a longing to learn the piano and tries to practice daily. Things are normal until one day he hears of a new transfer student coming to the school named Nicole, who he’s never met before but strangely seems very familiar to him. Progressively his memories of the people he knows and prior events start to become scrambled as he gets increasing feelings of deja vu he can’t explain

Expectedly this is mainly a game where you just read the dialogue and follow the story. It is marketed as having choices and consequences where you build relationships through picking dialogue choices and replying to texts or social media posts, but unless I missed something I feel like that wasn’t really a thing in this aside for some different flavor text at times? It’s mostly linear as far as I could tell, which is fine to be fair and still a clever way to tell the story. Initially I had a negative impression with the writing though, the characters didn’t really talk like convincing teenagers to me for some reason and their conversations are just a bit long winded a lot of the time, but it gets better as they start to get more endearing (especially Mark’s friends like Cathy). There are some minigames as I mentioned like rhythm segments with the piano or games at an amusement park, which aren’t that special on their own but add a bit of variety nonetheless

Guess this could just be me but I have a particular gripe with narrative games when they lack either good music or voice acting to compliment reading the dialogue. Until Then has nice piano tracks periodically which works well for its story moments, but for the most part it’s kinda quiet beyond sound effects. This kinda made it a bit dull to read for me especially at first, but YMMV there. I will say the presentation itself is unique though, an interesting blend of 2D pixel sprites with 3D environments. It even has its own cinematic cutscenes where the characters are much more detailed. The way the sprites are animated is a bit jarring with how they’re constantly moving, but got used to that after a while and works well

I’d say the most interesting thing about Until Then is that it’s deceptively longer than it seems. Won’t get too deep into spoilers, but the game will seem like it’s reached its end yet prompts if you want to continue or not. You will want to do so, in actually that’s more about 1/3 of the whole story and gets deeper into its mystery surrounding Mark’s “deja vu” and The Ruling itself with the next two playthroughs. It’s fairly ambitious in that regard which surprised me, but I also feel it gets a bit lost in its sci-fi concept with little satisfying explanation for it. And the final ending is sweet but also somewhat underwhelming, especially with how some side characters that seemed like they would’ve had more attention just drop off from the story for some reason. I don’t know, I enjoyed the game overall but did expect a bit more from it

While I’ve played Witch on the Holy Night (Mahoyo) beforehand I wasn’t familiar with Tsukihime much aside for vaguely seeing some of the Melty Blood fighting game. From the jump I was really captivated by its premise with it centering on Shiki, who after a supposed accident as a child gets the power to see “lines” everywhere that can somehow instantly destroy whatever they appear on when he cuts them. Years later when he’s forced to return to his family’s estate after he was disowned, he has a random but complicated encounter with a vampire named Arcueid which draws him into teaming up with her

I can’t exactly say how different this remake is compared to the original since I haven’t played it, but A Piece of Blue Glass Moon consists of revamps for its two Near Side routes (first focused on Arcueid then another character named Ciel) while the rest will be done with a Part 2 release later. The only issue I have with this is that it’s technically incomplete, as some of its mysteries are left unexplored with key characters not getting much focus until the second game comes around. As is though, both routes felt very extensive to me on their own and really different from each other, and while ultimately it’s a romance story, the horror atmosphere and dark characters had me so hooked I couldn’t stop reading. The way Nasu writes action is just really fun too, very descriptive but a breeze to get through with how exciting the CGs and music are along with it. The official translation did have some occasional typos I noticed, but nothing felt out of place with it otherwise

Same as Mahoyo, Type-Moon’s visual presentation is pretty much second to none of most VNs I’ve read with how high the production values are. The art is excellent and distinctive, with great use of movement for the sprites and backgrounds to make it appear more animated. Obviously being what it is, there’s no performance issues to speak of with the PS4 version

And in regard to music, all the tracks from Hideyuki Fukasawa in particular are so well done and perfectly fitting. Accompanied with Keita Haga (and ReoNa for the game’s opening and ending songs), it’s an unsurprisingly stellar soundtrack

This is a straight visual novel though, so the only gameplay to be found here is clicking through the text which I’m personally fine with. But there’s occasional choices you can make that might lead to bad endings (also accompanied with entertaining skits from Ciel and Neko-Arc), and thankfully it includes both a flowchart and full scene skipping so going back to make a different choice is about as quick as could be