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I Knew That Cat Was Behind Everything

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  • 01/31/2014 09:56 PM
  • 814 views


A Game Made By: Sailerius & Perihelion
Created Using: Renpy
It's A: VISUAL NOVEL Game
That Roughly Takes Around: 10 Minutes To Complete
And It's A... COMPLETED GAME!!!


It’s amazing how some games can go a long time without receiving any feedback or even a single review at all during its initial release. But then again, maybe it’s just needs the right sort of incentive to get things rolling and put it into the much needed spotlight that it so rightfully deserves. And that’s what I love about RMN and their ability to create a contest such as “Reviewrim” to get people off their collective butts and go play and review games that have been just basically sitting in the darkness collecting dust on a shelf – waiting to be explored! And quite frankly, with the reputation that Sailerius has around here, especially with his much beloved Vacant Sky series, I’m surprised that this one went as long it did unnoticed. Well, your loss is now my own personal gain. Let’s go check it out and see if I bagged myself a wiener.

The Story


I don’t really trust this guy.


Our story opens up with a young woman named Gale who is about to embark on a train ride to go meet her significant other who is quite far away. Apparently, Gale has been asked her hand in marriage and she is trying to decide on what the best thing is to do. As she slowly begins to analyze and dissect the pros and cons of her newly found life choices, she boards the train quite astonished to find that there is hardly anybody on board it. In fact, other than herself and two other passengers (and one cat), she seems to be completely alone on what was supposedly a pretty busy train when she first came in. And what’s worse is the fact that Gale’s watch appears to be broken along with everybody else’s on this train, almost like if time has come to a complete stop. What exactly is going on here?

For such a short told story and only a few characters present, the overall narrative of The Vestibule is quite a good one. Clever writing and a relatable plot with a fantastic meaning behind it definitely hits home and struck a chord with me, which I find really amazing in such a short matter of time of playing this game. It basically presents itself rather well and ends itself on a very satisfying conclusion.

The Gameplay


Choices, choices, choices.


Gameplay wise, being a visual novel game, there really isn’t that much to do here. You basically move throughout the train through a small series of choices while interacting with the other passengers and various other objects, like doors and windows. Basically, from a visual novel game perspective, everything is made rather simplistic, so you can just sit back and enjoy the show. While this may be a bit of an issue that there really isn’t that much for me, the player, to do or maybe even use my brain for something like solving a puzzle, it’s a visual novel game and they’re meant to be told as a story like this, which I guess works just fine the way it is. While I would have wished to be more interactively involved in the game, I can’t really complain about it that much, seeing how much time the author’s had to work on this game.

The Soundtrack


Where that cat come from!?


There aren’t a lot of music tracks present in The Vestibule, but, for the most part, the musical score did its job and it wasn’t half that bad. The ominous melody that plays on the train does its job to tighten up the atmosphere; and even though it loops quite a bit, it doesn’t get very tiring or annoying like some other songs often do. The soundtrack works well in its favor, and it’s actually quite nice. Typical for a visual novel game, but quite nice. As for the sound effects, this game really only use a few, like opening doors or opening a can of sweet, sweet cola; it’s the generic type of stuff that you’re all accustomed to, and it works just as well.

The Aesthetics


Well, there’s that guy and his mysterious cat – but who’s counting!


I found the graphical presentation to remind me of that of the old MS-DOS games that I used to play on my old Macintosh computer back when I was a kid. While it may not look as specular to some, I really dig the presentation and its more simplistic design. The character portraits look quite nice, even displaying various different moods whenever they talk about something, and even the backgrounds and cutscenes offer an wide array of detail. In other words, this is a very pretty game, and I have no real complaints about it. There may not be much of an emphasis on a H.U.D or anything like that like the other Renpy games, but it’s not really needed here. I really appreciate the overall look.

The End Result


Let’s!


For something that was made in only a short matter of time for a contest, I really enjoyed playing this little light hearted snack. The story was very well done with a great reflecting message using fantastic descriptive writing; the graphical presentation looked rather nice; and even the game managed to throw in some comedic lines in there for some good measure to break up some of the doom and gloom. In short, this was a pretty nice tale that I think if you had 10 or so minutes to spare, I think you will all quite enjoy it just like I did. There’s no excuse since it’s available on almost every single platform known to man. As a game, it’s pretty simplistic for a visual novel game, only offering a few varied choices here or there. But I can forgive it because of its small time table that it had to work with. Perhaps if The Vestibule had some more time to flesh out even more of its content and go into more detail on some of its story elements, it probably would have been an even better game. But settling for what it is right now isn’t too bad, quite frankly. I always like to give developers who only had a limited amount of time some slack because I myself would find it extremely difficult to get anything even remotely plausibly done in a short of matter of time, especially to even create something extremely worthwhile. But Salierius and co. managed to produce something actually quite commending for their efforts, and that I have to applaud them on.

OVERALL GRADE:
3.5 / 5 - C+ ~ A Few Quips, But Otherwise A Great Game.