BURIED STARS
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Über das Spiel
Reveal the hidden truth through Communication x Survival x Adventure
BURIED STARS is a new mystery adventure game presented by Studio LARGO, the developers of the masterpiece adventure series Panic Room and City of Mist in Korea, along with LINE Games Corporation.
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1703 Produkte im Account
275 Reviews
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1004 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 07.05.22 16:44
Zitat:
A review copy was provided by the developer.
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Follow my Curator page, Fruit N Doggie Reviews, so you can be updated whenever I post a new review.
First Impressions
Visual Novels (VN) can be a real buzzkill for me, so when looking into Buried Stars (BS), I wasn't sure I'd like it. However, those with more engaging stories, such as thrillers and mysteries stand much more of a chance, since it has the potential to capture my mind. Even with the strong reviews though, I wound up being pleasantly surprised by other facets that make this VN more captivating than usual.
Gameplay
Most VN can be experienced with the player practically taking a nap, as it requires so little input. BS is designed with a more interactive focus, mainly due to how much the player controls what topics are discussed. Each section of the game includes preset topics that have to be covered with specific characters, giving the protagonist enough info in order to move on.
With the other topics available, it's your choice what to discuss with each character. Theoretically, you could press each topic with every character, but with the stress and circumstances in play, does that really suit a character trying to survive a harrowing situation? Jumping into too many fires could deplete his sanity. On top of that, it can be hard to gauge what topics might strain the trust your peers have in you. The more they trust you, the more they'll open up, which provides you enough intel to help them out later.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2804663097
Controls
The control scheme is both simple and effective, working well with either the mouse and keyboard or with a controller. When I used my controller, the only issue I had was switching the auto progress back off during certain segments. Another factor I really like is how BS handled its tutorials. It starts off with only a couple of characters, as a way to learn the basics, and quickly brings in the other NPCs to expand on that base and introduce new mechanics. There's sensible story related reasons for more complexity as you progress, and there's simple checks to ensure you're thinking through material logically. For instance, what features are working on your phone, which is really important when you're trapped in a collapsed building.
Story
Seeing as this is a VN, a strong story is fundamental, which is carried by a protagonist with a developed personality, rather than a blank sheet. There's a lot of dialogue in BS, but instead of being talked to like a wall, he has a voice and converses with them as you'd expect two people to. It seems so minor, yet it significantly changes how the story is presented and develops. Nothing is lost by not having the protagonist be largely silent, because that's not how most stories or media works anyways. The circumstances making up the story are rather specific, atypical, and can stretch tenability a bit far. Even the title of the game is on the nose, when it doesn't even make much sense for an American Idol sort of TV show. Regardless, since the characters respond in mostly logical ways, or at the very least plausible for the situation they find themselves in, the story is still palatable. Out of a small group of sensible people, you somewhat expect one doofus to screw things up.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2804663513
Visuals
I never gave much thought to how conversations are presented in most VN because they're so universal. You'll see the NPC you're talking to, but unless it's a cutscene, the protagonist won't be visible at any point, typically because they're not saying anything anyways. However, when the protagonist is speaking with any of the NPCs here, you'll see his back as they talk, and occasional glimpses of his face. It seems insignificant, but seeing both parties of the conversation makes so much sense I'm surprised I've not seen more of it. Beyond this, the aesthetic is pretty classic for a VN, as many of them have an anime style. For the visual portion of a VN, I think BS works pretty well.
Sound Design
Matching the somber tone of the plot, many of the songs are fairly dreary and moody, helping to set the right atmosphere. Some of them are even kind of creepy and sinister, as the tension and foreboding increases. There are voice-acted lines in BS, but since they're in two languages I don't know, it's a bit hard to judge their performance. I think they sounded appropriate based on the various issues each character was talking about though. However, quite a few areas don't have voice acting, which is a slight downside. Also, if you advance the text manually, it makes an annoying noise each time, so I reduced the sound effects volume.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2804663203
Pros
???? Between the phone apps, conversations, and character designs, BS has a striking and enjoyable art style. The backgrounds aren't amazing looking, but the font and text is more interesting than what other VN have used.
???? Although some characters are less likable, when you learn more about their history and motivation, they at least can be understood as a person. Even if you still don't like them much.
Cons
❌ No matter what you do, your first playthrough leads to a bad ending, and it's much shorter compared to a normal playthrough. Plus, when playing through the same sections again, you fast forward through the text, which isn't nearly as effective as simply skipping ahead to pertinent choices.
❌ Characters could show more variety in their facial expressions and emotions. Different levels of anger and sadness are reflected in various ways, not just the same facial expression.
Tips
???? The game isn't complicated enough that you would need to take notes, but you'll want to be paying attention to what's presented so obvious matters don't fly over your head. “Wait, I'm a contestant in a reality show?”
???? Multiple save points will come in handy when replaying the game to access all the content.
Final Thoughts
In spite of many novel takes on the genre, one pitfall BS falls into is how players would need to replay the game several times to get all of the content available. It requires either a good amount of trial and error or following a well-written guide. Otherwise though, I enjoyed the way it presents the game's story to the player, finding it more invigorating than what I've dealt with previously. I admit to seeing this quality of writing and tone before, so that won't be as much of a change as one might wish for, but I hope other developers will quietly borrow some of the features this game used. BS slid well under my radar when it released late 2021, but I'm glad I came across this buried gem. You may want to wait for a discount, but I think this game is worth checking out.
Zitat:
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| PC Specs | Performance |
|---|---|
| Ryzen 2700 RTX 2070 16GB RAM ADATA SSD 1920x1080 |
The game ran without incident on default settings. ???? - BS is healthy |
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141 Produkte im Account
12 Reviews
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929 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 24.04.22 18:18
But Steam asks if you 'recommend' this game.
I haven't beaten it. I have gotten a bad ending, and I personally will probably finish it.
But the game doesn't have a 'skip only read text' option and text which you haven't read between stuff you have, depending on previous choices. So on a new playthrough you're rereading stuff 95% of the time for the 5% of things you can only sometimes tell you haven't read.
Which means I can't recommend it. No matter how good it is. You can't recommend a platformer without a jump button, right? Can't recommend an puzzle game without puzzles, right? Can't recommend an underwater basket weaving game without water, right?
Update after beating it;
It's fine. There are multiple paths and endings and because of the aforementioned issues, I just don't want to do them. Start a new game just to go through all that again? God no. It might be better with a walkthrough but that means you're just reading a book and this isn't good enough to carry that. I hold mystery VNs to lower standards for stories because of how fun it is to figure things out for yourself. Now your options are to either void that, or slog through a VN that doesn't function. Thanks for the ride. I'll see myself out after one ending.
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138 Produkte im Account
55 Reviews
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1613 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 10.04.22 08:06
Also, Seo Hyesung best boy!
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1547 Produkte im Account
36 Reviews
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2487 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 06.03.22 23:27
1. The translation is quite poor. Not so poor that you can't tell what's going on in the story, but poor enough that you have almost no ability to discern which conversation option is likely to be well-received by the person you're talking to. Several times the two choices seem exactly the same until you actually pick them and your character says dramatically different things.
2. It's a branching VN which requires replaying a huge amount of content but doesn't have a feature for skipping only text you've seen on previous playthroughs. That's really not an optional feature for a game of this sort.
3. Light spoilers: [spoiler]While the story does throw some interesting and satisfying curveballs, ultimately too many mysterious elements end up being explained away only as wildly improbable coincidences.[/spoiler]
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15237 Produkte im Account
193 Reviews
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2815 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 28.02.22 00:42
The game starts with the five finalists of a fictional audition / talent show named “Buried Stars” being revealed live on TV. Little do they know that seconds later, the building will collapse over them, morphing the name of the show into reality. The five contestants and the floor director thus become trapped under the ruins, with no apparent way out, with reduced means of communication with the outside world and with the dead body of their producer pinned down under the heavy iron bars that supported what once was a shoddy construction. This sets the plot to what ultimately will be a web of thrilling twists and turns, of unexpected events and surprising reveals, topped up with a threat that every hour the contestant ranked last will be killed.
You play as Do-yoon - one of the end contestants, who ranked 4th in the finalists. Together with the others trapped on the somewhat intact stage, you’ll try to find a way to survive until the rescue team arrives and digs up a path through the demolished building, while at the same time attempting to figure out a murder mystery.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2767929186
The gameplay mainly consists in talking with each of the other characters, collecting clues from these dialogues, which will then be used further as conversation topics or key elements for a deduction session. Some of these dialogues are just opinion exchanges, while others have a binary choice: depending on the answer you choose, you can increase the trust level with that specific character, which in turn will trigger a so called “rapport event” at a specific moment in your conversation; these are special scenes in which the characters confide in you and open up to you, sharing a snippet of their background story. While there is no romance at all in the game, these scenes are still emotionally packed and very touching. Aside from a multitude of dialogue (and boy, there’s a huge lot to read) there are some fun detective sequences in which you either need to investigate the scene or select the correct clues.
You’ll have to manage not only the trust level with each of the contestants (these values will play a definitive role in the endings that you can reach), but also Do-yoon’s unique “sanity” stat. The choices you make during Do-yoon’s conversations with the other characters can increase / decrease not only the relationship with them but also have an effect on Do-yoon’s sanity. Selecting the wrong clues during a deduction session will decrease this stat as well, and when when this gets too low, it’s game over.
A core part of the gameplay is using the sponsored smartwatch worn by each of the contestants. This not only acts like a smartwatch (you can set a background, and ringtone which is actually mandatory for story progression early in the game, make calls or receive messages), but also holds information about the other contestants’ profiles and most importantly gives you access to Phater - a social media which behaves awfully a lot like Twitter. Do-yoon will be able to read the multitude of comments posted on Phater and extract clues from them, or reply to some specific messages that are addressed to him. Since the building destruction heavily limits the ability to place calls to the rescue team, the characters will often rely on Phater for news about what’s happening in the outside world or for grasping the general opinion on the ongoing events, but also for disclosing some of the things happening inside the ruins.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2767928406
Each chapter deepens the plot and adds new twists, building the characters one step at a time and peeling the mystery like an onion, layer by layer. The story is thrilling indeed but the character buildup is even more top notch. On the 5th place we have Hyesung - a somewhat arrogant dude with a rumored violent background of bullying his classmates. The outspoken dancer with a veiled past Inha ranks the 3rd, while Juyoung - a rather fragile but ambitious girl struggling with panic attacks - takes the second spot. On the 1st position we have Gyu-Hyuk - the son of a famous artist who enrolled in the talent show to prove his own worth independently of his father’s popularity. Trapped together with the finalist is the floor director Seil - a mouse-y individual who always lived in the late producer’s shadow. Each of them has their own struggles and ultimately the more details are revealed about their personalities, the stronger is the contrast between the images the show has intentionally fabricated about them and their real selves.
Do-yoon is a great character to play especially because he’s an exceptionally competent protagonist. He’s not only polite, considerate and kind to the others, but also protective of them, stepping up as their leader in a very subtle way. He will be the one making the final decisions on behalf of the whole group, and this without exerting any authority. Do-yoon always asks the others about their own opinions and debates the issues at hand with them before reaching a certain judgment. Deemed as the “Betrayer” because he advanced in the show as a solo artist, without his fellow rock band members, he attracts a lot of hate from the Phater users. Despite this, he remains unaffected by the anger thrown at him, being aware that he is not at fault that he was cast in a bad light by the dead producer for publicity purposes. Despite being rather old fashioned and not a tech-y person at all, he’s a very bright individual who picks up modern concepts fairly easily once explained. Overall Do-yoon has a very strong mindset, almost infallible I’d say, but he also shows weakness in front of circumstances that would horrify anyone else in his place and is himself at times momentarily lost and scared. Yet not being a perfect character makes him even more likable in my book, more relatable and ultimately an ideal that one can aspire to.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2767929513
The voice acting was amazing both in Korean and in Japanese and all the bits that happen between the individual communication scenes are fully voiced. The latter rely heavily on stock phrases, with exclamations or representative single-word sentences often replacing a whole dialogue line. It’s a middle ground between having these personal discussions not voiced at all, or investing what probably is a significant budget into voicing every single line in two languages. Nevertheless, the voice actors did a tremendous job at conveying the characters’ feelings. When they speak, you can really feel their excitement, fear, concern, warmth and many other emotions.
In regards to the aesthetics, Buried Stars is also very impressive. The backgrounds are a mix of static images with few animated elements, and the characters are made seem alive by the fact that they blink, breathe or move their mouths while speaking, while also changing their posture rather often. The scenes become dynamic, fluid and more realistic this way.
All-in-all, Buried Stars is a brilliant game, with an in-depth story and catchy characters - not to mention how complex and likable they all are. The presentation is excellent, but partially hindered by the inability to skip only the already seen content. Uncovering the captivating plot will prove to be a true delight for fans of mystery visual novels and the multitude of endings, together with how different they all are will blow you away. I wholeheartedly recommend you to give it a try if you like the genre.
Zitat:
More reviews on the Lilly's Corner Curator page
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10 Produkte im Account
2 Reviews
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2986 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 06.02.22 04:48
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10 Reviews
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2353 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 05.02.22 14:36
The game has a unique take on visual novels by introducing a [spoiler] Rapport system for characters to reveal their backstories and secrets if certain conditions are met [/spoiler] and the characters didn't feel like a burden to the story because each of them felt really human with their own stories to tell and different opinions on the same matter. The [spoiler] Rapport system could have been utilized more if characters with low or high levels of rapport could back the player up in certain situations or influence the decisions based on how much they trust the player [/spoiler] Overall, they were pretty much enjoyable.
The art style, 3D backgrounds, the lighting and shadows reflected and cast onto the 2D sprites of the characters bring immersion to the game, makes everything seems more real. Also the gameplay mechanics such as [spoiler] Phater, keywords, investigation phase and the revelations using keywords [/spoiler] were all nice parts to the game as well. The voice acting was also done nicely, it helps portray the characters personalities, such as when they are happy or downright upset. The only complain I have is translation errors. The meaning of some sentences have been lost in translation, it causes you to sometimes detach from the game and it makes you kinda confused about what is going on. Errors such as using the wrong names and pronouns can cause some troubles in understanding certain situations. Otherwise, this game is worth playing!
The first run of the game will always result in the[spoiler]Bad Ending so don't feel discouraged if you get it.[/spoiler]
You will get most of the[spoiler]endings and new dialogues choices[/spoiler] after the first run of the game.
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98 Produkte im Account
3 Reviews
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1618 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 03.02.22 22:39
The good
-Characters: The way I see it this is by far the best aspect of the game. Characters feel multi-dimensional and human rather than caricatures, unlike that-other-gameTM.
-Plot and direction: Compelling, emotional and fun. Lots of moments kept me on the edge of my seat.
-Aesthetic: Beautiful art. great and fitting soundtrack. No complaints here.
The bad
-Communication sections execution: In these segments you communicate with the cast in order to move the story forward. Its the main driving force of the game so it's a shame that it's such a chore to go through. Although it's fun to see each character's perspective on certain topics, it's so long and feels like an endless barrage of info. Could be trimmed down. Maybe introduce another mechanic alongside it to drive the story forward without feeling exhausting.
-New game+ isn't that helpful: Once you finish a run you can play again with some tips from previous decisions. Though this isn't as helpful as it sounds since the tips aren't for the most vital choices. You might end up using a guide for this one.
-Replaying could be more streamlined: When replaying you have to go through the whole thing again and your only tool to reduce wasted time is the fast forward button. An option like skipping straight to decision making would have massively increased my enjoyment of the game.
-English Translation (small complaint): And i'm not talking about minor grammar issues. I have no problem with those as long as I understand the message. Here though, it seems like some things got lost in translation. I often had to re-read sentences several times to understand. But also maybe am idiot so this one is not that big of a deal.
Overall, it was a fun experience despite my personal gripes with the mechanics. Recommended if you are fine with the bad listed above.
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560 Produkte im Account
62 Reviews
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2192 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 27.01.22 04:46
7.5/10
Buried Star is a pretty good game. But unfortunately, the advantages and disadvantages of this game are very obvious, and the weight of the disadvantages is too large.
The theme of the game is very interesting. As a social reasoning visual novel game based on the entertainment industry, this game is unique among similar games. The theme and content of the game are not particularly superficial. The unique keyword dialogue system is very novel, and I have only seen it in a game called The Next Giseisha is Oshira Seshimasu released on the PSP platform. The disadvantage of this system is also obvious, which makes the amount of text in the game huge. To be honest, the whole process of this game is not particularly exciting, so in terms of time cost alone, it might be not worthwhile for you to play this game. The biggest advantage of the keyword system in this game is that the image and character of the characters are better shaped. After all, it is based on a large number of text dialogues, although this can easily make players tired.
Apart from the plot and time issues, the other most annoying thing about this game is the game system. The save of the game can only start from the dialogue when loading, and the most terrible thing is that the game does not skip the function of reading, and it is very likely to miss some unread text when fast-forwarding. The music in the game is very good, the atmosphere is also great, and the Korean voice actors are my most recommended in-game voices to use when playing games.
Overall, this game is rather confusing. It is recommended for players who are very patient and are more interested in the entertainment industry theme. At the same time, those players who are interested in the theme of survival and reasoning may have to consider carefully. This game does not have a lot of content in these aspects, and the reasoning is not particularly hardcore.
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47 Produkte im Account
5 Reviews
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887 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 25.01.22 23:24
I tried, I tried really hard to like it (the visuals are great, I give it that) but I just can't. For 10 hours I had been reading twitter feeds and conversations about issues of no importance. All the backstories are spoonfed to the reader, popping out on social media out of nowhere and hey, I guess it's time to have the characters talk about them and bite their lips while their great secrets are revealed.
So yeah, I've read fanfics with better characterizations.
Oh, and there is the mystery aspect of the game, of course. Who is doing all the atrocities? Who is helping the main character? Why are they browsing their social media instead of sitting on their asses together and waiting for the rescue?
Sadly, only the first two have a resolution. Meanwhile the third one, the answer of which I craved the most, is cast into the oblivion and we can only try to guess it.
10 hours of passion while reading every word, 3 hours of idling, 1 hour of skipping half of it to an unsatisfactory ending just to find out that this game has the audacity to ask me to play it again but this time better to find the answers to all the questions.
I bite my lips with sadness as I don't give a shit about the questions.
Keyword acquired! 1/10
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484 Produkte im Account
29 Reviews
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2237 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 04.01.22 16:28
Buried Stars is a long-ass game. The central points of the game are: The people who run the survival show are [not very nice]; the people following the show on faux-Twitter are toxic; all the contestants have a secret past; there is a murderer among you. And you will discuss all of these things endlessly with the other five people. Something will happen, everyone will freak out, you will talk talk talk about it, reams and reams of exposition. You have to be choosy about what you decide to talk about, because everyone is a sensitive flower and if you keep bringing up the wrong thing, either you or someone else's bar will get too low and that means you'll get a Bad Ending.
You're going to get a Bad Ending anyway the first time out. I'm not talking about the inevitability of failure, I'm saying it's literally baked into the game. Even if you make all the correct choices, you're going to fail about a quarter of the way through and have to play it all over again. This is not a bug, it's a feature. The game wants you to play it twice to get a real ending, padding out an already exorbitant running time for a Conversation Simulator. There's a Fast Forward feature to allow you to run through portions of conversation you already experienced, except the second time around the characters will start to reminisce and have flashbacks that didn't appear the first time around and than you will frantically try to stop the fast forward to figure out what they're talking about.
The best way I can sum this game up is the whole time I kept wondering why these characters couldn't sit in one place, keep quiet, and wait six hours to be rescued. That would be a pretty boring game, but somehow less tedious than this one. At least it would have been over in six hours.
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30 Produkte im Account
4 Reviews
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265 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 30.12.21 10:19
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2698 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 09.12.21 03:27
The premise is a good one, the 5 contestants of an American Idol style singing competition (plus a stage manager) are trapped inside a performance venue when it collapses due to rushed, shoddy construction. When the body of head producer is found, her death is deemed an accident due to the collapse, but our protagonist, Do-Yoon, feels a flicker of doubt. From there, the group battles paranoia and growing unease as the competition vote continues, the building creaks and groans, and online trolls torment the survivors, including one masquerading as the dead producer. Do-Yoon has to keep tensions from boiling over and discover the truth by talking to everyone and presenting keywords discovered through conversations, while managing his own fragile sanity.
It's great set-up, with immediate tension and stakes. The characters are lively and interesting, but suitably stressed. No one's chipper, and there are few moments of comic relief. The setting is stroke of genius- any time we're between mysteries and things slow down the game just throws in a bunch of ominous creaking and tremors, reminding us we're in a collapsed building that could come down at any time, which means the game has very tight control over the tension- fantastic in a narrative game. I also really like the way the characters balance 'figuring out this mystery' and 'surviving this moment'. The characters just want to survive the six hours it'll take to be rescued, and are mostly interested in solving mysteries as a way to relieve tension so people don't panic or become violent. Do-Yoon is several times told to stop playing detective and leave it to police. Really unique take, which felt very 'real' to me.
Unfortunately, it's all marred by the awful English translation. I don't have a ton of experience with visual novels, but I'm surprised someone okayed a translation of this quality. I consistently made incorrect deductions or dialogue choices due to confusion over what the options actually said, not bad logic on my part (though I made my share of those mistakes too). This was made worse by occasional 10-second timed choices, where you have to make a pivotal decision in a short time frame. Frankly, it's hard to read. Like a book where characters speak in a dialect, it does click better as you read, but... it's a visual novel. That's hard to read.
I slammed my head through the brick wall that was the awful translation and found a game that was worth the pain, but you'd be well within your rights not to bother.
Another pain point is that while there is a button to fast forward through text (fast forward, NOT skip, big difference, skipping through extended dialogue sections you've already scene still drags), it makes no distinction between text you've seen and text you haven't. As this game is meant to be played at least 4 times (bad end which you're forced into for playthrough 1, Route A aka true ending, Route B, and Route C) and more to find all the ending variants it would've been helpful (and I think obvious?) to include a feature that stops fast forward when you hit dialogue you haven't seen yet. Or at least a nudge to save before branch splits or something.
Also, for what it's worth, I figured out the truth (meaning if there was a killer, then who it was, and if there wasn't, then what was really going on- trying very hard to avoid spoilers) towards the end of the forced 1st playthrough bad ending. If being totally shocked at the end of a mystery if important to you, that's something to keep in mind.
How highly can you rate a visual novel that's hard to read when it hits the mark in most other areas? I'm still struggling to answer that, but this game has my tentative thumbs up.
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329 Produkte im Account
1 Reviews
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1476 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 08.12.21 11:18
Buried Stars, a game that apparently came out in 2020 for Switch and PS4 but went over my radar and is a real shame, I think if it was released on PC at that time it would have gotten alot more attention.
But, now at the end of 2021 we finally got a Steam release and its the first time I got to experience it and when I first saw it it got my interest.
Story
The game begins at the end of a audition contest called Buried Stars, the five highest ranked singers and musicians are announced and just as the final contestant is announced the entire building starts to collapse.
When the game returns you are awoken by being rescued by Lee Gyu-hyuk, the contestant who was ranked #1 in Buried Stars. You play as Han Do-yoon, the contestant with the ranking of #4.
Han is the quiet and logical thinking main character of this game and you will play from his perspective the entire game. Looking around, Han sees the entire building has collapsed and soon enough Han and Lee will find the other top 5 ranked contestants; Seo Hyesung #5, Min Juyoung #2, Oh Inha #3 and a staff member Chang Seil.
They quickly figure out that they are the only ones left inside the building and the audiance, staff and judges from the contest have managed to escape from the building.
Seo being the youngest of the contestants is very interested in social media, quickly notifies the people outside that he has survived the collapse and this is where the story starts.
As a massive fan of Zero Escape and Danganronpa series I was expecting a similar story of doubting and conspiracies, but I was very astonished how refreshing the story and characters were.
With a cast of only 6 people and 5 areas to visit, you would imagine this would be a short story which would last about 2-4 hours. But the story is actually rather complex and focuses on the interactions you have with both the other contestants but also the people on social media to make sure you are OK and keeping them calm even in a chaotic envirement.
Audio and visuals
The games 2D artstyle is very well done. For example when confronting other contestants, Han will have his back against you. But he will have a cut-in showing his expression to the current discussion. The other contestants also look great with appropriate amount of expressions and movement to make them believable.
As for audio, the songs used is great for the story and makes you get into that detective mode to piece together the games story bit by bit.
The voice active for this game is only in Korean and Japanese. I played through the game in Japanese audio and English text which I felt were really well done and the Korean VO seemed very high quality aswell.
Conclusion
The games story and characters really surprised me and felt very satisfied with the true ending, making this one of my favorite games of the year and would recommend it to anyone who wanna try a visual novel that isn't as simple as it would seem.
I would probably give this game a 8.5/10 or even a 9/10, it's that good.
Spoiler
I do have some minor issues with this game though, but I will keep them in spoilers since its mostly story related.
[spoiler] 1. Your first playthrough will always result in the worst ending you could get and you probably played the game for 3 hours at that time and having to restart from the beginning was not a fun experience and really put this game off for me for a while. I still managed to get back to the point of being back on route of the true ending and afterwards the game got better again.
2. The Japanese audio actually calls the main cast different names from their Korean names. Han becoming Ryou, Lee becoming Keisuke, Min becoming Reina. And I know this VO was specifically made for the Japanese translation. But I would have enjoyed this feature alot more if you could also change the English translation, thich is based of the Korean names, could also have the Japanese names when using Japanese VO. [/spoiler]
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108 Produkte im Account
1 Reviews
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1394 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 04.12.21 02:20
The bad stuff, that being the off translation or two, obvious audio looping and the inability to save/reload during long sections, wasn't enough to ruin the experience for me, even if I needed to reload a few times during the unforgiving final recap/thinking sections. Trust me, that sounds bad, but if you can put up with it, you're in for a good time.
The cast is extremely fleshed out and their dynamics help build up the tension nicely. The story constantly changes your perspective on things by revealing small truths here and there. This creates moments where you go from being absolutely certain of the truth, to suddenly needing to rethink everything because a new detail doesn't mesh with your original conclusion. This could have easily been too much if they dropped massive, ground breaking twists for the sake of surprise, but it's often small, plausible pieces of info that gets fed to the player over the course of the game.
But there is one time when a huge reveal takes place... and that's when you reveal the entire truth. The game doesn't reveal it for you, you have to reveal it yourself using all of the information you gathered, and it is by far the most satisfying moment in any mystery game I've ever experienced.
Just trust me on this, play the game. Good characters, great atmosphere and tension, and a fantastic, well crafted mystery.
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2038 Produkte im Account
45 Reviews
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127 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 02.12.21 07:47
Unfortunately the english translation results in pretty stitlted dialogue, but otherwise its a well written adventure visual novel (It's part of the trend of VNs moving towards more interactivity and adventure gameplay, like AI The Somnium Files, Raging Loop, Root Film or Gnosia)
The chracters are good, the game may start slow but it will add more significant mechanics later, and the drama stays realistic. Heck, it even takes the time to parody the absurdity of the convoluted plots these types of games have in a joke alternative route. Give it a shot, forgive the english translation
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177 Produkte im Account
6 Reviews
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1325 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 30.11.21 20:03
TW: suicide, stalking, mention of bullying. Cyberbullying
Pros
- Interesting plot, especially if you are into this type of settings
- Great characters
- Amazing illustrations and music
- Realistic portrayal of SNS culture
Cons
- Communication part can be boring.
- NO FLOWCHART and power to go back to make important decisions
: Replaying can be needlessly boring and long. You have to remember what you did to get the route you want (if you are not playing with the guide). Honestly it's not that bad without it but having one would boost quality of the game tremendously.
Recommended to
- Folks who are used to reading lots of texts and played other visual novels
- Likes thriller and mystery
- Likes great storytelling
- Wants to have second-hand experience of cyber bullying
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504 Produkte im Account
37 Reviews
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875 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 30.11.21 15:10
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225 Produkte im Account
5 Reviews
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765 Std. insgesamt
Verfasst: 29.11.21 22:02
- Fun Cast
- Interesting Story
- Chilly Atmosphere
- remindes me a little of Danganronpa (which is great)
- even after 4 Hours I feel like I just scratched the tip of the Iceberg
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Release:29.11.2021
Genre:
Gelegenheits-Spiel
Entwickler:
LINE Games Corporation
Vertrieb:keine Infos
Engine:keine Infos
Kopierschutz:keine Infos
Franchise:keine Infos
Einzelspieler
Mehrspieler
Koop
Kein Prisoner hat oder wartet auf das Spiel
