With the amount of Among Us jokes thrown at killing game VNs I was expecting this to just be another Danganronpa-esque social deduction type game, not an actual single player Among Us game. You got the roles on a spaceship with aliens indistinguishable from humans randomized in each match and the voting period to eliminate whoever is being sus. Since most visual novel readers are all lonely fucks who don't have enough friends to fill out a 10 player lobby in among us, this was the perfect game for me.
The most striking thing about Gnosia definitely has to be the art style and the diverse cast of characters, they are all very unique and leave you interested on their backstory, but unfortunately it's the sort of mystery story where the mysteries are a lot more thrilling than the reveals.
There is a meta element to the story about every match you play being a loop you're stuck into and the only way to progress through the real story is to see through all the events the story has to offer, which is fair enough if you want to see these characters being developed, but since the game is automated in a way where anyone at any time during the amogus match can die, some events are so obtuse and hard to get to the point where I pretty much gave up and looked for a guide to fill out the last 5. It surely starts out happening randomly enough without you doing much to trigger them, but the fact that absolutely everything is up to chance, means that you'll be seeing the same 20 dialogue boxes for hours without progressing the story for the sake of playing the game instead of the game within the game.
The first 100 or so loops are actually pretty engaging, the matches don't take longer than 5 minutes once you know what you're doing and the progression system of slowly acquiring more skills and having more weight and presence when voting helps it balance the early game where you're constantly saying "STOP VOTING FOR ME YOU FUCKING IDIOTS I'VE BEEN TELLING YOU SQ IS THE GNOSIA FOR THE PAST 3 ROUNDS!", but I clocked in at around 160 loops and I feel like it could have been 80 if the game actually did better use of it's runtime, I'm no scientist but 5 minutes times 160 adds up to a lot of unneeded time. I don't know how intentional the absolute eye-rolling, dreadful state of being stuck in constant loops trying to find the needle in the haystack to fill out the completed files was, but everything past loop 100 felt like busywork because the game required you to 100% it to finish it, which is always a lesson in endurance and patience. It felt like grinding out a season pass for a singleplayer game.
Once the credits rolled I was disappointed that I did not even get a better look at this game's world, lore or characters because again, the way it's structured is optimized to waste your time, and all the info you get from the cast is reduced to checklists with only a handful of them having a semblance of a character arc, whatever information you get from their skill graphs don't help in making the game faster by knowing if they're lying or not, more so than just tell the abilities that they're capable of using.
Could have been fantastic, ended up being just fine. Still somehow slightly more fun than playing among us or reading Danganronpa 2.
The most striking thing about Gnosia definitely has to be the art style and the diverse cast of characters, they are all very unique and leave you interested on their backstory, but unfortunately it's the sort of mystery story where the mysteries are a lot more thrilling than the reveals.
There is a meta element to the story about every match you play being a loop you're stuck into and the only way to progress through the real story is to see through all the events the story has to offer, which is fair enough if you want to see these characters being developed, but since the game is automated in a way where anyone at any time during the amogus match can die, some events are so obtuse and hard to get to the point where I pretty much gave up and looked for a guide to fill out the last 5. It surely starts out happening randomly enough without you doing much to trigger them, but the fact that absolutely everything is up to chance, means that you'll be seeing the same 20 dialogue boxes for hours without progressing the story for the sake of playing the game instead of the game within the game.
The first 100 or so loops are actually pretty engaging, the matches don't take longer than 5 minutes once you know what you're doing and the progression system of slowly acquiring more skills and having more weight and presence when voting helps it balance the early game where you're constantly saying "STOP VOTING FOR ME YOU FUCKING IDIOTS I'VE BEEN TELLING YOU SQ IS THE GNOSIA FOR THE PAST 3 ROUNDS!", but I clocked in at around 160 loops and I feel like it could have been 80 if the game actually did better use of it's runtime, I'm no scientist but 5 minutes times 160 adds up to a lot of unneeded time. I don't know how intentional the absolute eye-rolling, dreadful state of being stuck in constant loops trying to find the needle in the haystack to fill out the completed files was, but everything past loop 100 felt like busywork because the game required you to 100% it to finish it, which is always a lesson in endurance and patience. It felt like grinding out a season pass for a singleplayer game.
Once the credits rolled I was disappointed that I did not even get a better look at this game's world, lore or characters because again, the way it's structured is optimized to waste your time, and all the info you get from the cast is reduced to checklists with only a handful of them having a semblance of a character arc, whatever information you get from their skill graphs don't help in making the game faster by knowing if they're lying or not, more so than just tell the abilities that they're capable of using.
Could have been fantastic, ended up being just fine. Still somehow slightly more fun than playing among us or reading Danganronpa 2.
Waltzs
9 months ago