Exogenesis ~Perils of Rebirth~ Reviews

Really enjoyed it, challenging puzzles.

Bought the game back during the Steam Summer Sale. Instantly fell in love and spent the better part of my July 4th weekend playing through it. I recommend it for all Zero Escape, Danganronpa, or Professor Layton fans to check it out. The demo serves as a good introduction to the game with its 3-5 hours of gameplay. It's got a compelling story and has challenging & rewarding puzzles. Looking forward to the final chapter & ending and thanks for making a great game! Do yourself a favor and give this game a look!

Loving this game so far. The production is wonderful, beautiful art, nice little animations and the inclusion of puzzles is something I wish more visual novels would do. I've read my fair share of VN's and I may be a bit premature in saying this as I only have about 4 hours so far, but it may be up there with my favorites. Clearly wearing it's inspirations on it's sleeve, it is not ashamed to be similar to the Zero Escape series and nor should it be. This game so far melds all those ideas seamlessly and holds up in comparison to those games as well. Not to say it doesn't have it's issues but it is also still in early access and has been for quite some time. I actually mean that in a good way cause it is quite clear how much passion and love has been poured into this game. The only issue I've encountered so far is the small issue of autoplay sometimes cutting off the voices. Being still early access I imagine this will get sorted by release. According to the developer earlier this year they stated the game is about 90% done so full release should (hopefully) be coming soon. However, if you do enjoy games like this I recommend purchasing right away as it is relatively unknown on Steam and could use the support and promotion.

I was really enjoying this game until I came into a bug that prevents me from progressing further. I tried multiple things, posted on the discussion board with people that had the same issue but I haven`t found a fix. Very frustrating.

Exogenesis is an adventure game and a visual novel. The basic premise of the story revolves around the quest of Yudai Sayashi (the main character) to bring his deceased sister Miho Sayashi back to life. Yu embarks on this mission after intercepting, with the help of his friend Toshio, some information about a fabled technology allegedly capable of reviving the dead. Yu is determined to bring back Miho at almost any cost. He begins by trying to enlist the aid of his former comrades who were part of the Durchhalten treasure-hunting group. In addition to the sizeable cast, the game’s post-apocalyptic Earth has various factions such as the Sanctus, the GPA, Nomad groups, and other entities. Exogenesis handles all these factors well, weaving together intriguing story and dialogue. Many sections of the game are humorous while others are very gritty and dark. There are puzzles in every chapter, usually toward the chapter’s later end. If you need help with the puzzles, the best place to look is the Steam message board. Graphics and Art Direction: Very good. The characters and environments are well done. Audio: The OST is top-notch and perhaps the single area where this game excels the most. In its present early access form, Exogenesis is lengthier than most adventure and visual novel games. Chapters 1-5 are implemented and playable. However, the concluding segment, Chapter 6, is not yet in the game. There are also some scenes expanding upon certain characters’ plots which will be introduced later. Should you get this game? If you like the Zero Escape series, Exit/Corners, Steins; Gate, or other visual novels with interesting, complex stories, the real question is not really whether you should buy it. It is more of a question of when. In other words, now vs waiting for the full release. At present, there are two main issues the game exhibits. One is the existence of various glitches and bugs (some of which have been fixed through patches since early access started). There is the fact that the final portion of the game is incomplete. The voice acting is also currently confined to the prologue and much of Chapter 1, although the development team intends to expand the range of voice acting. Despite these early access limitations, Exogenesis is a high-quality and worthy addition to the roster of adventure games and visual novels. It is a good option for those looking for such a kind of game.

I'm loving this game so much, the plot is really interesting, visuals/art is beautiful, also the OSTs are amazing, and the voice acting is top notch. Has nonary vibe to it since clearly they're inspired by it. I really wish we could purchase OSTs of this game, I would gladly buy it. This game needs more love.

So I want to start out by saying that I don't think this is a bad game by any means. I'm simply posting this because the most recent review was back in like May of this year, 2020, and I thought it was important that any browsing people have a more up to date idea of where the game was at after more than a year of early access. I'm not a professional by any means, so I apologize for anything that's not clear. I have played a lot of visual novels though, so I have some good standards to compare to. However, I was aware that this game wasn't a fully polished one when I bought it, so I went into it not expecting perfection-I was prepared for a few glitches to pop up. I think there were definitely some great aspects to it that I saw. The visuals seemed pretty neat, the character models had a charm to them. I liked most of the voice acting, and it matched up with the speed of the actual scrawling lines consistently. These might seem small and obvious things, but again since this is isn't really a complete game I entered really wary. I enjoyed the Prologue a lot. For me the idea of a room to solve with the mini puzzles inside of them was a big reason I did buy this since I really miss Zero Escape, and in that section the puzzles seemed fun. However, Chapter 1 is where the cracks started to show. The voice actor overlays started to disappear, first the side characters and then the main ones, until the only sounds were the background music and the environment-interaction responses. This made me a bit sad, but I kept playing on anyway because I liked the game's potential. The solvable room in Chapter 1 was also fun. However, the one in chapter 2 was truly an awful experience. I'm keeping this an overview to avoid spoilers of course. In any sort of solvable room like these things are, there are puzzles and clues to how to approach them. However, almost of all the puzzles in the room had almost no clues on how to approach them. A broad example-there are a lot of jumbled up letters, and you need to write out the correct words from them. However, there were absolutely no clues in the room that could have led me to the solution. Things like that-most of the puzzles were like similar. One of them had a clue associated with it but it was such an obscure hint that I still couldn't make heads or tails of it. One of the puzzles gave you a clue but the clue didn't directly match up correctly with the solution so you still had to work on it confusedly afterwards. I only solved the room by looking up a guide, which I despise doing, and even the person that I watched explained how it was all not clear, and that he only solved it by trial and error. These are of course my personal opinions, entirely possible there was something that I missed or that it would make more sense to you. Anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying that I didn't feel like that puzzle room was fair, which is a big necessity for me with these types of games. Aside from that and the voice line disappearing issue, there was one other big frustration for me. Close to the end of chapter 2 it felt like-how do I put it. Like I'd hit a checkpoint and the game assumed that because I'd hit that checkpoint that I'd acquired all the information before it when I actually hadn't. Characters started to talk about topics that I hadn't ever discussed with them, and they did it in such a way that it was clear they were revisiting a previous conversation we supposedly had had. I was left scratching my head trying to figure out what I was supposed to know. And to be clear, it wasn't one of those moments where a game intentionally makes things confusing for the sake of the plot or mystery, it didn't feel like that at all. It genuinely felt as if the plot was moving forward assuming that I knew something that I didn't. And not a small detail or anything, but a very big plot point. This happened more than once, so not an isolated event. I couldn't really continue at that point. Again, I don't think this is a bad game, and it's entirely possible that the dev's will reach out and fix the things I've brought up here. Since I did stop at Chapter 2, it's also possible that the rest of the game is bug free and wonderful, and that by stopping at 6 hours I'm missing a lot. I can't really comment on the plot for similar reasons, just didn't experience enough. I just wanted to share that as of this review, the game doesn't feel like a complete enough one for me to recommend it to anyone or say they should buy it for full price. Hope my experience helps any prospective people out there. Make sure to decide for yourself whether you'll take a chance or not. EDIT: It has been brought to my attention that the voices disappearing might not have been a bug, but merely a result of extremely limited current voiced lines in the game. Whether or not that changes your perspective is up to you. Also, I'm an extremely fast reader so even though it took me 6 hours to get through a large chunk of Chapter 2, it'll likely take most people a few extra hours FYI.

I finished the prologue and I enjoyed the game so far, it's a Visual Novel with point & click elements as well as puzzles, The audio is English only. The game is mostly Visual Novel but there are places were we can interact with environment, try to solve puzzles to move forward etc. Puzzles in prologue was not very hard or challenging but still it's not very easy either. I liked how we can talk to other characters and get info from them and later use it when we need them like in Ace attorney etc. There was a conversation with soldiers in prologue, I got some basic info from it, but later in game a situation arose were I had to use the info from that conversation plus some thinking from my own part. This is an Interesting VN & will update as I play further. Hope this helps those interested to try this game.

I tend to dislike writing reviews, but I feel it's warranted here because I was really looking forward to this VN ever since it was announced a few years ago and I think the game really needs the feedback. This game SERIOUSLY needs more playtesting. A lot more. Not because of bugs; I ran into a few interface bugs here and there, but nothing that was crippling. What really cripples this game is that this game's expectation of the player's logic is nonsense. Puzzles are often without hints and, if they do have hints, they're extremely vague or confusing. The incinerator section in Chapter 2 is a great example; out of the 6-7 puzzles in that section, only ONE of them has anywhere close to a reasonable hint (the Hit-Miss number section). Out of the remaining puzzles, 2 of them have no hints whatsoever, 1 of them is semi-random whether the hint you got will work or not, 1 of them requires knowledge of Hebrew (?!), and some of them are just plain incorrect (like 666 and 616 being numbers of significance or the word alignment puzzle). And this goes for the user interface too. There's a reason why most adventure games nowadays have the ability to highlight objects of note or choose where to move out of a list and not just click on the background randomly. Where you choose to go when changing locations is extremely unclear and often very finicky; the incinerator section is again, a great choice because at the hallway, you have to move your mouse left to go right to the bust room, or else you go forward into the incinerator room itself. Let alone non-puzzle sections where it's totally unclear where you are and aren't allowed to go to move the story forward. And sections where you have to find objects to add to your inventory? It's so easy to click things in a random order and not know what to do. It's a shame because the story is interesting and there's a lot more work into the animation and voice delivery than you see a lot of other VNs do, but this game really needs a lot more work before you can do a blind playthrough of it whatsoever. I'll still complete it, but it'll be with the help of a video guide, which kind of defeats the point of adding puzzles to a VN.