https://store.steampowered.com/app/2316290/Cerulean_Days/
Cerulean Days is a poignant (and rather apt) drama visual novel, set in 2020 after a man-made virus wipes out most of the population of Inre Island. With the discovery that the attack was planned using the internet and the culprits caught and executed, the government of Inre soon extends an iron grip on the internet and starts reconfiguring it into something else.
After the rather wordy introduction, the main story starts, with the protagonist, Michael about to watch a news broadcast about how the internet on Inre is going to be restructured and all computer equipment will be updated. Eventually, requiring money, Michael gets a government job “helping” people...
The storyline is quite reminiscent of both 1984 and I, Robot (the film that is) – at least to start with, and proceeds at a steady, but slow pace, which borders on meandering.
The one problem with the story is there is a lot – probably too much – unnecessary detail, and doesn’t really get anywhere particularly fast. There also isn’t much in the way of humour – the barbs between Michael and Severine are cute-ish, but that’s as far as it goes.
The characters you meet are quite interesting – if somewhat generic. Severine is a rather haughty classmate and a cake maker, of which the latter the protagonist is a great fan of, whilst Grace is government worker (and with whom you are staying), and gets you your first job, and who is also looking forward to the new government appointed technology system. However, she is also aware of the changes that the terrorist attacks had on people and subtlety forewarns Michael.
The character graphics are certainly very nice, with simple animations, whilst the backgrounds are fine as well, if not always overly detailed. There is also the occasional CG shot.
It certainly could be interesting to see where the story goes – as long as you don’t mind something that takes ages to start anything – as the demo ends just at your first case.
As it stands, there is certainly an interesting and very contemporary storyline, but you have to wade through a lot of text that either could be removed or simplified to get to what feels like the actual story. Graphics and music are fine though.
Be worth checking out mainly if you like slow-paced stories.
Can you link the game and add that there are light spoilers in the post? Thanks 🙏
That should do it
I finally got around to looking further into this one. NekoNyan Software published this in the west. 99% of their licenses are for Eroge and the full release of this is definitely one. The 18+ patch can be found here.
According to the VNDB, this was made by a team of around 5 people, and I love the artwork so far; the concept also seems pretty interesting even if some of the writing may be lackluster or a bit too convoluted. A review I saw on Steam compared it to a bit of a Reddit shitpost and gave some perspective about that kind of dialogue. Added to my growing list of games to check out.
I'm very surprised that Neko picked this one up, though. They typically go for Japanese only VNs; this one is actually Scandinavian with no one on the staff being from Japan. Glad to see that they do some Western licenses.
I don't have most of my KoiChoco content marked as NSFW (even though it is 18+) but do mark them as having spoilers in the post along with it being brought up in the pinned Gameplay Index's How to run this game post. You don't have to tag as NSFW for this post but for future content like this, please mark them as such, especially if the game is an Eroge. This community isn't tagged as NSFW (to make it fairly inclusive since VNs are hard to get people into with different stigmas related to them), so tagging individual posts as NSFW where relevant keeps the community from getting in trouble with Hive itself; they do have rules about content even though it is decentralized. Thanks 😀
I didn't know there was an adult version - this review was actually written years ago (2019 to be precise), when I tried the demo for a website that wanted a review of it. Once I finished the demo, I forgot all about it up until now. For some reason, I was thinking about it yesterday...
I didn't particularly think that much of this visual novel, but the review was written in such a way to not annoy advertisers...
Glad someone else found it rather wordy as well. It's not one I would want to return to/start again.