VIDEOVERSE

This new visual novel from the creator of One Night Stand is an engrossing, emotional study of digital relationships that will hit a raw nerve with gamers.

Videoverse has to be one of the most authentic time travel pieces of media I’ve ever experienced. I’ve played countless games that lean heavily on nostalgia—oftentimes cheaply—to try to make me feel like a kid again or at least like I was immersed in something similar to those RPGs of yore. Videoverse might be the only title to truly accomplish that.

Videoverse involves and upsets, moves and enhances the feelings of the player, but more than anything it makes us reflect, with a hint of nostalgia, on what it means to grow and confront ourselves with the infinite diversity of the others' lives. With a never pedantic and always natural writing, Lucy Blundell gives life to characters that we will remember for years: Emmett, a teenager who will learn to recognize his privilege, Vivi, a young man struggling with events that she had never expected, along with the rest of the cast, can create a fresco so full of life to seem real. Not to be underestimated, for this effect, the painstaking construction of the interface, incredibly immersive in its simplicity. We are sure that Videoverse will be talked about for years to come, and we recommend it without any reservation.

Videoverse is game that managed to hit me with the force of a truck in various ways, from the more subtle things like the in-game community’s reaction to a collapsing world around them to the parts that were more upfront, like Emmett and Vivi’s budding relationship. But even if you don’t have any emotional connections to similar online groups, what’s here is still an engrossing visual novel, one with a great story and a clever retro gaming world to explore. Videoverse is a definite highlight for the genre and one not to be missed out on.

Videoverse joins an immensely charming, detailed snapshot of early 2000s online fandom with an intermeshed web of heartfelt and incredibly human (sub)plots.