Engima: Review

Visual novels are really difficult for me to wrap my head around. It’s a beautiful genre that focuses on engaging characters, impressive art, and a compelling story, so in theory I should love them all to death. But for every Katawa Shoujo out there, there is another 100 that are just dull beyond belief. Enigma is in that dull category.

Enigma: is a story about a man who gets diagnosed with an incurable disease and given a couple months to live. So he decides to live out his remaining days on sea but is unfortunately thrown into the sea and ends up on an inhabited island. Where he decides to live out his remaining days on the island with a snarky brother and sister duo he met after mysteriously waking up in her bed. Along the way there’s several fights, a mystery that grows ever more cliche as you watch and so few decisions for the player to actually make along the way. All leading up to the wildly predictable twist at the end, I assume… I never actually finished it because by hour four of still getting introductions I had already wanted my time given back to me.

Now the real trick to visual novels is giving the player enough choices to keep them involved but keeping that distance between the choices long enough to let the characters interact with each other naturally. This way it really gives the player the feeling of joy when they make that one key decision that either leads to a gorgeous wife and happy family, or stabbing your soon to be wife’s eyes out with a spoon. The distances between Enigma’s choices are so far between and so insignificant that the developers might as well have made a manga out of it rather than a game.

At one point my fingers were getting sore so I set the pace to auto and timed how long it would take me to get to the next decision and I fell asleep… I’m not joking, I literally fell asleep. I closed my eyes waiting for a scene that just wouldn’t end to be over and next thing I know it was morning and I had to shower.

The characters are so one-dimensional and bland I couldn’t justify any part of my brain to remember their names or who wants to grab whose dick the most. There was one scene I really enjoyed where the main character went into a sort of PTSD type hallucination and the brother and sister walk into the main character nearly cutting the head off a guy. I was waiting for how the brother and sister would confront him on it but they just let it go! What a let down that was.

The art was fairly pleasant and vividly detailed. I enjoyed looking at the scenery and characters as they were drawn well. But with the horribly painful interactions and long drawn out scenes of nothing that I had to force myself to get through, the art just didn’t make up for it.