A New Life

[got_quiet]

Name: A New Life
Status: Complete
Site: https://zephyo.itch.io/a-new-life
Rating: PG (character death)
Pairing: F/F
Description:  A cute, contained story about a couple and a little bit about loss.



This is a beautiful game. It foregoes any sort of sprite work and just gives you scene after scene of nice, pastel pictures and a chill atmospheric soundtrack. The story is short and focused on a single relationship of two girls who meet in college, fall in love, get married, and get an ending. It's all very romantic, but is also meant to pull at the heartstrings.

The blurb for this game was "When your love one hurts you, what do you do?" Which led me to think that there would be some sort of betrayal, or breakup, or something, but that's not actually how it goes, though there is tragedy. The game is designed so that the first run is likely to be a little short. At the end one of the characters feels like she could have done something in the past to have prevented the outcome of that path, and you're given an opportunity to restart from certain points in the game. When you do the MC retains memory of what happened in the last run, and her internal dialog tells you she wants to prevent it from happening again. When you "restart" you don't have to restart from the beginning, but can jump in at certain chapters in the couple's relationships, and try change the situation. It's a nice way of giving the player an incentive to go back and redo things (especially since the plot is based on redoing things) without introducing the tedium of starting from the beginning.


 

The game is very short and the story is very simple. The biggest draw to me is definitely the art, which is soft and cute. I think if you want a nice sappy f/f love story and don't mind a little bit of loss in there to add to the drama this is the game for you.