That Which Binds Us

[got_quiet]

Name: That Which Binds Us
Status: Complete
Site: https://crystalgameworks.itch.io/that-which-binds-us
Pairing: F/M
Description: Lies, manipulation, and mind wipes somehow coalesce into romance?

This is a game that relies a lot on romance logic making some of the weird shit that goes on okay. The idea is that there is a magic knife that can be used to make people forget completely about someone else. The man who owns the knife inherited it from his father, and with it he inherited the business of performing this operation on behalf of other people. He also happened to inherit a bondsman's shop along with it. It's a weird combo, and a premise I can safely say I've never seen before. If nothing else I do have to give the game some credit for that.

 

The MC is a girl who has a shit criminal boyfriend, and when going to get a bond for him the bondsman informs her that he has this magical knife that he can use to make her boyfriend just forget about her completely. She decides to take him up on it, and since he doesn't charge her she decides to treat him to dinner as a thank you when it turns out to work just as he promised. 

 

While the game is mostly just a straight romance as these two characters keep ending up on dates together and the MC slowly but surely falls for the LI, there is a side plot where the bondsman is in some shady business as a result of some arrangements he's made with the local mob, and a rival gang is starting to cause trouble for him. There is crime and danger, the MC gets chased down the street by some random thug, and the LI is constantly dealing with scary people because he's in a business that intentionally deals with scary people. While the game doesn't have a particularly strong theme, it does try at least a little bit to show that it's not easy to just discard the past without it creeping back on you eventually. But at its heart it's a romance, and characters (really the LI) get away with a hell of a lot because of that.

The plot takes its damn time. It's a single romance, with one LI, but it felt longer than full playthroughs for some games out there with multiple LIs, mainly because it's date after date after date. This works kind of ok, because the two characters have decent chemistry, and the feelings that develop between them is paced more naturally than in a lot of games where after date two everyone is head over heels in love with everyone else. There are a couple of plot twists that are visible from a mile away, but they still keep things at least somewhat interesting. I ended up getting a little bit invested in this couple, because they were cute together. By the end of my first playthough I thought this was a cute little romance, with a couple that were endearing enough that I was willing to sit through hours of small talk as they got to know each other. Anyone who dislikes small talk may have a different reaction, because there was a lot of it.


 

After you play it the first time the game tells you that you've only seen half of it, and you can play now a second time with the option to refuse to accept the guy's services. The game starts to fail here, because even though taking the alternative route does result in basically a completely new path with completely different date scenes, the whole story still feels exactly the same because it hits all the same emotional beats with nothing new learned. The big difference is that instead of voluntarily having her boyfriend forget, the MC is effectively attacked by the LI in her home to force her to undergo the process, and then the LI makes her forget him and the fact that he's done this. This path also starts introducing some brief moments from the LI's point of view, but again it shows us nothing that we don't already know at this point, because everything he feels has been revealed in the first playthrough.

For this reason the second run wore me out somewhat. I thought maybe because the LI does some slightly more unethical things like breaking into someone's house there might be some consequences for his actions, so I kept playing, but there isn't really any significant difference between the two paths, except for one thing. The first path has no subroutes, and the second does, but they are extremely limited.

And since I'm mostly playing these games to pick apart their narrative mechanics, I have to say that this game has some of the worst, even though the story itself was better than a lot of the other VNs I've played. It felt very much that That Which Binds Us wanted to be a kinetic novel, and just threw in the multiple routes as an afterthought. The majority of choices you make make no difference. While there are a handful of choices on the first route they don't feel significant in any way, and there's no change in outcome. The second route has maybe 4 or five different endings, but they all peel off immediately based on a single choice. For example, at some point you can make one choice that will lead you quickly to the one bad end in the game, and it's very abrupt. In another you can pick between two choices near the end of the game, and you'll immediately get one of two endings, both of which are meh. And getting the "good" ending for the second path seems to depend on a single choice made early on in that route. The 6 or so other choices you make after basically mean nothing. None of these endings feel like a particularly meaningful result of any of the choices I've made. The good ending for the second refusal run just results in the LI confessing the bullshit he's pulled on the MC, and the MC being angry about it but forgiving him, and then the end, all of the complications that made the first run a little interesting get resolved without issue, some of them off screen even.

I somewhat regret replaying this one multiple times, because the first run, while effectively a kinetic novel, was cute, had some plot progression, and the ending was satisfying. I felt that the following runs only resulted in lowering my opinion of the way the story was told because these felt like subpar versions of the original story, not really new paths in their own right.