PLOT (spoiler free)
In Notch, you play a normal student living with his family in an isolated village near the woods. The main character (you choose his name) spends his daily life peacefully with his childhood friend Nanami, whom he - not so secretly - is in love with until the day he starts to have weird nightmares: in these dreams, he finds himself in a strange villa, where appaerently girls are being killed.
He don't know that yet, but his peaceful life is about to end...
NOTCH IN A NUTSHELL
An old style horror VN. Not dubbed.
WHAT AKIYAMI CHAN THINKS
Notch has a lot of good ideas, but very few of them are actually well developed. The classical horror plot could have been entertaining enough to play, but the poor characters' development and the almost nonexistent setting don't exactly help players to get hooked on the story.
Maybe the wost part of all this is realizing that much of the mistery sorrounding the main characters is not mistery at all - it's simply bad writing and lack of any logic explanation for things happening in the game's world.
There's no form of law or police - not even a doctor! - in the whole town because - or so it seems - the authors think that if your town is small enough it doesn't really need any of these things................. And this is only one example of the rather absurd things you're going to find in Notch!
I can't say too much in case you wanted to try it, but characters aren't any better than the setting. They lack personality and background. Nanami - our love interest - is as interesting as a stone: we know nothing about her or her family - she just seems some sort of stalker of our protagonist XD Seriously, we learn only that she enjoys wandering the woods and watching flowers. Period. End of her characterization.
Playing the game, I felt like they wanted to create something similar to Umineko, but lacking the courage to REALLY delve into the abyss of human evil like Umineko's author tends to do. It's horror but not so horror. The villains are evil but not so evil.
A story with good potential that maybe deserved a better writing.
It's not terribile, mind you, but I can't really recommend it with so many Visual Novels available on steam.
WHERE YOU CAN FIND IT:
steam link
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