Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog Steam Charts & Stats

I've just finished my first run through of the game and I'm absolutely fascinated by it. It's a wonderful love letter to the PC-98, with art and music that would not be even a little bit out of place. I had a lot of trouble putting it down! Very highly recommended!

( full review with screenshots: https://www.gaming-parrot.com/post/stories-from-sol-review-dog-gun-it ) Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog is a sci-fi visual novel that's meant to evoke the aesthetic of Japanese PC-9800 adventure games. The store page gives the impression that it's some kind of slow burn mystery that's also an adventure game, but neither of those is really what you're getting. Adventure elements are present, but this is a Ren'py game and you're primarily interacting through dialogue choices like a standard visual novel. Similarly, while the crew does descend into mistrust like the description says, they do it so quickly that it can't really be called a mystery. So it's a bit different than the description implies, but is it any good? Since this is actually a visual novel, the story is likely to be the most important factor in whether or not Gun-Dog works for you. You play as the newly arrived security officer on a scout ship and quickly learn that the small crew includes both your girlfriend and a pilot who strongly dislikes you based on events in the prologue. Events will happen in remarkably short order than require you to jump into action and protect the crew, with the decisions you make along the way determining who will help you and how the mission concludes for most of the characters involved. All the individual scenes are well written in isolation, but the pacing often feels abrupt. You pretty much go from one major development to another with only some brief, almost completely optional exploration sequences along the way, and you're almost never provided with the information you'd need to have a thinky mystery experience before the solution is revealed. Somewhat ironically, the otherwise excellent ending sequence is actually an exception to this: it sets up a mystery for the sequel without really answering any questions at all. It's not an entirely original ending and I've seen games with similar plots fail to ever deliver a sequel before, so be prepared for that as well. Although there are an impressive number of branches and you're clearly intended to play more than once to see what changes, most of the ending sequence is locked in regardless of what you do and the triggers for certain character interactions are obscure enough that you're likely to need a guide. The good news is that you're able to resume play from quite a few different automatic save points and there's a speedy fast forward function, so it doesn't take long to get past the repeat content on additional playthroughs. You do also get a few minor changes when restarting the game, but don't expect anything too wild here. It's really just a few additional lines, not a totally new experience like you'd get from some games. You could probably get a half dozen playthroughs out of it if you really want to see all the different paths, but two or three is enough to hit the major differences at the end. As for how you'll be doing all of this, most of the action consists of choosing dialogue options and moving between rooms. There are a couple of sequences in the game where you can freely move around the ship and interact with characters and rooms in whatever order you want, but for the most part these are actually just a bunch of optional scenes that don't impact anything. I'm only aware of one missable interaction that actually has an impact on what happens later on - in every other instance you will either eventually be forced to make a choice or the impact of whatever you did doesn't change much about the flow of the story. Similarly, while every room has a bunch of points you can look at or use and there's an items menu, these interactions are basically all either pointless or mandatory. It all works and there are definitely some fun optional text boxes to find, but this is why I don't consider Gun-Dog an adventure game. You will not be finding any optional hidden rooms or combining items. On the other hand, the graphics and music are exactly what you'd expect from taking a glance at the game. I've seen some discussions saying that the sound and color quality aren't quite authentic to what the PC-9800 would have produced, but it's certainly a convincing enough facsimile for anyone who isn't deeply familiar with the original hardware. The soundtrack would have benefited from having a little more variety, but otherwise I don't have anything to criticize here. The game looks and sounds great. -------- For more reviews, see [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041]my curator page[/url]

Absolutely adored this game; like others said, once it gets going it was so hard to put down. The 90's anime, pixelart-style combined with the Star Trek x Gundam setting made this one a delight to play through. The story kept me gripped throughout and the cast was pretty well fleshed out. Music and sound design fit the aesthetic perfectly. Only small gripes are that I felt the game could've allowed your choices to matter a bit more, like by allowing you to "fail". Also felt items were underutilized and a bit spoonfed when they were. Small text display issues here and there too. Very much looking forward to a sequel!

If you have any love of 80s-90s Mecha and visual novels, there's no reason not to buy this. It's graphically impressive, good music and an interesting plot. Very interested to see the other plotlines. Worth every penny. Hoping for a Gundog 2.

It's a short but very captivating story. The old-school graphics add a strong sense of nostalgia and work wonderfully. Each character is well written in their own way — some you love, some you hate — but all of them leave a lasting impression. I found myself wishing I could spend more time learning about and interacting with them. I truly hope there's a sequel in the works.

Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog is a visually stunning blast of nostalgia. This mecha anime-inspired visual novel manages to carve out its own space, despite the obvious reverence it pays to its inspirations. Read the full review here: https://www.jetsonplaysgames.com/post/stories-from-sol-the-gun-dog-review

I loved a lot about this game but there's definitely a lot of frustrating aspects to the actual story. The overall aesthetic, music and direction for the game is fantastic. It goes back to the old PC-98 style visual novels that I find to be very enjoyable. Some of the best pixel art around for sure. The music is nice but gets very repetitive, which is understandable for the era they're going after. The mechanics of the point and click adventure parts can be tedious and frustrating, including the characters within the game providing "hints" that stall your progress. The story feels like a late 80s or early 90s sci fi OVA in the vein of 08th MS Team or similar but the characters are either annoying or straight up dumb (these military officers feel so incompetent that it's ridiculous)...it also feels like the story is very much incomplete. I liked it and would be interested in other works in the same universe....but this is very much a "wait for sale" kind of game imo 7.5/10

A very fun mecha visual novel with a retro anime aesthetic and great characters.

What a gem of a game. Stumbled across this randomly on Steam and took a chance on it, and I'm VERY glad I did. I'm a sucker for space and mech stories so this was a no brainer buy. You can tell this is part of an overarching story, so keep that in mind if you're curious, but the story is really great. Characters were great too, it was nice to have some friction between everyone instead of everyone just playing along or playing nice. Highly, highly recommend, and I look forward to this studio's next title!

Starting off with the good. The visuals and aesthetics are spot-on. Gun-Dog is going for a PC-98 experience with the screen layout and graphics and nails it. Characters have a decent amount of animation and feel fairly consistent visually. Full marks for the art crew. Now for the bad. Gun-Dog is a visual novel and the writing and characters are pretty bad and this is not good since the only gameplay is reading for the most part. I'll break this down across a couple of areas. There are some broad-based spoilers ahead. One, some of the characters are just written in a manner where they feel like they exists only to provide cheap conflict to the story. This namely applies to Vanessa and Hansen. These two characters spend nearly every interaction with the player just shitting all over them and it really doesn't get much better as the game progresses. I'd wager if I broke down every line these characters have, probably like 90% of them are just insulting the player. That's a lot, and these characters have a bunch of dialogue and screen time! Hansen feels like a character the writers wanted to have an unearned face turn while Vanessa is just irredeemable all the way through. Not sure which is worse, maybe Hansen because there's a part where another character actually tells the player character to give a Hansen a J.D. Vance-like "have you said thank you yet?" to him. Moving on, the writing feels too verbose a lot of the time. There is just a ton of descriptive text and monologuing that starts feeling very repetitive after a while. I felt this most keenly during a section near the end of the game in the sickbay where you spend what feels like forever just talking and monologuing with very little payoff. Considering the story gives the player a sense of "time is of the essence" at this point, you'd expect some big revelation or culmination of the story as the result of this section, but nah, not really. I feel like an editor could've put an axe to a lot of the text throughout the game without losing much while improving the readability. At the same time, the story feels like it ramps up too fast. There's not enough time early on to get a sense of the normal day in the life of the Gun-Dog before the story starts ramping up and feels like it is jumping from one big thing to the next without enough time in between to decompress. Finally, the last 30-40 minutes of the game is just...woof. The less said, the better and it just left a bad taste in my mouth. There are some good aspects to the writing. In particular, I really like how the player character's girlfriend is handled. Basically you're given a pre-existing relationship with a fun and bubbly girl and the two have a very healthy, trusting and drama-free relationship. It almost feels bizarre to play through such a thing. Also like that there are seemingly mico-choices throughout the game that have small effects on the story (can't confirm, no desire to play again) and one likely legit choice that changes the last stretch of the game. Don't like the music at all. Feels like it came out of a Mega Man romhack. Literally turned down the music to nearly inaudible levels. It's too "loud" for the style of game (reading) and I also didn't like the sound effects. In short, can't recommend this despite it being a labor of love. It's like a book with pretty pictures but poor writing. The visuals can only make up for so much. It's short enough to be worth a try for anyone interested. Took around seven hours to finish and I frequently searched for environmental text and what not. I likely would not have finished this if it were much longer than it was. I was definitely ready for it to be over.