High school, a ghost, and romance! Sounds fun right? Rei is a short little visual novel by sonnet009 that I thought was pretty adorable. Admittedly I’m not too picky with the games I play, but still.
(possibly mild spoilers ahead)
Rei starts off with 15 year of Aya, who’s just shown up for her first day of high school. Aya and her best friend Risa are a little weirded out by the teacher’s lectures on safety.
But the teachers have a good reason, because last year a student died.
Rumor has it the ghost of the student is hanging around the hallways, so like any good story with ghosts, Aya and Risa wander reluctantly into the school at night to try and find it. After Risa bails, Aya then finds herself alone, and meets….
Rei the romancable ghost! (well sort of)…
I won’t spoil anything more but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed this short visual novel. It has four endings, all relatively easy to find, and they are all unique enough and pretty awesome. Even the bad endings are cool. The visual novel is really quite short, only about 9000 words and has no CG’s , but it was apparently made in three days, so major kudos!
I decided to talk about Rei because it was a short visual novel that I really liked, with easy to grab screenshots, but I’ve also played through sonnet009’s other completed work, Aloners, which is considerably longer and really, really good. (Random side note: In Aloners you get to name the female protagonist and I named her Awk without really realizing how often her name would be used. Long story short it was quite grand and made a generally very serious story a little goofy every time a character ‘said’ her name).
What I like about sonnet009’s works is that they focus on very few characters. Aya and Rei are the stars of Rei, and there are only two major characters in Aloners. While I am a fan of works with many characters too, its a refreshing difference when you get to spend “more” time with fewer characters.
So go play these great visual novels!
Until next week! (Where I hope to have an update on my project)
-L
Game Tangents 