SYNESTHESIA

Synesthesia is like a budget version of The Nonary Games. I don't necessarily say this as a negative, the inspiration seems fairly clear and there's a lot of passion that went into the creation of this game. While the sprites and voice acting are clearly low budget, and the writing is a bit stiff, the overall narrative is interesting and keeps you hooked. I will say that a large chunk of the experience is fluff, there's several scenes that, I presume, are only written to make the characters seem more endearing or fleshed out, but unfortunately those are some of the weaker aspects of the game. When I said the game has an interesting hook, that's despite the writing and less so because of it, and precisely that makes you less engaged in any of the plotlines that aren't directly relating to the main mystery at hand. Naturally, there's a lot of suspension of disbelief necessary to excuse the narrative confinement happening. The game makes little effort to excuse the fact that the majori...

Synethesia isn't going to blow your mind, but for the price it's a decent enough game/story for those who enjoy visual novels. The base concept of the story is pretty interesting, though the side elements with the relationship drama feels out of place and shoehorned in. You don't need romance in every story, people! The graphics are fine, with some nifty stuff done around the Synethesia events. The voice acting is passable, though it does sound robotic in places, whereby the tone is completely off for the line that's being delivered, but it wasn't offensive or laugh out loud bad. Jase was the one that felt the most off, but then Jase just disappeared by the end, so I'm not convinced he was even intended to be in it originally and was just shoehorned in near the end to resolve some plot issues. The puzzles are ... there? There's some intriguing ideas presented by the superpower our protagonist has, but it does feel like they could have gone a lot further with this. It's also worth noti...