Another slightly delayed post! Apologies. At least I remembered to do the monthly wallpaper before the end of the actual month!
Once again, it was a thoroughly compelling video game that distracted me from remembering to post last night — in this case, upcoming Cover Game subject, 428: Shibuya Scramble.
I don't want to give too much away that I'll be writing about in the Cover Game feature starting next week, but suffice to say for now that 428: Shibuya Scramble is one of the most interesting visual novels you'll ever play, from a variety of perspectives: its narrative composition, its mechanics and its presentation.
For the unfamiliar, 428: Shibuya Scramble is a multi-perspective visual novel in which you follow the events surrounding five very different characters over the course of 10 hours in a single day. Each character's storyline has its own distinct personality — and we're talking wildly divergent here, ranging from hard-boiled cop thriller to psychological horror via slapstick comedy — but they all intertwine in various ways over the course of the complete meta-narrative, and in fact taking advantage of the ways in which each of these characters have a direct or indirect impact on each other is key to progressing through the game.
Probably the most striking aspect of the game's presentation is that it's all done using photographs and a small amount of full-motion video. The photographs are heavily stylised, making heavy use of motion blur and depth-of-field effects, and there are also some clear anime influences at work along the way, too.
But we'll go into much more detail about all that starting next week! Suffice to say for now that if you've been pondering whether this is worth picking up, the answer is an emphatic yes.
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