Tales of the Black Death Reviews

i do not recommend this game to anyone, as after four hours of gameplay, it has become clear to me that the creator does not know anything about a good gameplay experience at all. you are forced to repeat entire sections of the game (the chase scenes are especially awful) and there is no fast forward button and it causes the game to bug out. this game is stupid. however, i will be playing the rest of it because the story is quite good, although unrealistic and outlandish, and i've become invested by means of sunk cost fallacy. i hope that you will save yourself this time and ten dollars.

Dark, wonderful visual novel. The atmospheric artwork and music really transport you to this historical period, the story is engaging, and balancing morality with survival led to lots of interesting choices. I also loved that you get three different settings, each with different vibes and storylines (although how does this peasant kid who's probably never been to school learn languages so fast? Lol). Frequent decision points mean you're never reading endless lines of text without getting to do anything, one of my pet peeves in visual novels. This studio is located in Quebec, and a minor issue is that the devs didn't translate the QTE chase scenes into English. Only important thing to know is that you'll have different running speeds on different terrains; none of the other dialogue in those parts is essential. My only major gripe with this game is that the checkpoints are too far apart. Especially if you're playing on hard mode, it's easy to get stuck in death loops that will require you to start the entire chapter over, spending ages clicking through content you've already seen. There are so many ways to die in this game that this happened to me regularly even on easy mode, and getting thrown back so far really broke the immersion. However, this hiccup was totally worth it for the great storytelling, atmosphere, and choice-driven narrative.

8 out of 10 boils Tales of the Black Death is a choose your own path adventure VN with lots of choices to make, some trivial and some moral. But all having meaningful results. There are two modes: Historic and Story, with the historic mode being a hardcore mode and Story mode being more casual. Game play (and even the tutorial) drip with atmosphere. The writing is good quality as is the soundtrack which compliments the art style well. The UI is also clean and easy to navigate. Overall a very good VN.

On the one hand I think it's certainly deserving of more than 6 reviews compared to some of the garbage that is popular. On the other, it just wasn't for me. Having the text move all around the screen like that is a drag having to track with your eyes one sentence at a time like that. I also think it's too focused on plot rather than characters/dialogue, from what little I played, which I admit is very little. The art is very nice, and the raven and the aunt were the right idea (raven is funny/engaging, aunt seems like a genuine character, little mystery there, wish I got to spend more time with her) but it kind of lost me as it went on with random encounters, seemed like a "and then this happened, and then this happened" way too early on and I got bored. If I had one bit of advice it would be this, if you make another one I'd focus on a much longer intro before things get going so we can get invested/set into the world. But that's for my personal taste. Some people might enjoy getting right into the action. Also the writing isn't obviously bad from the get go so that puts it above 95% of games. It just isn't stand out great enough to put up with the random deaths like a sir brante is. But it isn't bad at all.