Nova-Box had gotten me interested in their style of visual novels with Seer’s Isle although it didn’t fully give me what I wanted and fell short in some ways. I decided to work my way back and try Along the Edge which was their initial offering and had gotten quite a bit of praise. I will say I enjoyed it more than Seer’s Isle but some of the gripes I had remained. I’ll start by saying the art is simply fantastic and among the best I have ever seen. It almost has the style of a water color painting to it. The story was also really enjoyable and there are a good amount of choices you can make in it. Like in Seer’s Isle though the choices are tied to a set of symbols that are in no way explained to me. I have no idea which symbol a specific answer will give me nor what that means in the grand scheme of things. I simply stopped trying to guess and just picked which choices appealed to me without trying to think where they would lead. The ending I received was called “heart of darkness” due to the symbols most associated with my choices but as ominous as that sounds I wouldn’t call it a bleak ending at all. Symbols aside I enjoyed the characters; the story; the dialogue; so I advise those thinking the choice system is weird to just roll with it and enjoy the game as a whole. I did feel the game ended rather suddenly and felt a tad rushed in the last act. I also wish there were more options for romance as I didn’t care much for the ones provided but that being said staying single was an option so that’s good enough. The music is nice but gets repetitive after a while. There is no voice acting, which is fine by me, I’m just setting expectations.
I played Along the Edge on Linux. The game had some issues crashing at launch on it’s old Electron based engine so the developers took the time and effort to move the game to Unity. It never crashed on me after that. I didn’t notice any spelling errors. The game uses the OpenGL API. I played version 2.0 of the game. It uses an auto save system where the game saves each time you move to the next page. This means no going back to redo a choice. My main issue with this is if you want to see where a different path leads you have to replay the entire game. I get wanting to give your choices more impact and have you put thought into them but for those who like to experiment it’s a nuisance. Alt-Tab didn’t work.
Disk Space Used: 771MB
Game Engine: Unity
Input Used: Keyboard and Mouse
GPU Usage: 0-55 %
VRAM Usage: 510-1113 MB
CPU Usage: 2-6 %
RAM Usage: 2.6-2.7 GB
Overall I found this to be a very mature visual novel with a great story to explore and some fantastic art. As much as it seems like I knock their choice system I will say kudos to the developers for trying to do something different. I also think they should be praised for their response to their games crashing on Linux. Switching your games over to a new engine is no small feat and is a very classy move. I finished Along the Edge in 2 hours and paid $15.08 for it. I think it provided solid value for the price.
My Score: 8/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X 
Alternativen: 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15
Alternativen: Mesa 20.1.7
Alternativen: Manjaro 20.1
