visualnovels

cross-posted from: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/3597853b-0a38-4faa-88f1-8c448f1c818b

Cardamom: A Musical Visual Novel just dropped on Steam today.

You’re a stray cat poking around a new apartment building, rubbing up against furniture, pawing at flyers, and meeting the tenants—some human, some not. Every encounter turns into a song, and not just background tracks either. These are full-on Broadway-style numbers, with 17 unique songs and full voice acting. Your choices decide which ones you actually hear.

The whole thing is drawn in a flat cartoon style that feels like the old Flash games from the 2000s. It’s not going to blow your graphics card, and it doesn’t need to. This is a text-heavy game, and yes, you can adjust the font size so you don’t have to squint.

The make-or-break here is the music. If you’re into showtunes—Rent with cats, basically—you’ll probably be in heaven. Me, I can’t stand Broadway-style singing. But I’ll admit, it’s impressive they’ve built a visual novel where the soundtrack literally shifts with your decisions. At least you get individual volume sliders, which is a nice touch.

Controls are simple: mouse and keyboard only, no gamepad support. Windows and Mac are both natively supported, and it runs fine on Linux through Proton. Weirdly high system requirements for a visual novel: an i5 at 3.1GHz, 8GB RAM, and 4GB disk space.

This is the debut release from developer Box of Black Spiders, and they’re swinging for the fences with a full-length interactive musical. No reviews yet, so I can’t tell you if it’s going to land with anyone. My kid would probably get a kick out of it—she’s into quirky animation and offbeat characters—but me? Not so much.

Launch price is C$11.04 (intro discount included). Not cheap by visual novel standards, but fair enough when you’re getting 17 original tracks baked into the story.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3940880/Cardamom__A_Musical_Visual_Novel/

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