Torn Apart: Over the Net; Kay

Torn Apart: Over the Net, Kay is a short visual novel dealing with monster hunters (not that kind), friendship, love and an online relationship built on a lie!
It has a few sweet things to it, but it is rushing every story thread a little bit, does not have a clear focus, and suffers from other minor issues.

Story

The game is a continuation of a story in comic form. It may explain a little bit about the way text is handled, but it is no prequirement to the story - just a lot of things will not make any sense or come out of nowhere if you have no previous knowledge. This is bad design.
You play Jack. Jack is a poor bastard who has seemingly everything and nothing, we do not really know. He is good at math and fighting, though!

On one end is the family history - tragic events, your mother dying in them - which eventually leads you to live with your uncle. You never explore what happened, why it happened, or what it means to you - you are angry at a bunch of people for things you do not know, and that is as far as we ever go.
Different endings could have highlighted this - but while one ending hints at wanting to talk about these events, you never actually explore what happened, nor do you explore how it makes you feel. There is not enough meat to make any form of guess, either. We just operate under the assumption that something bad bad happened.
Working under assumptions without any explanation is a bad habit the creator falls into on all ends.

You then have the fact that you are an amazing fighter and you have a bracelet or magic charm that helps you fight supernatural monsters. You do not know any of this before a monster appears in your home and needs to be fought - and is treated without any explanation as a perfectly normal occurence.
Then the involvement with monsters in your family and such is weaved in later, but for the "main part" of the story, this is completely obsolete. I realize this plays in a universe with monsters and the backstory is there - but I simply have no grasp on the backstory, thus I do not care about the backstory all that much and am instead invested in the story I now see. All this supernatural fighting simply feels tagged on for no good reason. It adds nothing to the story at hand.


.. okay?

You then have the story end of you being a loner and desparately searching for real connection .. apparantly .. but have lots of friends and people caring about you, and are super-popular in school and ..
*sigh*
I understand you can be a loner even surrounded by people. You can close yourself off, and while it could be that our protagonist does so - it is in no tangible way explained, seen, nor does it play a part other than him lying about himself at times since he feels he needs to do that to be accepted.
We get no insight into how he treats people, really. He seems like an ass most of the time treating a good friend (who is never introduced as an old friend and just pops up, I assumed they just met and she was super-friendly and open at first - but turns out they knew each other and I had no idea!)
.. actually, she is introduced as a new peer and acquaintance of your uncle upon replaying.. the more you know. It seems far beyond that in how she treats you, and how comfortable you are around her.

You simply do not get little beyond the fact that there are people, and there are a few interactions. Some people announce you their leader for helping them out - you have never seen them beforehand but "recognize their face from somewhere", and henceforth you are good friends.

And finally, you have the actual story thread giving the game its title - an online relationship/friendship of sorts with the gentle bully in class, which is the most interesting part, but receiving the least attention of the ones noted.
There is hinted gay romance (the desktop background is really too obvious and unnecessary for it) between the two, there is also a friend of you who is in love with his best friend and wants your advice on what to do about it. I found that part to be fairly sweet and realistically done - in comparison anyway.

Slow. Down. This is a game running about half an hour - you spend most of this time watching pleasantries and mostly empty conversation.
Take your time to explore these threads and actually let the player follow and make sense of them and this would be a solid game. As it is, it is crammed with information, backgrounds, different friends, relatives and events you get hints of, but never understand, explore or enjoy.


I wonder what this might mean..

We see that as online friends you care about another - we do not see why, we do not see what you actually talk about or share aside from one or two day stories.
There are so many ways to show you care even in a small frame (thinking of the online social link in Persona 3), but it is sadly left unexplored.

Writing

Writing is the backbone of any visual novel, and it is .. a mix, to say the least. It is fairly bad. As explained beforehand, the challenge playing this is really making sense of what is actually going on.

This is extremely apparant in the fighting scenes - they feel, like most of the game, rushed in their pace.
There is a lot of additional "stage-direction" text added in the text boxes, so you sometimes have a dialogue snippet, along with two or three distinct actions in one single box. Distributing them across a box each would already help to set the pacing right.
At one point, it is hinted at that a teacher makes an appearance, a person is taken away due to a fight that had taken place, and that is added as a one-liner in an after-thought. All in one box.

It would have been really wise to split up thoughts and monologue in a different window, separately from dialogue.
This would allow for a break to contemplate what happened, and actually get to see narrations, explanations and the point of view of our protagonist instead of a muddled outsider-observation.
It also would automatically slow down the pacing at least a little bit.

There are a plethora of typos and minor mistakes, but they are overshadowed by the lack of introperspective and suitable pace.
The style is mostly simple and utilitarian.

Other Things

There are a few technical oddities - for example, upon reaching an ending the game automatically shuts down without warning. This disrupts the impact and pace of the game.

The music is not really improving gameplay for the most part - tracks change only rarely, and for most of the game you will hear a classical piece of music. It is also really quiet in comparison to the few sound effects used.
I enjoy classics myself and I think they can do well, but they do not suit the mix of action, gloom and other things that are prevalent in the game. It is an ill match. A wider array of different tracks would help set the mood and guide things along.
But I can also see that for the pace the writing sets, tracks would change every few seconds, making this difficult.

Art is a mixed bag - it is fully custom and for the most part alright. A few characters, such as your best/new friend have particularily thin hips and look quite out of proportion, but it works for the most part.

All in All

I actually really cared about Nash, "the bully guy", I was reminded of many things in my own life, and I did enjoy the ending involving him. That said, it felt horribly under-developed and at the end of the game you know as little about him as you do starting out.

There are too many quick changes, making it a challenge to even keep track of what is happening. If I was watching a fully developed movie with the dialogue added - then this could have worked much better.
Sadly, a visual novel is not a movie and text has to fulfill both descriptions and dialogue.

The title feels like the game itself - it feels like too many elements glued together without a guiding line. It lacks the patience to stay with any element a little longer and thus ends with a poor, rushed experience of a solid concept.
If focused on the actual forming bond and relationship, this could have been a great game.