Satellite turned out to be a worthwhile addition to the visual novel genre. It has a good story that has a good pace and doesn’t rush itselfSatellite turned out to be a worthwhile addition to the visual novel genre. It has a good story that has a good pace and doesn’t rush itself aside from a bit near the end. It has great art and fantastic music. One thing that it could used more of is a bit more explanation of the backstory. There are a lot of mentions of a big war that happened centuries ago which helped make the world the way that it is now. It doesn’t really go beyond a cursory mention of these events. It also drops a lot of lingo and short forms for different groups of people without introducing them well. Luckily though context I can figure it out but a little more time spent on the introductions of people and palces would have been appreciated. A glossary would have also accomplished this. Despite this I still enjoyed the game a lot. There were a good amount of choices that seemed to give you enough freedom to change the story. There were some dead ends though, points where if you picked one choice it resulted in your death so really there was just one “real” choice. There were also a few mini games that gave next to no explanation on how to complete. I even checked on Youtube and found no answers. Luckily these mini games can be skipped with no penalty that I could see.
I played Satellite on Linux. It didn’t crash on me at all. I could manually save the game whenever I wanted and there were 9 pages worth of save slots. Alt-Tab didn’t work though. There were a few spelling errors but it didn’t bother me much and was not a lot given the length of the game. My total system usage for RAM while playing was 2.5GB and it used 3% of my CPU. The game opeend on the wrong monitor but this is a bug with the Ren’Py engine and not with the game. The game used up just 389MB of disk space and as mentioned used the Ren’Py engine. I finished my first playthough in about 3 hours. I got my copy from Itch.io.
Overall I had a lot of fun with Satellite and look forward to other games from this developer. It had some rough edges but made up for it in other ways. I paid $1.99 USD for it and can easily recommend it at that price. I would even pay $15 for it and feel good about my investment. There is a free demo available on the Itch.io page for Satellite so if you like visual novels give it a shot.