Trials of Harmony at the very least does a good job at tackling the visual novel genre from a unique perspective. Only communicating over textTrials of Harmony at the very least does a good job at tackling the visual novel genre from a unique perspective. Only communicating over text message; never getting to see other characters; and never really seeing much around you makes it more of a text adventure than visual novel but in the end it handles it well. I felt that, even though the store page says otherwise, I didn’t get much in the way of choices. In fact most of the game I found myself wishing my character were handling things differently or that I could have more control over his reactions and dialogue. The choices I did get certainly seemed to be decently impactful but left much of the novel as a kinetic one. Near the end the game seemed to pick up steam and make up for the slower beginning. Despite calling one of the major twists rather early I still enjoyed where I was allowed to take it. The puzzle mechanics were fairly well done. You are mostly playing a game of hangman trying to spell out words in order to figure out clues. There was one puzzle that I felt was pure luck that I don’t see how I was supposed to solve it any other way than trial and error guessing but then again failing the puzzles is an option that branches the story in a different route so at least you don’t have to keep banging your head against the wall if you don’t want to. The game interface was nice but at the same time because it was so different from other visual novels took some getting used to and wasn’t explained very well. The music was pretty decent overall but got a tad repetitive at times although I found this mostly early on. The later part of the game had more variety in the songs. The characters were interesting and fleshed out well although I expected more of a bombshell backstory as to why they were in this demented situation. It was well described but a tad mundane.
I played Trials of Harmony on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. There is a manual save system with 122 save slots. You can save at any time except when there are dialogue choices on the screen. I took to saving any time my message box was flashing in case it had a choice. Alt-Tab didn’t work. One huge issue I had with the game was it wiped your saves after completing the game so if you want to see the outcome of different choices near the end you had to play the game over again from the beginning.
Game Version Played: 1.1.1
Game Engine: Unity
API Used: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 463 MB
CPU Usage: 5-20 %
RAM Usage: 1.6-2.7 GB
Overall this was a solid game with enough done right to warrant recommending it. It was far from perfect but did enough to stand out from the crowd and got more enjoyable the deeper I got into it’s mysteries. I finished my first play through in 9 hours and 19 minutes. I paid $2.93 USD for it and feel that is more than fair given the quality. There is a free demo available at this time for those who want to try it out.
My Score: 7/10
My System:
Intel I7-4770 | 16GB DDR3-2133 CL9 | Intel HD 4600 1536MB | Mesa 20.0.8 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Trisquel 9.0 | Mate 1.20.0 | Kernel 5.10.0-gnu… Expand
