Playing games with an emphasis on story.

It's that time of year again. Seems I'm only paying much attention to these little VNs during Yaoi Jam. And I'm yet again going through all of them. The first one I tried was a demo for the game How to Defeat a Demon Lord. For a minute there I thought maybe I made a mistake and was playing the Yuri Jam games. Character art is very feminine. Sort of like a reverse DaVinci where the pillowing in the color makes them look like they have boobs on top of their feminine faces. Maybe I've just been away from yaoi for too long but it was a little disconcerting. You start out as a wannabe hero that fails pretty much immediately, but that failure gives you an opportunity, as a random knight explains that the corruption you've been exposed to gives you an opportunity to infiltrate the demon castle and attack the demon lord by surprise.

The fourth wall breaking is unnecessary, but at the same time it's kind of nostalgic. Reminds me of the days back when it was common for authors to interject in the middle of the fic to express some random, irrelevant thought. For example: holy shit there is a lot of cleaning that I need to do. Anyway. The demo is short but there is promising humor, and the characters are intriguing. You've got a small, violent yandare, the slutty middle child, an loyal and submissive guard, and a DILF. There's an eldest sibling too, but he didn't have much to do in the demo. Even though the writing is rough on a line-by-line basis, there are some choices, and promised branching, and it might be worth a look if the thing ever finds itself completed. Most VNs don't allow for too many fail states, and would prefer to nudge players through certain bottlenecks, but you can basically fail the game in your very first choice, albeit with a cutscene as a reward. The other options are less fatal but there does seem to be at least a little variety going on.