Lost Between the Lines Reviews

It's a nice story. I liked it. The MC isn't very smart, but the game acknowledges this, so I don't consider it a knock. The heroine, and all the central characters really, are nice. The art is nice. Though only the heroine gets a real portrait, I appreciate that development resources were directed to where it counts. The story events are a tad thought-provoking. Some things you need to know before diving in: -There is no age-sensitive sexual content. The most risqué thing you see is the swimsuit you see in the game thumbnail. There are a couple kisses in the story (not shown). -The game appears to be ported from a mobile device version? This results in a lot of interface and layout quirks that make it very different from the typical visual novel experience, see the next few points for details. -It's not a start-to-finish experience, and it's not JUST broken up by chapters; it is broken up into chunks within five chapters, numbered like Mario levels or textbook lessons (1-1, 1-2, ... 4-10, etc.) with short descriptive names. After the prologue, you access each chunk by clicking a button in a sort of table-of-contents story menu. I'd estimate each chunk averaging 5 minutes of leisurely reading time, so if you don't want to have to read for long periods, this is actually awesome. -The game auto-saves your progress after each chunk. You can go back to re-read, but you cannot change any choices you made when you read it the first time. How do you get different endings then, you may ask? Well.... -You can, from the story menu, reset your story progress back to the beginning of any chapter you've reached. So, if you want to change a decision, you have to re-read every chunk from the beginning of the chapter to the one that has that decision. The chunks do load pretty snappily, so it doesn't take THAT long (took me 9 hours to get all 5 endings without a guide), but it's a far cry from the streamlined saves/loads of a typical VN. If you're using the skip button for already-read chunks, you must re-press if when starting each chunk. It will thus feel tedious if you go for completion, so try pacing yourself. -In chunks with decisions, there are bad, good, and better choices. You'll recognize them by visual and audio cues right after the decision, plus dialogue afterward will always clue you in to what the best decision was if you didn't make it. Bad decisions lack audio/visual cues; good/better decisions have an audio flourish and an icon with 1 or 3 hearts (or buggy heart-then-music-notes when it's with your friends). One decision made all by yourself has the audio flourish but no icon appears. -Making bad (or not good enough) choices in a decision chunk will cause a "bad ending" (not one of the five real endings, just a game over with slightly altered story leading to it), but not immediately; it will come several chunks later (sometimes in the next chapter!), in certain evaluation chunks. (The game doesn't say which are which, and the story doesn't make it obvious when you've successfully passed an evaluation, so you'll have to learn from experience.) Good choices build up points, so there are rare cases where you can choose a single bad option without getting a bad ending, but don't count on it. -There is one exception to the above point. One decision has two options. Neither are bad, but they affect which one of two "best" endings you can get. Conspicuously, the decision lacks any audio/visual feedback, which might make you think that whichever one you picked was a bad option. Don't worry. (Also, vague spoiler: [spoiler]the game makes a major plot development right after this decision[/spoiler] regardless of what you pick; don't worry about that either. -In those evaluation chunks, if you get a bad ending, the story will be a little different than usual shortly before the game over screen. Oddly, the game still lets you skip past these sections if you've ever read that chunk before (even if you've never gotten the "bad ending' version of the story before). So you can skip right into a game over, whereupon the game forces you to choose a chapter to restart without even knowing what happened. This made me super-wary of skipping text, but take courage that only evaluation and decision chunks are susceptible to story change (and skips auto-stop at decisions). Learn which ones these are, and you can skip any other chunks without a care when going for completion. -Endings are their own separate chunks that you unlock after finishing chapter 5. You can freely revisit these endings whenever, even after restarting to an earlier chapter. But this is a double-edged sword: If you achieve an ending you've gotten before, it won't tell you which one you just got again. So you're gonna have to keep close tabs on how many and/or which good/better choices got you to a certain ending the first time. Also, the chapters have different numbers of choices, so you'll need to strategically pick which ones you choose good/better in order to make efficient use of your time-intensive restarts. This is not a good game to half-complete and then forget about for a while. -Let me reiterate and expand on some of the above for completionists; skip this if you want to be captivated by uncertainty for your first playthrough. [spoiler]Choices affect the story chapters ONLY in decision and evaluation chunks. Main events remain the same, which does give the VN a bit of a kinetic novel flavor. The MC and heroine will always come together the same way (or you get a game over). The endings largely vary based on how well the couple's relationship is, so it's fitting that it's based on how many good/better choices you made (plus the one exception decision I mentioned above).[/spoiler] Technical notes for the developer: -In one chunk in chapter 1, some of the dialogue is unlabeled, so it's hard to tell who's saying it. -In the decisions with friends in chapter 3, the icon shows a single heart for a split second before hiding it to show the one or three music notes to indicate good/better options. This is a bug, right? Also, the music notes, I'm still a little unclear whether these contribute to a different score than the hearts, as this would seem to indicate. -In the last decision chunk of chapter 3, there's no visual cue for which option is good or better. Maybe this was just a design choice, as the MC is alone, and it is certainly obvious after-the-fact which one is best, but I can't help but think about this as an accessibility issue. -Pertinent to my points above, disabling skipping for those sections of evaluation chunks leading up to bad endings would be a major improvement for inexperienced players, if you can spare the effort. If skipping non-interactive chunks could be made any smoother or quicker, all the better. -Thanks for making this game! I don't want anything I said to sound like I'm complaining; I really appreciate that you made this nice story available for us. I suppose I'm going to have to try ketchup, soy sauce, and brown sauce each on a croquette. All very different perspectives and perceptions. Stuff to make you think....