In Falsus

Really cool genre-blending mix! Visual novel with rhythm gameplay and card-crafting puzzle mechanics. The premise is quite interesting, and uses the format well to drop you into the middle of a world the characters know well and still be able to keep up with minimal required exposition. The writing is a touch polarising? It's the sort of story where you can expect just about every prominent character to be queer and neurodivergent (though it thankfully isn't heavy-handed about it), and you're likely to have a sense from that alone of whether you're going to love or hate it. If it's the latter, well, there's a fast-forward button. You only have to go through it once. Once the story's over, you have a fully-unlocked rhythm game to enjoy! Lower-level charts are *really* well designed so you'll have a good time even if you're new to this. The gameplay features six lanes on one hand (not all at once except on high difficulty) while your mouse simultaneously does its own thing in the sky. Technically quite challenging, which means they could design the charts less about raw mechanical skill and more about being able to parse and process what you have to do. Intimidating at first, but it's been super satisfying to learn and improve. The song lineup is incredible! Pretty much every prominent rhythm game artist has a song here, and they just don't miss. Frankly worth the price for that alone. The puzzle game elements are a challenging optimisation puzzle where it's easy to find "good enough" but very very difficult to find "perfect". There are some more traditional pass/fail style tasks along the way that get you used to the techniques you'll need, and then you can optimise fully in postgame if that suits your style. If it doesn't, you can also turn the entire system off and forget it exists (just don't expect to get 100% achievements that way if you care about that). It's an oddball overall, but it's very well-polished and easy to fall in love with if you give it a chance. Great to see lowiro finally on PC.

great integration of story + card puzzle + rhythm game and very well executed on all fronts! would recommend to anyone who's open to giving this kind of visual novel storytelling a try, don't think you'll be disappointed. well worth the cost imo

If you can ignore/tolerate the weirdness about crossdressing and the lack of non-white/japanese characters it's otherwise a pretty good game

i feel so cryogenic in that i was stunlocked, frozen, in awe. Came for the very unique rhythm gameplay by the same devs as Arcaea only to realize I have been tricked into playing a fantastic visual novel. I found myself invested, and when I felt like I wanted to get out of continuous scenario nodes, it wasn't to play the genre I love but just to get to making cards. and i am left wanting more ... see you in Some years

iris leal you are justr like me existential crisis 10/10

I bought this expecting a well-made and stylish rhythm game with tracks from some of the best in current techno/artcore/edm. What I wasn't expecting was also getting a genuinely engaging VN with some sharp prose and really well-defined characters, interspersed with a surprisingly fun light puzzle game (albeit one that did still feel like it was getting in the way of everything else sometimes). Often, when a game has disparate elements like this, at least some of them can seem like an afterthought; none of them do here, and the result is a unique experience that quite obviously had a lot of love and care put into it, from the dozens of unique illustrations, to the great songs, to how its main cast all come across as convincingly real people with their own distinct worldviews. At a time when the various megacorporations forming the mainstream gaming industry seem hellbent on not just sanding edges off, but removing creators themselves from the equation, something like this shines even more than it already would. Play this game. You won't regret it.

fun BUT very opinionated rhythm game. imo you'll either like it or you won't game runs well on modern hardware, but beware CPU usage

Game is so good i pulled out a knife.