I played the pre-order preview for Cinders, a beautiful visual novel based on the Cinderella fairytale. It’s a well refined game, distinctly built on a unique engine rather than the standard Ren’Py engine, but it’s the quality of the writing, with a huge number of delayed choice consequences and heavy content pruning, that really makes it for me.

My problem… is that I’ll probably prefer this demo to the real game. I probably won’t find all of its hidden gems, and on future plays I might even just start to see it as a tree traversal exercise than the compelling story it tells. And also, my expectations are really damn high right now.

I could neither recommend it, nor avoid talking about it at this point.

My next post will be better.