VIDEOVERSE Reviews

Kojima would have introduced the game with "The web has changed"

What a wonderful game! A beautiful homage to the Miiverse online community of the Wii U and 3DS. I never owned those consoles, but I have very much nostalgia for the messengers and social networks of the 2000s. The Emily is Away games captured the feeling of 2000s Internet so well and Videoverse does too. This game made me feel nostalgic for a console I never owned. The love story (if you chose to be more than friends) between Emmett and Vivi is great. God damn, this game had me in tears. Games rarely make me feel such a emotional rollercoaster ride. Thank you Lucy for making such a fantastic game!

Well-designed facsimile of a turn-of-the-century digital community. The way the story addressed disability was an interesting and welcome choice. Though, generally, it felt a bit limited by the fact that this was the experience of a straight white cis-dude of these online spaces, where ""diverse"" characters mainly existed for you to help by white-knighting and notifying/removing hamrful posts and being positive. It also never really engages with the problematics of policing communities through blocking/banning (the notification/block system is never gamed by trolls, for example). Ultimately still a touching coming-of-age story (for a particular generation), though it was also a bit inspiration-porny and self-congratulatory.

Miiverse was great, so a Miiverse-alike for a fictional Nintendo-alike sounded right up my alley. Unfortunately, I really don't think this game delivers on that promise. So little of the actual game is looking at people's posts. Bafflingly, there is only one single game community you can browse, and it hardly feels like it's about the game. You can never see screenshots from the game, they almost never ask for advice or actually talk about game mechanics, almost all the fan art is just the characters' faces, and when your character plays the game you never see a single second of non-cutscene gameplay. Miiverse had a ton of faults but it was very game-focused and you simply don't get that from this. Instead, most of the game is spent DMing/video chatting the player character's friends, and those sections are just boring. I don't know why they were even included, because Miiverse never had that functionality. Miiverse also had some extremely weird and endearing posts on it. There's the legendary "y can't metroid crawl" guy of course, who eventually beat the game! There's also "Mount Wario... is that a place or a command?" and the "Amazing looking water in this game" guy, and the "ganondorf is my new stepdad and he makes me pancakes every morning" guy. The posts in Videoverse don't even come close to that level of weirdness. For the posts that the game does have, there's a distracting reliance on memes that are much newer than the date in which the game supposedly takes place. It's supposed to be happening in 2003 but there are memes from 2020 and later. It just doesn't feel like the old internet when the references are from the real world and not period-appropriate. I loved Hypnospace Outlaw's fictional internet and I was hoping to get more of that from this. Maybe it's not fair to compare a small project like this to one of the best indie games ever, but considering they're both fictional internet simulators I made the comparison nonetheless. If the game had gone for the Hypnospace approach and made the player merely an observer in almost all cases I think it would have been much improved, because the interactions between Emmett and his online friends never did anything for me at all.

A fun visual novel. Seems to have quite a bit of optional stuff to find.