10.5 hours played
Written 3 years ago
[h2]Island Diary[/h2]
[i]Bear Grylls would be proud.[/i]
[h3]Preclaimer[/h3]
- This is an Adult Visual Novel - one with a free R18 Patch (obtainable at Denpasoft's webshop) at that - designed to be R18, which is why I consider the R18 content part of the whole and will include it in this review. If for whatever reason you are not interested in this content, or aren't legally allowed to play it, just look for another game.
- Since many Visual Novels are similar in a bunch of ways, I'm gonna review this one on a few common aspects.
- This review should rather be considered to be a [b]neutral[/b] rating than a recommendation.
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[url]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2574197070[/url]
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[h3]Graphical & Technical Quality[/h3]
Island Diary is a good looking Kinetic Novel. That is the most there is to say about it.
With it's high quality 1080p artstyle seen both on the CGs and character sprites - which are otherwise not animated (blinking, ear or mouth movement) and only change rarely within a scene - it is enjoyable to play.
Though other than that, there is not much to it. The features and corresponding settings are kept to a minimum. There is no scene jumping, neither ingame nor in the backlog, but an ingame language selector to easily switch for the three corresponding achievements is given.
Running on the KiriKiri engine the game even supports dual-language subtitles - though they easily cut off on longer lines due to lack of space. Also coming with the KiriKiri engine is the hidden advanced settings menu, half untranslated and with as little customization options as the main game.
The soundtrack is okay-ish, the translation rather weird at points, though doesn't have too many actual typos and is overall enjoyable.
And for whatever reason, the fix for some achievements and intro movie not working correctly is handed out as a "beta branch" of the game on Steam due to "ongoing testing, but seems stable anyway".
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[url]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2574197138[/url]
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[h3]Content & Runtime[/h3]
What can you ecpect from this game?
Not spoiling any actual content of the 10h long Kinetic Novel story, it is a shallow, tension-lacking, comedic Slice of Life story about our amnesic can-do-it-all protagonist stranding on a deserted island with only three Kemonomimi girls around.
These heroines have the usual stereotypical personalities with as much depth as two of them have in their chest. No one cares about background stories - no one can remember anyway - and all that matters is their happy survival trip ahead of them.
After going through that you unlock the gallery where you can reenjoy the 20 CGs - which are all vertically larger than 16:9 and hence minimally scrollable - and listen to the 12 OSTs and all that.
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[url]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2574197113[/url]
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[h3]The R18 content[/h3]
Despite being the core component of this Kinetic Novel - half of the story consists of nude CGs - basically as simple as the rest of the game.
There are 4 H-Scenes in total, 2 for every character (you can guess the math here yourself). They use excuses like our feral friends being "in heat" to exist, don't have sound effects, background moaning, choices or even much variety in the CGs at all.
When it comes to the depiction of bodily fluids, the inhuman stamina of the actors or even the intensitiy of the action as a whole, it's just "normal" in a fictional hentai sense.
Nothing more to say honestly.
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[h3]Conclusion[/h3]
Is this game worth is?
If you don't care about story, tension, logic or any of that and just want to enjoy cute looking Kemonomimis - go ahead, the artstyle is great and there is nothing serious anywhere to worry about.
If those things are more in your interest though, I don't think even the next Steam Sale can justify that.
[code]Helpful review? Maybe take a look at [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/37389784/][u]the rest[/u][/url] of my reviews too![/code]
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