A well-written story-driven Otome that puts a new twist on classic fairy tales with 5 love interests. Be prepared for a feels trip!

If you are a male button-mashing adrenaline junkie, have no patience, or simply no time nor understanding for romantic sentimentality, please leave this page. Now. This offering is not for you. For everybody else, I cannot recommend this highly enough, and that opinion would not alter even if it was for sale at £20. What you get for downloading this game is 5 unique, engaging stories for the price of none.

After completing my first route and perhaps inevitably getting a bad ending, I decided to have a read through the negative reviews and see what it is that people were finding to dislike about it.
I’d like to offer responses to some of the points I found:

• “The game hates you.” If you give up before you’re much beyond the prologue, yes it will seem that way. But the initial negativity around the MC is essential foundation-building for the wonderful stories that follow. If she doesn’t start as an emotionally repressed, dislikeable individual, there would be far less room for her to grow. And grow, she does.
  
• “The game leads the player, not the other way around.” Also true. This, after all, is a visual novel. If you treat it as what it is, then you will be able to enjoy it for the sheer high quality that is on offer. If you are expecting a game where you dictate everything that happens, then you are looking at the wrong genre.
  
• “It’s linear.” Each of the stories is almost 100% linear from chapters 2 through 9. I was initially slightly disappointed to discover that whatever choice I made, the next option, when it came was still the same as it would have been had I chosen differently. What you don’t see until chapter 10 is that everything you have chosen previously has contributed to the final chapter that you get. It seems to be based on some kind of points-for-”right answers” system, rather than branching arcs depending on what you do.
  
• “The right choices seem completely arbitrary.” I thought this too initially, and my first route run-through appeared to back it up, as I chose incorrectly all over the place, resulting in some frustration when I thought I had done OK but still got a bad ending. However, by my third route, I had figured out that it is NOT random nor arbitrary at all, and I shall explain that conclusion shortly.
  
• “It’s cliched, bland and boring” The concept is based around Grimm’s Fairytales, so you can expect the general nature of the stories to not be too dissimilar. However, the writing is excellent. I was almost brought to tears twice during Waltz’s route, and had tears of laughter early during Rumpel’s. Poor writing could not elicit these emotions from the reader, and even less so from one who is twice the age of the most likely target audience.

With some experience of the gameplay, I realised why I was regularly making the “wrong” decisions. If you want to get the good ends in your playthroughs without having to resort to the right choice indicator or a guide, try this:

Do not impose your personality on to the protagonist. Going with what you think she should do is likely to lead you to the bad ending. Put yourself in her shoes, and think about her reaction before you choose. Remember that she has been separated from society for her entire life to this point, she has zero knowledge of normal social protocol, zero experience of love and believes that nobody is to be trusted. Her first signs of growth/warming to those around her will come some time in chapter 5. This is when you should begin to adjust your choices slightly. By chapter 7, you should be choosing in full support of your partner.

Following the above method through my third route, I got all but two of the correct choices without using any assistance, and made no mistakes at all in my final one. Admittedly, I found Fritz’s route more challenging than the others.

Each story is well written: both relationships and character growth develop at a believable pace, and you’d have to be either totally disinterested else pretty cold-hearted yourself not to be moved at least a little by some of the scenes.

So many of the things in this novel ooze attention to detail. Backgrounds are plentiful and beautiful, such things as the marble effect on the pillars and wood grain on the furniture are above and beyond what it is reasonable to expect for free. Smooth animations on character expressions are pleasing to watch, the music is appropriate and does not become off-putting; although I found the sound effects better still and turned the music down a little so they were more apparent. You can save on a decision screen so that you can always load in to an important moment without having to forward through loads of screens. There is a log option so you can review the last few entries if you forget what had been going on, this is quicker than going back several times.

The one and only thing I did not like in the game, is the decision to display incidental characters without any eyes. This just looks so wrong and did detract from my suspension of disbelief which the writing had allowed me to enjoy. I hope the developer realises this was a bad decision and does not repeat it in any future release.

At time of writing, this is my favourite game experience on Steam of any genre that I have tried so far. If it was the developers’ intention to release this as free-to-play in order to attract a wider audience for a future chargeable offering, they thoroughly deserve to have acquired a huge, willing customer base just waiting to throw money at them. I will certainly be a part of it.

Review also posted on Steam ➞