Six Rules

Six Rules is a visual novel game made by Kirroha using the Ren'Py engine.

The story centers around a boy living in the Heian period of Japan, his way of living under six rules devised by his clan and how resolute he is to abiding by them when he meets a girl. A bit like Romeo and Juliet but with Japanese kids.

The six rules are very much integral to the story and I liked how Kirroha brought me back to the rules when it was appropriate.

As this game is a visual novel, the main focus is on story and it delivers on that end. As expected, it is very text-heavy but about the right length (it took me roughly half an hour to finish) and the English is more-or-less perfect.

The graphics are well-suited for the story as is the background music, there is no voice acting though.



What little there is of actual gameplay, most of it compromises of mouse-clicking or hitting the Enter key to progress the story. The mouse scroll can be used to go back which is useful in case you think you missed anything, this is not made obvious unless you've played Ren'Py games before though. It is also a bit buggy and I crashed the game trying to go back a bit further than I wanted.

Going back to the story, I like to guess what will happen in this sort of stories and the ending (without trying to spoil it) didn't really surprise me though it looks like it did a number on a few people. The reasoning behind it in the "extras" section that is unlocked after the story ends is essential reading because it helps explain the ending clearly.

In terms of improvements, a scene section might have been useful if players choices were introduced to get branched endings. It would have definitely increased the play time here.

Six Rules tells its story well, there are no distractions in the form of puzzles or clicking everywhere on a screen to find a missing item but this works in its favour. A short but sweet bitter game.