The Cherry Orchard

Probably the best kinetic visual novel/play I've ever seen. Uses the vaporwave style to tell the story and embellish the performances, rather than just as a random stylistic choice. Highly recommended!

Retelling of a play by the same name. More of a movie / interactive novel? Voice acting and visuals are excellent. If this play interests you, give it a watch!

Very cool style, stellar voice actors, overall a good experience. Definitely recommended

[b]UPDATE (December 4th, 2020):[/b] I greatly appreciate the developer's diligence in addressing various user concerns and releasing a substantial update to this work since my original review. I am more than happy to change my review to Recommended instead of Not Recommended. This is a great way to experience Chekhov's work and I applaud the devs for bringing this to a casual audience, with a great aesthetic style to boot. -- This was a very cool idea, adapting this classic play into a kinetic novel - especially with this clearly vaporwave-based art style. Unfortunately, it could have used more time in development. It looks like this project was rushed out the door before all the scenes could be fully animated and polished. The scenes keep switching between fluid, real-time animations and sequences of frozen poses and expressions. This is very jarring and immediately cheapens the entire production. I can only hope this was a result of some resource constraint, and not part of the original vision. [b]UPDATE:[/b] This was in fact the case, and I'm sure I won't be alone in both sympathising with the developers and remaining put off by the non-animated segments. However, I think I've been somewhat unfair; traditional visual novels use static portraits in exactly this fashion, and it was only the immediate [i]contrast[/i] against the fully animated scenes that these still poses were made to seem "worse". There's definitely food for thought here, about how and why we perceive and review games as we do. [strike]The on-screen dialogue could be better divided up to match the voice acting. We are frequently left waiting for the voice actors to overcome awkward pauses and catch up to the ends of sentences shown on screen. [i]How much[/i] of a line is shown on screen, and [i]when[/i] it shows up, affects the feel of the entire delivery, and these are not handled well here.[/strike] [b]UPDATE:[/b] This complaint has been resolved in the update released on December 2nd, 2020, and I have no further complaints along these lines.

I like plays. I like classic Russian literature. I like cool computer visuals. I've never experienced anything quite like this before, but somehow it mashes up those things and makes them work together. And the awesome shader work isn't just a "visual theme" (although it *is* that and a bold choice of a theme, too), there's some interesting storytelling going on with the effects too. Probably not going to be for everyone, but if it sounds remotely interesting, give it a shot! I'm glad I did.

This was super-neat!! I've been on a chekhov kick lately so this was a treat, love the shaders and music too.