The Great Voyage - Visual Novel

This is one of those cases when a neutral vote would have been more suited to represent how I feel about a game. The Great Voyage is not a bad visual novel by any means, it's pretty good and well-written, there are some lines here and there that are actually quite brilliant, there's a cast of fairly good characters and the art style is very good. Sadly though, the plot feels like it's missing some turning points and, as a result, the whole package feels a little disjointed and the characters, good at first, end up being quite underdeveloped. However, it's very cheap, and cheaper when on sale, so I'd say it's worth a try if you're into visual novels. [url=store.steampowered.com/curator/31397169/]If you liked this review, please consider following the Indie Games Appreciation Society curator page for more.[/url]

A short, focused and well-told kinetic story with nostalgic art and appropriate music. The price asked for it is fair. My playtime's brief, but I'm a very fast reader; I expect most people will take an hour or so.

Full disclosure, the creator of this VN is a friend of mine, who asked me to go through this and I have not played many VN's in my life. Only few which have some sort of gameplay elements in them and this was a first VN for me which was solely text based with no gameplay at all. All this in mind take my opinion as you will. I enjoyed going through this little story. I was honestly expecting this to be a bit of a "dry" experience for me, but I was pleasantly surprised how the writing kept me going through this. This isn't a very long experience, only taking about an hour or two to read through, but while story progresses quite fast, I never felt that it hurt the pacing of it. The characters, while not the deepest, kept me interested in the story and made me care about their hardships. Regarding the presentation, even though it can be a bit rough, I ended up finding it quite charming. While I don't have much experience with VN's, so I can't really tell what a "quality VN" would look li...

The retro style really makes this game work well. The story is simple, but it's an emotionally draining one, and the sparse colors and dark music really work well to help the increasingly dire plot move along. A short story, but certainly nice for $2. For some reason, the developers removed some of the normal visual novel accessibility options, which is the biggest shortcoming for me. No options for text speed, auto-scrolling, or a text log. I frequently clicked too quickly through the script and accidentally missed some lines--the lack of any way to go back was a little annoying. But for a story this short, that's all pretty minor. It's a rough gem I hope more players experience.

Cool "game" - I enjoyed it. Worth the price.

A dark kinetic novel about war and guilt in a fantasy world reminiscent of the French Revolution, with art reminding of VNs from the early 90's. Short but worth reading.

Not nearly as good as their next game, Vengeful Heart (which is one of my favorite things I've played this year), but still a decent first attempt, and you can see how they got from here to there. The story and world and thematic elements and artwork are all pretty good here, but they built on and improved on them all significantly for their next attempt. I extremely highly recommend Vengeful Heart no matter what, and this mostly if you want to see how they got started before that. Still a reasonably enjoyable use of an hour of my day either way though.