Oct 162023
Today’s spooky game to discuss is a short visual novel called Amelie.
A young woman named Amelie lives alone with her friend Lilika in an isolated manor. Now her pen pal, Sofia, is coming for a visit, but things in the manor are not what they seem.
Amelie is a psychological horror yuri visual novel, with more emphasis on the psychological horror than on the yuri. There is some romance between Amelie and Sofia, but it’s secondary compared to the creepy atmosphere and unsettling events that occur.
You play through the story from the perspective of each of the characters in a set order, and each adds a new piece to the puzzle. It’s written in a clever way to ensure that the first route only provides hints that something is wrong, so the second route has some significant (and creepy) reveals just by providing a different perspective.
The downside is that since the story covers the same events each time, there is a fair amount of shared dialogue between the three routes that can’t be skipped. I found myself mashing through those parts to reach the new scenes.
The entire experience is pretty short, only taking me about an hour and a half to complete. This is the sort of story I think could benefit from being longer, with more time spent building up the atmosphere and showing the characters’ lives. As it is, it still does a great job with its atmosphere in what time it has.
Amelie is a nice little slice of spookiness worth checking out if you’re looking for a short, creepy visual novel.
Oh wow, it’s that short but still falls pray to repeated dialog for each route with no obvious changes? Still sounds like a decent premise and it’s nice to see it lean more on the horror side!
Right, since it’s covering the same events from different perspectives, some parts have the same dialogue just because of that.
Fate/Stay Night also has you go through the same timeline three times in a set way, but it has the decency to tell you when you’ve already read a scene or not!
Which is good because that VN has taken over 90 hours of my life to read through………
Meanwhile, I remember watching LPers skip through dialogue they’d already read in the second route of DDLC and getting frustrated 1) at the player for not wondering if something might have changed and 2) at the game for not having enough changed early on!
Wait, DDLC didn’t have a “skip read dialogue” option?? I could have sworn it did.
I do like games where different perspectives piece more of the puzzle into the story, might have this on my radar!
It was definitely fun to start the second route and slowly realize something that hadn’t been apparent on the first.