Mizuchi has a great story to it and I enjoyed the characters but it has an issue with momentum. There are long stretches where not a lotMizuchi has a great story to it and I enjoyed the characters but it has an issue with momentum. There are long stretches where not a lot really happens and it can kind of drag a bit. The choice system is also not to my liking. There are not many choices to the story and even some of the ones that are there don’t change much. For instance one choice has you hide from a stranger on the road and another choice is to not hide. Either way they take you prisoner so what’s the difference ? Overall there are few enough choices that it felt like more of a kinetic novel rather than a branching story although there are multiple endings. The music is very well done and very peaceful. The art is well done and has a great use of colours. The descriptions of food are also fantastic. That seems like a strange thing to praise but the descriptions of food being prepared and also describing the taste and textures made me hungry while playing.
I played Mizuchi on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. It does open on the wrong monitor and I had to manually move it over to my main monitor. This is a bug with the Ren’Py engine the game uses. Alt-Tab didn’t work. You can manually save whenever you want and the game has 54 save slots. The game uses the OpenGL API. I played version 1.0 of the game.
Disk Space Used: 824 MB
GPU Usage: 0-35 %
VRAM Usage: 545-908 MB
CPU Usage: 1-8 %
RAM Usage: 2.2-3.1 GB
Overall I wanted to like Mizuchi more than I did. I really did enjoy most of the story and characters but I found myself getting bored often which is never a good sign. If you enjoy more kinetic visual novels or slow burn games in general you may end up enjoying it. There are certainly far worse visual novels out there but also better ones. I backed Mizuchi on Kickstarter at a price of $15 USD. I finished my first play through in 4 hours 18 minutes. I feel that the price is fair for the game. I look forward to future games from the developer as I feel they did a lot of things right and hopefully can improve on those things they didn’t. There is a free demo to the game on Itch.io that I would encourage people to try if they’re interested.