recommendations of visual novels on sale for the steam winter sale 2023
steam's winter sale just started and will run for the next two weeks, so if you're looking for a new visual novel to try (or want to get into them), here's a lot that I've played that are on sale on steam.
umineko when they cry
the ushiromiya family returns to the family head's home on an isolated island for their annual conference with the intention of settling how his vast amount of wealth is divided. instead, though, a letter is left from someone claiming to be a "witch". with the ushiromiyas dropping left and right, the mystery behind everything remains to be solved.
I can't make a recommendation list without mentioning umineko. it's life changing. it might even trans your gender. it's hard to describe umineko, but just know that it's absolutely deserving of the "cult classic" tag.
notes:
kinetic/linear - no choices
VERY long
divided into two games on steam - Questions Arcs is the first 4 episodes and Answers Arcs is the last 4 episodes (8 episodes in total, play Questions Arcs first)
created by Ryukishi07, creator of Higurashi
fantasy mystery
ace attorney
follow phoenix wright as he embarks on his career as a lawyer to help people. meet a variety of clients and prove their innocence by collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, and exposing lies in court.
ace attorney is one of the classic mystery visual novels, being a blend of point-and-click elements via investigations and visual novel storytelling. the steam port is a massive collection, combining the first 3 games (the original phoenix wright trilogy) as 1 game.
notes:
investigative gameplay segments, a good chunk of the story is point-and-click parts
VERY long for the whole trilogy- each game is around 20 hours long and the steam edition is 3 games
modern mystery with supernatural elements
ai: the somnium files
play as detective kaname date as he hunts down a serial killer using a cutting-edge technology which allows him to "psync" with a person, diving into the memories of others to solve crimes in a limited amount of time with the help of his AI assistant/eyeball Aiba.
aitsf is a lot. it's probably the raunchiest non-eroge game I've ever played and despite my low tolerance for dirty jokes I found most of it to be laughable and a fun experience, though I did play this with friends. if it's a miss for you, it's gonna miss you by a wide margin, but if it's a hit for you, you're going to be recommending it nonstop. either way you'll want to hit kaname date with a car.
notes:
long, around 25-35 hours
this game heavily relies on going back to prior choices via their branching menu to try other options in order to get the full story (and true ending). there are several endings to this game but you're meant to play through them all, not just one or two.
a lot of gameplay and interactive segments
sci-fi mystery
english voice acting
witch on the holy night
aoko aozaki is a highschooler who has to balance her class president, perfect grades life with her secret afterschool life of being a mage—a secret she has to keep at the risk of death. keeping this balance already isn’t easy but one day she gets a wrench thrown into it with the introduction of a transfer student, soujuurou shizuki, a country boy so out of touch that he’s never seen electricity before.
I love witch on the holy night so, so much. it's one of the most beautifully directed visual novels ever made with so much love and care put into each frame. the cast is wonderful (touko my beloved) and it's a must-read for anyone who likes modern-ish fantasy.
notes:
kinetic / linear - no choices
long, around 25-30 hours
originally written by kinoko nasu, one of the co-founders of type-moon and creators of fate/stay night. has some relation to tsukihime and garden of sinners but you don't need any knowledge of those going in
modern-ish (1980s) fantasy with lots of talking about magic
ghostpia
a snowy town filled with "ghosts" is where the young woman sayako finds herself trapped, feeling like she doesn't belong and wants to leave this town where no one dies.
it's hard to describe ghostpia. it's a surreal-ish story about "ghosts" where every character is quirkier than the last but every part is made with so much heart behind it. you never really know where the story is going, but unfortunately only 1 season is currently out on steam.
notes:
medium length, around 10 hours
very innovative and unique use of visuals and paneling
surreal-ish (sometimes violent) fantasy
please be happy
as a shapeshifting fox called a "gumiho", miho has traveled the world in search for a traveler who showed her kindness many years ago. afraid of sticking around in one place for too long, miho has never stayed anywhere for more than a few nights- but all of that changes when she arrives in wellington, new zealand and meets the barista/writer aspen and the vampire archivist juliet.
okay okay I had to recommend at least one visual novel I worked on. please be happy was a labor of love for our team that took over 3 years to make and is a slice of life story about love, trust, and what it means to be human.
notes:
medium to long, about 20 hours
2 romanceable ladies, aspen and juliet, and a plethora of side characters to meet via a map system
modern slice of life fantasy
english voice acting
WE KNOW THE DEVIL
find yourself back at summer camp with all the queer religious horror of it.
WE KNOW THE DEVIL is a short, atmospheric and slightly surreal story about 3 teens at a religious summer camp waiting for the devil. if you want something that feels familiar and otherworldly at the same time, this is right up your alley.
notes:
very short, about 2 hours
3 endings and 1 true ending
isolation, psychological horror
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this is just a handful of recommendations of visual novels I've played and enjoyed that are on sale right now on steam.
some of these titles, like please be happy and WE KNOW THE DEVIL, are also available on itch.io which is a website for indie games! they're also currently having a winter sale so a lot of indie visual novels are on sale over there too, if you want DRM-free versions of games while also giving a better revenue split to devs.
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The revealed Wapeach concept art made an explosion of fanart of the girl, here's mine, but with my own twists (and a Wadaisy too!)
more images and info under the read more :)
I wanted to try my best to replicate the ideas of the Wapeach concept art while putting my own spin to it (mainly trying to make her look VERY childish and bratty) and to match how the Wario bros look in comparison to the Mario Bros
Wapeach being purple didn't make a lot of sense to me...Waluigi is already purple, and I wanted to try black but green just looked the best to me, besides it's close to peach's inverted colors
Unlike Wapeach though, I wanted to make Wadaisy look "old and devoid of life" opposite of Daisy's loud and lively personality, even making her outfit cold and themed more around ice than the desert
I tried her best to look like she matched with Wapeach!
some fun facts about the pair:
Nectarine is not part of any royalty (being a faker lol)
while Viola is a queen of a small ice kingdom
Both hate the nicknames of Wapeach and Wadaisy
Both of them don't get along with each other unlike Peach and Daisy
Nectarine is a bossy, carefree rascal who wants to be better than everyone (especially Peach)
Viola is distant, scheming individual who just wants recognition for her own kingdom and royal prowess
Both of them despise their so-called counterparts very much
Nectarine is about 12 years old while Viola is a whopping 64 years old
Viola can be considered the leader out of the four Wahs, but Nectarine and Wario wants to be the most vocal about it
The only Wah whose isn't a demeaning nickname is Wario, thus is the true inspiration of the others being nicknamed the way they are (seriously who would look at their child and go "yup your name will be Wapeach")
hope you enjoy! <3
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Dancestors and Their Implications on Classpecting
For many of Homestuck's readers, the Dancestors aren't exactly fond memories. While there is a good chunk of the fanbase who loves them for what's under the surface, myself included, I would argue the majority of the fanbase sees the Dancestors as what they were likely intended to be: bad-faith mockeries of Tumblr and the Homestuck fanbase at the time.
They are not well-written characters, for the most part. Oh, there are glimpses of interesting characterization and deeper story for all of them, but none of them beyond perhaps Aranea and Meenah live up to their potential. Many of them are uncomfortable at best and downright harmful at worst.
I do not want to talk about their characterization directly here, though. No, I would instead like to discuss the impact that the Dancestors have on a far more widely beloved part of Homestuck: the classpect system.
As we all know, the classpect system has two parts: the Class, such as 'Heir', and the Aspect, such as 'Breath'. Every sburb and sgrub player has a defined classpect, and every player we see in the comic has their classpect revealed at some point in time.
For the humans, every human has a unique class and a unique aspect. There are only eight of them who play sburb, so it makes sense for each of them to get one of the twelve options, as a shorthand for character differentiation. The Strilondes may be ectobiologically related, but each of the four has their own unique class and aspect.
For the trolls, though, there's something a little different that happens. Because there are only twelve aspects and fourteen classes, and because the master classes are only seen in-comic with the cherubs, there has to be overlap between the core twelve trolls and their Dancestors. Every class and aspect is used twice, in different combinations so that every troll has their own title.
What's interesting about the Dancestors' classpects, though, is that every Dancestor's aspect lines up with their respective core troll. The Captors, for example, are both Doom players, while the Vantases are both Blood players. They have different classes, but their aspect stays the same between the two of them.
Where this gets even more interesting is in the way the relationship between Dancestor and core troll works. Troll genetics is... hard to understand at best, and complicated even further when ectobiology is pulled into the mix, but we know that they have a concept of ancestors who provide the majority of their genetic code. We also know that each of the Dancestors is ectobiologically the ancestor of their respective core troll. The Dancestor Aranea Serket, for example, is genetically the same as Alternia's Mindfang; much in the same way that Jane Crocker is genetically the same as Nanna.
While we cannot say that the ancestry rules are the same for the sgrub players as they are for the rest of Trollkind, I believe that it is more informative and interesting to read the text in that way, because when we do there is a clear and incredibly useful correlation to be found. Because we do not see the trolls' ectobiology in action, I think it is reasonable to make the assumption that ectobiology machines tend to reflect the genetic combination practices of the species playing, and so would create a mother grub-like condition for the trolls as opposed to the parent-like condition that Jegbert had.
Assuming this to be true, then, and that the Dancestors share a large part of their genetic code with their respective core trolls, let's look back at the aspect connection.
Why are their aspects the same, but their classes different?
I believe it is a matter of nature vs nurture, where aspects are determined by nature and classes are determined by nurture.
The biggest difference between the trolls and their Dancestors is the world they were brought up in. The Dancestors lived in a world much more similar to our own, with many social issues being bureaucratic and political in nature; where the core trolls grew up in a much more violent and war-focused world. This is very clear in the canon of Homestuck, and established regularly throughout openbound.
This would, inevitably, lead to the Dancestors being raised and nurtured to implement their aspects in different ways from the core trolls. In turn, this brings them to have different classes.
Let's also look at what the basic setup of classpecting: classes have verbs (eg: bards and princes destroy) and are either passive or active (eg: bards destroy [aspect] while princes are destroyed by [aspect]), and aspects are the elemental forces affected by those verbs. From the Expanded Zodiac, we can further interpret aspects as a person's core values, and extrapolate that classes are how they interact with those core values.
This, too, lines up with the nature vs nurture interpretation of the classpect system. Both Karkat and Kankri are Blood players, and we can see that at their core both of them very heavily value the bonds between people. Those bonds are, for the Vantases, the most important parts of their lives. What's different between them is how they act on that belief: Karkat, as a Knight, helps (or, more properly, serves) the people he's bonded with and make sure they're happy and prospering, and is regularly the guy any of them go to for emotional advice; where Kankri, as a Seer, knows the connections between people and knows how to work with those connections to try and minimize conflict.
Karkat grew up in a world where he was marked for death from the day he was hatched, and the only way he would survive would be to serve powerful people and hope to impress them. He was nurtured into a role where helping people he's grown a bond with was useful and practical to keep himself alive and moving forward in the world.
Kankri grew up in a world where he was effectively a highblood's pet, and the only way he could further his place in society was to understand the connections between people and the complexities of a political bureaucracy. He was nurtured into a role where understanding the bonds between people was useful and practical to keep himself moving forward in the world.
Both of them, though, are still Blood players at their core.
While it is clearest and easiest to see this connection in the Vantases, it is, to my knowledge, true for all of the troll pairs.
This interpretation of classpecting, where classes are determined by nurture and aspects are determined by nature, may seem somewhat less than useful on the surface, but I believe that it is actually a GREATLY useful reference point for writing and developing characters, both in AUs and in original works.
Let's say you wanted to write a high school AU, but you were struggling to keep Karkat in character because of his more aggressive tendancies. Knowing that his Blood aspect is determined by nature would help to identify exactly what core values should be carried over, where having Knight be determined by nurture would help identify what might change or shift in this new version. Perhaps he's still a Knight, and he was still raised in a situation that led him to be knight-like, but it now takes the form of Karkat demanding that his friends have study groups together and ensuring that they're all ready for tests and quizzes.
It's flexible, of course, and should never be used as the single point of a character's personality, but I think that using the classpecting system to identify how a character's environments affect how they interact with their core belief is a really interesting and useful usage of the system.
TL;DR: I believe that the Dancestors' aspects being the same as their core troll counterparts while their classes differ indicates that classpecting is determined, in part, by the nature and nurture factors on a person's personality. Aspects are determined by nature and genetics, where classes are determined by nurture and environment. I think that this interpretation of the classpecting system is particularly interesting when creating characters and useful in analyzing characters both within and outside of Homestuck, as a way to identify how the way a character is raised leads them to interact with their core beliefs and values.
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