I backed this up on Kickstarter. I played all routes except for Yuu, and I believe I have not completely finished that one route with the robot guy whose name completely slips my mind.
(Btw, the game description should probably be fixed, as all of the additional 3 routes have been added to the main game, they are not "to be released" anymore)
I enjoyed Gilded Shadows, because I like the fantasy of this world, the protagonist, and the romantic interests. I love the developer's style, creative settings, their writing is always on point, and they will always be on my radar as one of my top favourite indie otome devs. Gilded Shadows is 100% worth reading, as well as Steamberry Studio's other works.
But I don't think I will re-play Gilded Shadows, and if I do, I will be heavily skipping chunks of text. I actually still want to finish the routes that I have not, but they were released waaaaaaay back, and I still can't bring myself to it due to one simple issue.
The text is oversaturated with exposition through dialogue. A lot of the time - and in some routes, most of the time - all people talk about is worldbuilding: the politics, the social relations, the history, the esper powers - and at best it doesn't sound natural at all, at worst it kills momentum. It's almost like I'm being recited the codex through character dialogue. The robot guy's route - I remember, Quill! - became a complete brick wall for me because of this, and even my favourite route, Reuben's, was soured by overexposition.
[i][b]25/05/2024 EDIT HERE:[/b] I actually finished both Yuu & Quill's route's passionate endings so I'm done with the game. I feel like that last paragraph sounds a lot harsher than I meant it to be. What I want to say - it's still very very good, but as a reader I found myself at times frustrated with how exposition affected the flow of the text, and that in turn made me feel negativity about it. And not every route had that problem to the same degree. As examples I'll mention the last 3 routes that were released, which were the last ones I played, so I remember them better. Yuu's route, in my opinion, did not have any problem with exposition at all. Quill's route, as I mentioned, suffered from it the most in my opinion - but I understand why! Quill's (and Reuben's really) route was basically like a completely different book altogether, it explored a completely different part of the setting, and also dealt with a lot of in-universe politics by virtue of characters being involved in said politics. That is a [i]lot[/i] of stuff to tell in just one route.[/i]
Having played the demo for the next Steamberry VN [i]When Stars Collide[/i] on their itch.io and seeing it have the exact same problem, I wanted to mention this, because this seems to be something systematic, and I hope the author sees it and can maybe see what can be done about it. Just an example, when [b](spoilers for the demo I guess)[/b] [spoiler]a newly awakened alien from an ancient secretive race gets into polemics about how their race was historically misunderstood and why and what they did and their history with other races and ALL THAT during [i]the first[/i] meeting with the crew of the ship they awakened on centuries after they went to stasis[/spoiler], it really, really slams the brakes on the flow and takes you out of the story that [i]is intriguing[/i] and has so, so much potential.
[quote] [b]Reading accessibility options:[/b]
Default font size: ................ [i]Relatively large[/i]
Ability to change text size: ..................... [i]No[/i]
Ability to change font style: ................... [i]No[/i] [/quote]
