(I will say when spoilers start) I will probably update this when I finally finish the game. If you know me, I've been posting about VNs for a bit now. I like them for two reasons:

1. They can pull you in instantly with just two jpegs, a sound file and a line of text. The simplicity is impressive.
2. They are very easy to play, which is the perfect wind-down activity to help me sleep.

My trifecta of visual novels is the original ace attorney trilogy, virtue's last reward and paranormasight to give you an idea. You can tell I like mystery, plot twists and convoluted plots. And I like studying them too.

So with those three in mind, I set out to find more and landed on Ever17 as my next pick. I've been playing it for probably a little bit over a month now, and despite this, the in-game stats say that I have picked 80% of all choices, and seen ONLY 68% of all text. So this is a midway review that I feel I need to write.

I'm not going to talk about the story and characters so much because I'm more interested in the design and grander themes, and I don't want to spoil the game for you either. But it takes place on a sci-fi (set in the far future year of... 2017 lol) underwater theme park that suddenly gets evacuated, and 6 people get left behind when that happens. With the systems failing, the danger posed by the huge weight of the water surrounding the 200m deep park begins to loom...

[spoilers start from here]

I really liked some of the progression and player discovery in the VN, at least early on. My first playthrough was a pretty basic romance novel, which almost turned me off the game if I didn't know I had to expect something to happen. It had a happy ending where everyone got saved, and the MC and the love interest got together. Good for them. But then, something happened. The game addressed me in the outro cutscene, with the words:

The story is not an end yet. Only you are in the infinity loop

And the title of the game is Ever17: The Out of Infinity

Alright, I'm getting chills.

So in my second playthrough, I decided to take the opposite choices. If I made choice 2 the first time, I'd make choice 1 here.

And something else quickly happened. At some point, the textbox switched from blue to green after a choice. The name of the MC had changed too. It was only then that I realized the prologue had a grey textbox because it follows both MCs (no wonder I felt confused in the first prologue), and a specific choice decides who you will play as. Dang. That's right, this game has two MCs and never clues you in on it until you actually experience it for yourself. There's a lot of mindfucks moments like this one.

So hopes were rekindled for my second playthrough. I was expecting to play as the same guy and pick the alt choices, but instead I get a whole new perspective.

Long story short, I really enjoyed how my playthroughs progressed, and I don't know how much of that was through my own choices of picking one character over the other, or if the game was designed in a way that the first playthrough was a standard happy ending or what. It's a testament to its great design either way, because from playthrough 2 to 4, things got much darker. And then you stop getting good endings altogether. Instead, everyone dies. No matter which route you pick. The game suddenly veered from a romance VN to despair. There is blood on the love interest. Can you even go back to that happy ending, if you made the first choices? No, that's not the answer. You have to press on and end this infinity loop.

Subsequently you get exposed to tragic backstories by picking the alternate choices during the VN. You alternate between the MCs and the choices you pick. New dialogue opens up in places you've read before, but nothing too big at once... at least until you've made all the choices during the VN.

In the nitty-gritty, I think the game could have done some things better. For example, it's absolutely impossible to piece your own theories before the game exposes them to you point blank. There is no foreshadowing at all that you can work from. There is some good early exposition that keeps you hooked, but I also felt that having to replay over and over actually diminished the chapters I'd read before.

For example there's some interesting stuff like how a "phantom" that one MC sees in his route is a full-fledged character replacing another NPC in the other MC's storyline. That was a mindfuck moment because I picked the MC that sees the phantom first, and then playing as the other MC she's just... there with you, and everyone accepts that.

But replaying those phantom scenes and all the 'eerie' stuff with skip on completely detaches me from it after the first few times. Yes, someone kicked the can when nobody was close to it. It was eerie the first time, but it's happened five times now and all the effect is gone. I want to completely bypass the hide-and-seek moment so that I can focus on unlocking more endings.

The point I'm at now at 68% completion is that I'm basically walking in the dark. There are four routes I know (two MCs each with two routes), and I'm at a point where I'm only unlocking additions to endings. So I pick a route randomly, having to skip through the entire VN the entire time, and hope I get something new out of it. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't and I just wasted over 10 minutes of my life skipping through the VN for nothing. Because you have to make choices, you have to actively watch over the game until you get all the way to the end just for a bit more of an epilogue. At least skip stops when there is new text.

I don't even know if my random method is what the game expects me to do or if there's a mechanic at play. I know how to get locked into each of the four routes, but maybe I need to make specific choices before that point to unlock more epilogues? I don't know, and the game doesn't tell you anything. You can clearly tell it's kind of the "grandpappy" of these types of VNs. If I had to redo ever17, I'd make it playthrough-based instead of route-based, i.e. progress is based on your number of replays. The lead designer is also apparently behind the zero escape series, and virtue's last reward and its flowchart mechanic has become a staple of the genre now. It clearly solves a lot of problems that these VNs have.

I won't lie, it turned me off the game for days and I don't play it as much anymore. The middle is a slog and I'm starting to forget some of what happened in the VN that is probably important. But at 68% finished, I can tell there's still a lot of story I'm missing out on and that keeps me going. I really want to know how it all ties in together. Due to how much text there is left, I'm expecting that at some point the entire VN will restart but the characters will remember it happening before or something like that. Just spitballing.

What about the number 17 that somehow gets idly referenced but no one seems to pay any attention to? It's even in the game title! What about the character literally named You, which leads to some wall-breaking lines ("You handed me the wrench"), but no one seems to think much of? What about the bioscanner that constantly shifts between 5, 6 and 7 life signs? This gets introduced very early on in all routes but hasn't been resolved yet. One of the 6 characters is an AI, so she doesn't count in the lifesigns, leaving two questions.

In terms of themes, my first playthrough had a discussion about the third eye. I think jungian themes are just a staple of this niche genre and to be expected. I was expecting some chummy nonsense but it was actually quite well thought-out. It's a sci-fi game and there's a lot of science being talked about, which is a nice touch. For example they have buoyancy elevators that work by filling the elevator shaft with water, which lets them work even during power outages, but to get it to sink you need enough weight to displace the water. It adds some grounding elements and helps reassure the reader that this is going somewhere and wasn't thrown together haphazardly. I wonder if some of the themes, for example around AI, are seen differently today. Honestly for 2002 these themes were not out of the ordinary, AI and sci-fi was all the rage back then, and it's almost endearing the way they handle it sometimes. For example burning the AI onto a 1TB cd-rom, or how it uses "preprogrammed responses from a memory bank" when it doesn't know something. Now that we have inference, this feels almost childish, but in an affectionate way. It asks questions about what makes you you instead of a copy of your past self, in a ship of theseus kind of way.

If you want to play it, I recommend either the PC original or the PSP version that you can load on your phone, with english fan patches. The remake/remaster is apparently disliked, even though it seems to add some foreshadowing and make the facility look more like a theme park, which is what it's supposed to be. If you look at the picture in the post, you can see the environments are pretty bland and barren - and this is a good background pic. But apparently they mess up some references that were consciously added in the original script.