The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass Reviews

Holy shit. This is better than crack.

The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass is a hard VN to recommend: the prose is clunky and frequently very dense in a bad way; the story doesn’t pick up steam until a few hours in (6-8 in my estimate); characters, more frequently than not, act like mystery-delivering devices disguised as cardboard cutouts of people. If anything, this is more of a logic puzzle book in a visual novel wrapper. But despite all that, you can tell that this is a passion project and people spent hours of their life on creating something, that, despite its many downsides, shines brightly. And so, I do recommend it. The Sekimeiya does respect your time if you honestly engage with it and are willing to look past its shortcomings. Once you overcome dry clunky prose, you start noticing fun character moments. And by that time, core mystery picks up and it is genuinely intriguing. The final chapter, specifically, I found to be a very honest and genuine way to engage with the reader and I wish this was an approach more mystery VNs took. Also, I have to praise the robust notes system and the very useful search function. Though I mostly stopped taking detailed in-game notes for one reason or another, I still used it a lot (be it for refreshers or to keep track of info) and it was a pleasurable experience. Oh, and the soundtrack is really fun. I’m not really big into EDM, but this track list fits the story perfectly and I enjoyed the music selection. TL;DR if you value character writing, allergic to dry clunky prose and can’t look past some very explicit contrivances for mystery setups, skip this one. If you are looking for a hardcore mystery that would make Furudo Erika salivate, this is going to be best 40-ish hours of your life. I was neither of those and I still ended up enjoying this VN.

Very, very ambitious work, which I deeply enjoyed breaking my brain over!

This game is for a very specific type of mystery lover and I unfortunately don't fit that mold. There is very little character writing and I just couldn't make myself care about what was happening without it. I did tough it out and finish but by the end I was completely checked out.

Such an ambitious and deep mystery! Took me a while to wrap my head around it, but the twists and the payoff at the end are really satisfying.

TL;DR -- don't expect the mystery to be realistically solvable (you'd need tons of time for rereading and note taking). Honestly, I have no idea why I'm reviewing this positively. I guess at the end I had some fun, and don't really care about the downsides of the game being wordy, since my time is worth nothing (and yet I was skimping on it here) and don't really see that the characters lacked character, probably because I just never pay attention to what personalities characters have. I've played a bit more than the counter shows, and I still haven't finished the bonus content, so I don't know how fast the other reviewers must have been reading, or if they weren't trying to answer the questions and just winged them (or I'm just stupid). I like the gameplay in the form of questions that test your knowledge and kinda give you answers even if you get them wrong, so you can start to have an idea of what's going on. The first question prepares you for what kind of stupid little details you have to look for to get the answer right, so I prepared to lock in and really go back through the story to that point to get the other ones right. Then I got the next 5 wrong. The anger I felt back then at the kind of bullshiterry that's going on... wow, haven't felt like that in a long time. They are probably solvable, if you take the time to cross reference everything ten times, read the author's mind (or managed to solve everything while reading through it, but I doubt that's possible without making really extensive notes and charts for everything). While this probably wasn't a game made for me, but for someone with the patience to solve the damn thing without hints, I still enjoyed it. Also I'm prolly outing myself as even more braindead, but the characters weren't that bad? The main 3, Sai and Akaro had enough personality. And as for everybody feeling like "the vehicle for the mystery", idk I'd say only Erina was like that. [spoiler] Myiia definitely had a lot of personality, that being, hating on Atsuki and Shiroya all the time xdxd I really liked that part. [/spoiler] My favourite moment was when [spoiler] Atsuki finally realised, that you can teleport to most places with P.Egg if you just ask it nicely [/spoiler]

Some very obvious flaws that I'm sure are covered in other reviews, a slow start, often dry and expository dialogue, but I absolutely loved this, especially towards the end, if you like mysteries I would definitely give it a go, this is a very impressive work

Tapping out a couple hours in, the writing here is too rough for me to spend 40+ hours with, the characters are flat, and the art feels too safe. It seems like no risks were taken in terms of character or environment art, and so there isn't anything to latch onto except for the prose and the mystery. The mystery could very well be neat, but the prose is so slow and meandering, and none of the characters seem like they have a distinct narrative voice that I am just not going to be diving into it. The score is pretty nice from what I heard though.

It's such a fantastic, gripping story, but I haven't finished it only because I really wanted to puzzle out the solution on my own. One of these days! Still, the game merely prods you, you can easily finish it without getting it right, and you'll enjoy every minute of it anyway.

Visual novel that really banks on you being interested in solving an overall puzzle that gets increasingly complex. This can be rewarding by the final acts but requires a lot of patience to read with how the game is written. The overall mystery of what's going on reaches levels of complexity that's both funny and impressive. For the most part the reading experience can be tedious with repetitive things happening and characters feeling flat as if they only existed to proceed the mystery or provide deductions for the player. Many paragraphs are also written with far more words than needed. The overall story is held together pretty well but characters can really be colorless. Still, there are some interesting parts with the writing at least one of which I'll remember for a while. Trying to fully figure out the puzzle element is pretty demanding on logic and taking notes. The game provides good tools for this (I took a lot of notes personally, but didn't perform super well). The mystery forms its own cohesive structure over time making this kind of a unique experience you could imagine as something else than a VN. I can see why someone could get super into it. I get the impression a lot of polish went into the game despite its issues. There's some nice music in the licensed soundtrack. You might like this if you enjoy the idea of solving a mechanically complex mystery in a medium like this. Since the mechanics are solid it can feel like a puzzle game where you're always actively thinking towards solutions. Those aspects are really what's carrying this game.