Feb 182022
It’s been a while since we’ve had a crowd-funding campaign to discuss, and during the Valentine Video Games Festival no less!
Love Cypher, currently seeking funding through Kickstarter, is a near-future romance visual novel set in the 2040s. You play a new student at a university studying artificial intelligence advancements.
It is a galge with four romance routes (and the possibility for more if Love Cypher should meet both its goal and subsequent stretch goals).
A demo is also available, and I played it after seeing the Kickstarter campaign. The demo is fairly short and follows the protagonist as he arrives at the university and meets the heroines.
From the demo, Love Cypher comes across as a lighthearted romantic comedy, with some silly situations and classic misunderstandings.
However, the description mentions that the advanced AI technology in this world “re-sculpts one’s identity, while keeping the individual unaware of their transformation,” which suggests there’s more to the story than meets the eye. Alongside the rom-com antics, it looks like it will deal with themes of identity and humanity.
(Nowadays I’m suspicious of anything that looks fun and lighthearted with hints of something else, but the developer has said online that the story will be philosophical, but still fun, so I don’t think we have to worry about this one being secretly depressing.)
Love Cypher will be an 18+ visual novel once it’s complete, although the demo has no 18+ content since it’s the beginning of the story.
The art looks very nice, and all around it looks like it will be a high-quality production. Although it has stock backgrounds for now, the Kickstarter page says they will be replaced in the final version. It’s tough to judge the story from the demo this early on, but the premise sounds intriguing.
So if you’re looking for an upcoming romance visual novel, you might want to check out Love Cypher’s Kickstarter page to learn more about it.
Haha, everyone needs to be clear whether or not they’re going full Doki Doki or not these days.
Haha, yes. You see something cute and lighthearted and immediately say, “…I don’t trust it.”