DYSCHRONIA: Chronos Alternate - Dual Edition Reviews

Lily is annoying but otherwise good game Edit: I don't really know if it's worth $35. I'll buy it again when it's on sale probably.

Will update if my mind changes after finishing the story, but so far the story is interesting and playing in VR makes the game much more immersive than 2D. The puzzles are fun too and feel designed for VR. This is my first VR visual novel and I am impressed ^^

Very good game as well as the whole Chronos series. It's one of the few representatives of the VR visual novel genre. Story is just awesome, the endings are very emotional and Lily shenanigans are cute and funny. Really hope for the next game in this series. You can found summarized review below (thanks to Vojtěch Struhár for the template). ---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☑ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS [i]Commentary: nothing changed from Quest graphics[/i] ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf [i]Commentary: i liked ALTDEUS OST more[/i] ---{ Audience }--- ☐ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☐ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☐ Potato ☑ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Game Size }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☐ Old Fashioned ☑ Workable ☐ Big ☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls [i]Commentary: story puzzles are easy, but if you want 100% - memory puzzles (counseling) can be a bit hard[/i] ---{ Grind }--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☑ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding [i]Commentary: residents counseling i can count as a grind, but it's not required. And ofc Lily head rubs :D[/i] ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☐ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☑ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☐ Average ☑ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond [i]Commentary: it's long if you want every bit of info and full completion [/i] ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☑ Worth the price ☐ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☑ Never heard of ☐ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☐ 8 ☑ 9 ☐ 10

One of the better story-driven VR games on Steam and a huge improvement from the previous Chronos games

This game has criminally few reviews. We don't have many narrative heavy VR experiences which are of substantial length like this is. It's basically like a visual novel in VR, but there's enough basic interactivity and walking around to make it more than like watching an on rails movie from somebody's PoV. But they're largely pretty basic, though just enough to get some engagement such as the menu navigation. If you buy this game, you better be here largely for the story telling experience and feeling like you're a character inside the world. It's very light on gameplay, but there are some puzzles you need to solve and a few key moments where you have to present your investigation evidence sort of like a very watered down Phoenix Wright trial. If you're here for any other reason and expecting high quality gameplay, you will be disappointed. This game isn't for everyone, but if you're into this kind of stuff, like me, you'll love it. Graphically, while the character models look quite good for the style its going for, it's not winning any awards for graphics. But, thanks to the stylized anime look, the simpler graphics actually end up not feeling bad and don't feel as distracting as some other, more realistic games which use the Quest as a basis. If you like the art style, you should find it easy to get immersed in the experience. Without any spoilers, I do think it fumbles a little in the ending on the story telling, but if you like anime styled story telling or visual novels, this is definitely worth picking up. It tells a pretty compelling narrative across an easy 12-14+ hours if you go hunting around for the story relevant collectibles needed to hit the true ending, but hunting for them can get kind of tedious. If you only want to laser focus on the story without exploring some of the world and exploring optional/extra dialog options, you could probably get it done in 10 hours. Which is still an impressive length for a story driven game like this in VR. There's a lot more I could say and I'll probably come back to edit in a longer, more comprehensive review at some point since this is one of my favorite experiences I've had in VR. But with only 41 reviews at the time of this writing, I had to write at least a little something to add a positive review in the meantime.

I would recommend this game, but I have some suggestions for the this game in the latest version ①.UI design looks a litte bit weird. I know you guys designed it this way to match the style of the game, but there's something about the UI that doesn't look very intentional and is a bit spartan. I hope you guys can redesign the UI. ②. I hope you guys can add a save option in the game. When an external event interrupts the current progress of the game, I don't want to re-play some contents before I quit because there is no "active save" option, which is a very annoying thing. By the way, I have experienced this serious problem in the current game. ③. I hope you can to add a "Quick rotation View" feature for the right back button of the gamepad. When the player wants to get a perspective behind them, the right back button of the gamepad has this feature can solve the vertigo caused by using the right joystick for a long time.

Played the episode 1 from quest store year ago and decided to wait for the PC release, and not disappointed at all. The graphic is more crisp and a bit more detailed than the quest store, and more importantly it's VR mode is pretty well optimized, even my GTX 1660s can easily handle this without using it full power. Gameplay wise, it's more or less a visual novel like ace attorney with a little bit more action built in, some people either hate it or love it, there's no in-between. For me personally, visual novel in VR is my most favorite genre since i played tokyo chronos

Usually VR Games are not polished enough, or it seems like whoever developed them had no care at all... This game is outstanding, I see a lot of care, nice details, beautiful scenarios and voice over, thank you for this!

MyDearest has done it again in this whodunnit for VR! This game has more story than ALTDEUS at about 20 hours to get the first ending VS about 15 hours to get all the endings in ALTDEUS, more interactivity by combining VN style cutscenes with crime solving along the lines of Phoenix Wright, it has time-leaping mechanics and memory diving to alter the past, and it has a tangled web of a story that you unravel with the help of a virtual red thread board! You begin your first day on the job by being tasked with solving the case of the murder of the city's founder! Also, the mental fortitude of the citizens has been crumbling since the news broke and it will also be your job to help them all. No pressure or anything. But the more you uncover, the more questions that pop up and this rabbit hole gets deeper and deeper until everything you think you know about the world comes into question. Absolutely phenomenal writing. It was a little slow to get going but, once all the characters were introduced, I was hooked! I just finished the first ending and I'll be jumping in soon to collect the rest of the memories and seeing what secrets the game still has left to offer! My only real complaint was that Elaine's English voice actress was flat as a pancake. The rest of the cast was pretty decent but she was terrible. If she weren't a core character, it wouldn't be such a big deal but her completely dead line reading was enough to ruin some scenes. I'm not sure what the Japanese voice acting is like, though. If you like visual novels, mysteries, and crime solving this is a must-buy!

TL;DR - The game is fine, has a bunch of issues, but is overall passable-to-enjoyable. 6-7/10 Imma preface this review with the fact that I played the entire 14 hour (possibly +1h of demo, Idk if it counts) experience in VR, and I have done so across multiple 1-2h sessions within a single week. I think on the surface, the game is very good, with an interesting premise, story, and mechanics. But there is a lot of problems under said surface. To start off, a lot of the VR content is less immersive than you'd think. The world is empty because everyone is in Augmented Dreaming version of reality (AD), but AD is only available in limited areas, and you have to go out of it to travel between the main areas. And while moving outside of the AD boundary smoothly brings you back to the real world, leaving/entering manually is associated with added wait times whereas it could've been a really cool smooth transition. And this isn't a standalone issue. Every time you enter a scripted dialogue scene your character blinks which freezes you in place for the duration of the dialogue, until you blink again, which either frees you or jumps to the next scene. There is a lot of waiting, and even characters running away from you will wait for their queue, adding to the feeling that you're going panel by panel in a 360-degree virtual comic. Overall fine, but occasionally very awkward. This is accumulated by a host of other small issues that plague the game. Some animations play off the center of the playspace, other off the presumed head position, others still off your actual head position. Letting go of an item returns it to where it originally was, so you better not accidentally weaken your grip for a single frame while carrying something, or you have to do it again. Some items are both collectibles and memory triggers, so you need to pick it up to trigger the memory, and then pick it up again after memory is done to collect it. And memories themselves will sometimes require you to replay them (at least once, sometimes multiple, especially if you make a mistake) but they don't have a fast forward button, so you're just waiting there for the characters to get to the point. As a cherry on top of all those issues, resident consolation minigames start as a nice change of pace from the Detective Visual Novel gameplay bits, but they quickly turn into distractions away from the game, making for awkward pacing in tenser moments, especially given you need to check (nearly) every room you enter for the patients if you want to 100% it. And even then, I somehow only got ~60% of all patients. And frankly, the very simple Simon Says is the most challenging part of the game. Everything else is quite linear, and if there are parts where playtesters got stuck, you can bet that the game will beat it over your head what you need to do. Finally, there are the accessibility features, or lack thereof. I have no idea why there is no height controls for a VR title, or a way to recenter the playspace. The game would often throw the place where it thinks I am in a corner of the room, and because you get transported during a blackout, I could never know if me not going out of it is intentional, or if the game put my head in a middle of some object or just outside the area I'm intended to be in for a certain interaction. There is also some moments where your controllers vibrate, and mine did so at full power every time. They vibrated so hard for so long, that I could see the tracking accuracy degrade in real time. My controllers were vibrating so loud it drowned out in-game sounds. I'm all for adding a kick with vibrations, but when it feels like I'm holding a pair of drills in my hands, I'd like the ability to tone it down or disable entirely. And it's strange, because the game seems to do a lot to accommodate VR so that it doesn't seem sickening, and can be very comfortably played in a seated position (probably better than standing for majority of the game tbf). But it still has some problems, some of which can be fixed easily, others not so much. And yet... despite all that wall of text, this review is positive. Why? Story. While all the issues above bogged down the experience, they didn't ruin it. The story carries the game real hard. It's by no means perfect - the main gimmick is a bit contrived, and the further into the story you go, the more you need to suspend your disbelief to not notice some issues. But it's a good story, with interesting twists and turns. Again, the format tries to bring it down because everyone that matters has a face, and everyone that doesn't don't, which makes the pool of suspects and major characters very small. But still, the web of interactions is very tangled, and untangling it is a pleasant journey that you go on alongside your character. Him lacking his memory is a fantastic empty vessel for the player to slot themselves right into. There are some issues here still. VA occasionally falls off, Elaine will often sound as if she's a robot, and while I think a lot of the VA intonation choices were intentional, I don't think they always hit the nail on the head, but I think the protagonist is at least very well voiced. Varied, with mostly correct emotion and responses to the events happening. You spend the most time with his voice, so I'm really glad its of good quality. Same for our mini sidekick, even if people might find her a bit annoying. And in the end, I'm really happy they went with a dual edition. Even if it makes both the PC and VR version slightly worse than had they kept focus on just one. I think a minor sacrifice of quality there is worth bridging the gap that VR games tend to have And it means you can play it in VR, and when you get tired from standing around with some goggles on your head, you can take them off and still continue enjoying the story on a flat screen. Even if I purposefully didn't use this feature, there were definitely times where I would've had I not been going for a full-VR run. So yes, game has issues. It aint perfect, far from it. But it's a solid story across a good amount of time, so I think it's worth a recommendation.