Buried Stars is the first Korean VN I've played. If I didn't know any better, I would've thought it was another JP one since the mechanics and presentation aren't particularly different than many JP ones. Of course, the game deals with Korean characters in Korea so that's different.

The story deals with a few young B-Tier celebrities on some sort of music talent reality show. In the middle of the finals stage, the ceiling begins to collapse. The contestants soon find themselves alone and trapped within the venue building along with one staff member. From there, they try to get in contact with the outside world while finding a way to escape. A person later winds up dead setting up a murder mystery.

Despite the murder mystery, that element doesn't get much focus. A large portion of the game has the survivors stand around and chat about various topics relating to the current situation inside, the in-game twitter chats and their prior histories and backgrounds. A major theme of the game deals with Korean celebrities, the reality shows and the dark side of the entertainment industry there.

These segments do reveal a lot about the characters and gives them quite a bit of depth by the end of the game. They are written pretty well overall. Getting a look into what does on in the industry is also interesting.

The murder mystery elements are also solid despite not having a lot of time focusing on it. The circumstances of the death would be explored throughout the game instead of in one moment. The setup works well and is fairly grounded in the genre so that it's very reasonable to figure out how a character died.

Figuring out the culprit is another question however. The game throws a lot of red herrings at you and it took me pretty much right before the reveal to get the complete picture.

The character art looks great as well as the few CGs in the game. The backgrounds looks decent, but there isn't much variety. The whole game takes place in the building, but there are very few rooms that the characters visit.

The music has some rock elements, but otherwise has a lot of oppressive songs to reflect the tension filled atmosphere.

The gameplay is mostly split into two segments. The main story segments are pretty much linear with little player control. Other than a few dialogue options, you're just watching a lot of people talk here. In between those, there's the investigation segments which gives you a lot more control over what to do. You gather topics from the various "twitter" posts during a moment and discuss them with the other characters along with any other story relevant topic at the time. At the minimum, you need to gather all of the keywords for this part before you can advance. In some cases, you need to use every topic for every character to get all of the keywords.

Some of the topics can adjust the trust the characters has in the MC. Some of them gives you a dialogue choice which can also alter the trust. The MC himself has an insanity gauge which gets adjusted throughout the game and from the topics he has with the characters. You get a game over if the gauge hits 0.

Other than these investigation moments, there isn't much else for gameplay.

The story route structure is a bit strange at first. You're forced to go down a linear route and reached the first ending regardless of the choices you make. You then have access to the story split on a subsequent playthrough, but unless you have a save just right before the split that occurs pretty close to the first ending, you'll have to replay that segment again.

The game essentially has 3 story routes (A, B and C). A is pretty good overall. While B provides the additional information that A didn't have, it was generally a disappointing one. C is short and not really a full route, but an amusing one.

Overall, the mystery is decent and it did leave me guessing until pretty much the end. I enjoyed the exploration of the characters and focus on the characters as well. I did wished that there were more major story events since it just feels like there isn't that much that happens.

There isn't an in-game timer, but I figure it takes about 15-20 hours to complete all of the story routes.