; width: 100%; height: 500px; background-color: #000; }

RE Alistair Review

Rating:

RE: Alistair is a romantic visual novel independently produced by Sake Visual and released free for download. Adorned with beautiful manga-styled artwork, interesting characters and a unique storyline, this is a gem amongst free visual novels out there.

Full Review

For those not familiar with the genre, visual novels are conversation games that allow players to influence the direction of the narrative through dialogue options that are offered at certain points within the game. This genre originated in Japan, but has found its way to English-speaking communities via translations.

RE: Alistair is an English visual novel created using the free Ren'Py engine, and has quickly become the benchmark for games created within the Ren'Py development community. It tells the story of a girl who meets an adversary within an online game, and then proceeds to track down that person in real life. While engaging in this investigation, you can help her make new friends, or even fall in love.

Being a visual novel and thoroughly narrative-focused, players will spend most of the game clicking through dialogue sequences. However, after the first 15 minutes or so into the game, players start to have more control of the girl's day - choosing who to let her spend the day with, and what activities to engage in during her free time in the evening. At the end of every virtual week, there will be a summary showing how well the player has progressed.

Although the game is visually and narratively very appealing, the feedback on how well you are doing in the game comes after extended intervals, which makes it hard to gauge if you are on the right track. The endless chain of dialogues early on in the game also comes across as too long for quality engagement.

Nonetheless, this game's strengths outweigh its shortcomings, and is definitely worth a look if you are a fan of visual novels. If you haven't played visual novels before, this is a good chance to see if its your cup of tea, at the cost of only its download time - which may be a tad long at 72 MB.

Download RE: Alistair over at this website.

Posted by Zhou Xuanming on April 14, 2010 Comments (1)


sake-bento said at 2010-06-01 02:09:

Thank you very much for the review! It's an honor. There is an extended version with updated graphics, more scenes, and an updated feedback interface (stats readily available with a single click) available right now, if you're interested. http://www.sakevisual.com/realistair/