Kodansha Creators’ Lab has announced that it will publish the Bon-developed visual novel Buzz or Die. In it, you compete in a new gruesome game show for viewer votes to avoid being sent to death row. Buzz or Die is in development for PC and is expected to launch this year.…
There was a time when visual novels were a rare thing in the West, particularly on consoles. Steins;Gate, from 2009, was one of the pioneers in changing that. Brought to the West on PS3 and Vita, it turned heads by proving to a wide and mainstream audience that it was…
Six years after its original Japanese launch, Cupid Parasite is now coming…
Idea Factory and its otome factory, Otomate, is at its best when…
Mere days ago, I was whining about how a new trailer for Cupid Parasite: Sweet and Spicy Darling didn’t quite make up for the lack of a known release date. Someone somewhere must have heard my cries, because today Idea Factory International announced the game’s release date. It also dropped…
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I absolutely love detective games featuring strong, smart women. I think there aren’t enough of them… but that could just be me. Hauma – A Detective Noir Story fits in this category. It launched for PC last September but I was never sure it would come to consoles, until today…
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Japanese romance visual novel Memories Off launched for PlayStation in 1999, spawning an entire series that goes by the same name. The mainline series currently includes eight games (I’m not even going to get into the extended world of direct prequels, sequels, and spin-offs). Seven of those are available in…
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Idea Factory and Otomate have brought us some incredible flights of fantasy over the years. There are the historical dramas, allowing us to hang out with and romance the Shinsengumi or Beinke. Then there’s the bright and bubbly Cupid Parasite, where you play as Cupid herself, or the almost brutally…
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Death Mark deserves better recognition than it gets. The first two games in the series (Death Mark itself, and then Spirit Hunter: Ng) are both incredible horror visual novels, through which Experience Inc. has given us some of the finest art and suspense narratives that we’ve seen. And yet to…
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Well, Konosuba: Love for These Clothes of Desire certainly has its eye-opening moments. This is a game that likes to get downright dirty in places, and embraces (with gusto) every possible sexualisation trope you can imagine in anime. It has a ball doing so, and as long as isekai-style narratives…
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It is finally happening! For years and years now, Fate/Stay Night has been perhaps the most important visual novel to never be released (officially) in English. Despite launching a massive media property, including untold numbers of games that have been localised, the original visual novel has languished, only available to…
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What do tornadoes, a cult, and a man in a trunk have in common? You’ll be surprised. Bahnsen Knights is the third in LCB Game Studio’s Pixel Pulp series. The series takes pulp fiction, gives it a paranormal twist, and turns it into a video game. To date, it has…
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The next Steam Next Fest is next month (that’s a lot of nexts), which means developers and getting demos ready now. At full launch, visual novel The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty will be available in English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese – but the demo…
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Some licensed games aim to introduce people to the property, and in doing so help to expand the overall number of fans the thing has. Koei Tecmo has been particularly successful at that over the years, applying the Warriors (Musou) formula to several emerging IP. Arslan: The Warriors of Legend,…
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