Review: The Novelist (2015)

Original post: https://misthold.dreamwidth.org/9535.html

The Novelist (2015) is a narrative adventure game with visual novel leanings. You play as a ghost who interferes with a family's life to try and move them towards making better decisions over the course of one summer. The father's a novelist (hence the title), the mother is an artist, and the kid is being bullied at school (maybe because of a learning disability?).

Gameplay is: you wander through the house trying not to be seen by the family while looking for clues on what they're worried about. Then you pick one narrative choice and one compromise choice per session. So, for instance, the dad might be worried about finishing his novel on time, the mom's concerned with networking with local artists, and the kid wants his dad to pay attention to him. You can pick one of those concerns to resolve, which then blocks the other characters' concerns from being resolved. But you can choice a “compromise,” where one of the non-picked choices is only a LITTLE messed up, instead of a lot.

The story alters depending on what you choose for the family, and every choice has good and “bad” outcomes. I suppose it's more realistic that way, but I felt so bad for every member of this non-communicating little family that I really tried to choose the most positive outcomes for everybody, which mostly worked.

Added difficulties are: if you get spotted more than once by the same family member they get “spooked” and you can't choose their option for the compromise, which might make it suck more. Also, you move through lamps and some lamps get turned off at different times, making it nearly impossible to get into some rooms safely. Otherwise it's a pretty easy gameplay, just looking for glowing items and hovering behind people to read their memories, etc.

I think it was an interesting idea and the characters were well-written, but I was also a little bored after about 30 minutes because it was so simplistic. It took about 2 hours to get through the first run and most of that was just trying to dodge the family members. If I had turned on the “don't need to dodge” option it would've been closer to an hour, maybe?

Price: $4.99

Available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. I played the Mac OS version.