The Ballad Singer Reviews

[h1]Gameplay: 3/10[/h1] [h1]Graphics & Sound: 6/10[/h1] [h1]Narration: 4/10[/h1] ✔️ The promise of playing through a story from different points of view is interesting and partly fulfilled. ✔️ The full voiceover is a nice bonus. ❌ The writing is... not great. The characters lack any kind of depth or relatable emotion, and it makes any decisions you take very superficial. ❌ A lot of decisions aren't even narrative choices but rather right & wrong choices. A lot of time, taking any decision except the "right" one just leads to your death, which limits a lot the narrative branching and makes most choices pretty bland. ❌ The decisions that ARE defining of the rest of the story often can be summed up by "do you keep going on, or do you consider this distraction to be important enough to completely drop your quest to go and take care of it instead - this is your new main quest", and it feels like lazy writing. ❌ The game has an obsession with highschool-grade riddles as artificial locks on the progression. ❌ Some encounters are reused in absolutely unrelated contexts, which dispels any illusion you may have had about a coherent worldbuilding. ❌ The user interface is awful, nothing is positionned in an intuitive manner, everything requires too many clicks to use. Nah I don't recommend it. I think purely narrative games can collect a lot of flaws before I can confidently say they are bad, but poor writing is one thing that I can't forgive.

The drawings are magnificent, the story is truly immersive and thrilling, I recommend it.

[h1]Overall: 8,1[/h1] [b] Graphic: 10/10 [/b] The graphics in this game are amazing – there are tons of illustrations. It’s incredible to see how many you can enjoy compared to classic visual novels. The artistic quality is sky-high, and the style is super engaging. The design of the monsters is unique, and I’ve really enjoyed how interesting both the monsters and the characters are. [b] Voiceover: 9/10 [/b] The voice acting in both languages is fantastic – it’s the first indie game where I’ve seen such an effort. I’m used to this quality in AAA games, but for an indie title, it’s pretty rare. Every single choice even comes with its own voiceover. [b] Music: 10/10[/b] The music is one of the game’s best features – the OST is really deep and perfectly ties the story to the visuals. I even used the soundtrack for one of my D&D campaigns, and everyone was surprised it came from a game they’d never heard of. [b] Gameplay: 6/10 [/b] The gameplay is functional – it’s a simple game where you just have to click. I mean, it’s more like an interactive book than a typical video game. I’d give it a 6/10 because everything in this department works fine, though they could have added a bit more depth; still, that’s not really the focus of the game. Choices really change the course of the story and it’s fun to discover every single aspect of the game! [b] Interface: 7/10 [/b] The interface is simple and functional. I did have a bit of a struggle figuring out the icons on the bottom-right of the screen. If you’re wondering what they’re for, they show your save progress and how many “lives” you have left. [b] Story: 7/10[/b] The story is interesting – it might not be mind-blowing, but it’s good. What really stands out is that when one hero dies, the narrative for the next hero follows the choices you made with the first one. I mean, that feature is fucking incredible. The game can often be found for around €15 and offers hours of quality entertainment. I mean, we’re talking about a small indie game – can you really ask for more?