RUNT

I have very mixed feelings on this game. The demo is fantastic and the original premise sucked me in immediately. There is a lot of talent and hard work that went into the animation, sound design and music, as well as dialogue. A couple scenes are genuinely heartwarming. Runt is great at drawing you into its world and maintaining a tense, suspenseful atmosphere. I can honestly say the demo was a breath of fresh air. Sadly, this is where the positives end for me. As many have pointed out, the lack of a manual save (especially in a game designed for replayability) is massively frustrating. It is an utter slog to replay days over and over and all the positives of the game cannot prevent this tedium. While replayability is understandable and can be a great tool, I was very annoyed that not only is the key clue not one that can be discovered through actual investigating but that you must lose 3 different times which feels like a way to force the player to keep replaying as opposed to anything that actually makes sense or serves the overall story in some way. For a game that clearly champions replayability the final answer to the mystery completely ruined any lingering desire to do so for me. It's difficult to replay even my favorite scenes with the brothers when there's an underlying [spoiler]reality of nothing matters because this is all an act[/spoiler]. While I appreciate the game not glorifying abuse, potentially interesting angles such as trauma bonding or reasons to even stay in the first place (as was present in the demo) or even some meaningful changes in relationship trajectory are thrown out for a relatively straightforward good vs evil story which does not fit the themes presented nor the reactions of multiple characters. Multiple interesting subplots are introduced only to never meaningfully impact player relationships or their conclusions. Calling this a game about building relationships isn't quite accurate as most relationships are already established (the exceptions to this are lovely though). For the main culprit(s) goal in creating the message, it actually would have made more sense if they hadn't been so mysterious and the threat clearly laid out. This is what ultimately led me to make a negative review; that the entire mystery in and of itself, did not need to happen and the game arguably would have made more sense if it didn't happen. I would say the best way to experience this game would be to play through some scenes but ignore trying to find the mystery. You cannot actually solve it on your own anyway and the majority of the clues you find are not helpful. I wanted so badly to like this game. As it is, I am frustrated and disappointed by both game design and characterization.

I can't recommend this, and that's a real shame. The writing and setting are superb. The characters are well realised, the story is solid, the atmosphere and tension are extremely well done. But that's where the good stuff ends. The structure of the game is extremely bad. Despite there being plenty of replayability, the game seems to punish you for wanting to. [spoiler] the game wants you to fail on your first three runthroughs, and fail in a specific way each time. You can make plenty of choices here, but none of them really matter. All that matters is that you fail three times. This then unlocks the "true" playthrough, in which you can make no meaningful choices and cannot really fail unless you specifically go against the game and deliberately choose wrongly. The true playthrough is completely on rails. You cannot advance until you have done everything necessary to achieve the correct ending. [/spoiler] Why the game is set up like this is a mystery. It would have worked so much better if the two types of playthrough were merged into one. Secondly, the mini games are dreadful. I've seen a review describe them as early 2000's flash game jank, and that's being generous. Some are worse than others, but even the most acceptable ones are bad. Poor instructions and tiny hitboxes on some of them are absolute game breakers, genuinely frustrating for no reason. I've not encountered any bugs, but the sheer ineptitude of them is teeth grindingly bad. They are also unskippable on repeat playthroughs. Also unskippable on repeat playthroughs are the story scenes. The game takes place over four main days, with each day split into morning, afternoon and evening. Afternoon is where most of the gameplay happens, as you decide where to go and who to talk to. Mornings and evenings are story sections. But they will always be the same on every playthrough. The same thing always happens on Monday morning, Monday evening, Tuesday morning and so on. Nothing you do will change the events of Tuesday evening, or Thursday morning, for example. The thing is, there are plenty of scenes with multiple characters in the game. There's no reason why each day has to play out identically on each playthrough. It's honestly baffling. I have to say, I haven't finished the game. I do believe I'm near the end, as the main story plot has been mostly resolved, but an absolute brick wall of a puzzle has made me put the game down. Unless I can find a guide to help me, it's unlikely I'll ever bother to finish it. And that's a real shame, because despite all the slog to get this far, I did really enjoy the story and I'd like to see how it ends. But as it stands, it's not worth it right now. There are vastly better games, both visual novel and otherwise, out there, with just as compelling stories but infinitely better gameplay and structure. It pains me to say it, but I really can't recommend Runt.

So far looks like very good visual novel. Characters are interesting and game have a lof of conditional interactions with them based of gathered info. Mystery and worldbuilding are very engaging too. Really liked it, so I recommned to give it a try.

This game is so... oh my god... I can tell just how much love and care was put into this, the writing is so incredible, the art is breathtaking and packed with so much style, and the minigames are a blast once you get the hang of them!! I don't even mind some of the lil hiccups here and there, cuz i can tell this team worked so hard. Yall really captured exactly what it feels like to grow up in the south with a difficult upbringing, as someone who grew up queer in the south this hit really really close to home and made me feel seen and heard. This game's already really special to me... im gonna continue exploring every part of this game and recommending it big to others! Be proud of yourselves!! Yall made a really special game <3

seems good. a couple of cutscenes take too long but overall the game is a good horror vn. could make the skip button not instantly make dialogue dissapear but make it go faster so people dont lose context if they try to skip some dialogue.

This visual novel is absolutely a banger. The storytelling keeps you really invested and engaged on what's really wrong with Skipclaw and it's residents and it really pulls you in. I really love, [spoiler] how the residents don't really seem friendly as how they look [/spoiler] and the huge reveals towards the storyprogression just makes you wanna keep going and going. Really recommended, worth every buck what you pay for this game.

As another review said, the atmosphere, writing, setting, and characters are all superb but the gameplay(including minigames) and way the story is paced leaves much to be desired. Runt is a game where the main character needs to investigate the inciting event of the story by talking with the people of Skipclaw and by spending time with his brothers. During this investigation, you are limited by the number of hours you have until you need to work a night shift with one of your brothers-at which time the day will end. A lot of my frustration comes from the fact that there are clearly "correct" times to talk to an NPC or do a certain task combined with the fact that you have to play through the game three times and fail before you get the "true" playthrough. Runt, the main character, even comments on whether you should have talked to someone later or earlier in the week depending on how an interaction went. When it is clearly the "incorrect" time to gather information or talk to an NPC, you will have wasted your limited hours and failed to gather anything contributing to your investigation. For me this lead to incorrect assumptions about NPCs(i.e. who would be useful to talk to and who wouldn't), feeling constantly like I wasn't making ANY progress on the investigation or somehow being softlocked out of it, and resetting my game many times-that is, until I found out that I can't progress into an ending that felt like it was the clear result of my decisions. Not to mention that the beginning of the game doesn't give you very many good leads on how to conduct your investigation. (Which is to say who you should be asking first, or any rumors that might point you in the right direction) Instead it feels like I'm constantly gathering useless information that I can't use to draw any conclusions(another mechanic of the game). By day 4, which is where I decided to stop playing after a 4th reset, I had maybe three conclusions resulting from what felt like the game telling me it didn't want me to progress. A few other reasons I won't be picking it up again: The dialogue takes a long time to skip, the cutscenes and minigames are unskippable(and VERY janky), and the game takes a long time to load. I think that most of my playthrough has been spent looking at my phone waiting to get to new dialogue. I'm not a fan of leaving negative reviews like this for a game that clearly had a lot of passion and care put into it, but I can't recommend playing through this with the lack of QOL features and how the game expects you to complete it.

First of all, this is not a mystery game; it’s an adventure game. RUNT has a great story (if you ignore the mystery/culprit), but it’s held back by a “time travel” mechanic. Playing through it is a slog, and the game becomes a thousand times better on a second run, when you have a code to access locked content — because even the developers didn’t trust that anyone would replay it enough times through all the scenes and minigames, which have no efficient way to skip repeated content. The mystery itself is also generic and doesn’t fit the game. It would have been much better if it had been one of three options: 1) the protagonist is the culprit and is trying to save himself by sacrificing someone else; 2) the culprit is someone already dead or missing, but you still have to accuse someone; 3) there are multiple culprits for the crime, but no one is entirely responsible. I complain about the mystery because of the witch hunt provoked by the brothers, which ends in the most anticlimactic and, honestly, stupid way. It’s a complete waste not to have that moral dilemma. If you want to play for the story, ignoring the mystery aspect and the awful mechanic, try entering the code “RIVER” at the start of the game. And don’t worry: all the endings you can get on a first run are bad endings. I’m not sure if the code can be used right away, but if it can’t, you still have two hours to request a refund. Note: the last day of the game is a black screen (the game is very buggy), so I don’t even know how it ends, even though the game had already told me who did everything. Technically, it spoiled the answer much earlier if you were paying attention, but that part wasn’t very good anyway.