woosk
Jul 16, 2023
Porcelana is Pandita Studio's first visual novel in Steam with a dark slice of life narrative. It features a male protagonist with a customizable name attending college with a mysterious classmate Isabella. As Isabella drops subtle hints to the main character, he begins to take an interest in her.
It takes around two hours to read through the visual novel, do another playthrough to reach an unlockable good ending, and obtain all achievements. There are published community guides and posts to help players with this part. I also like the developer's decision to allow some player interactivity by asking the player to write something on a blank TXT file in the game directory to start a different playthrough, find some hidden objects in three different scenes, and access certain inventory items in backpack. The artwork and background music are decent, simply fulfilling the role where it is needed, so nothing more needs to be said about the topic.
On the other hand, Porcelana can be rather short to justify buying it at full price. The other supporting characters are also often one-dimensional characters, or only show up near the end of the story, making it difficult for the player to feel invested in learning about them.
Overall, Porcelana is a dark slice of life visual novel with mature 16+ themes and some player interaction to help carry the story. I enjoyed my time with Porcelana, but it is fairly short, so I recommend buying when it is discounted to $2 or less to be more proportional to the playing time.
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