Lonely Yuri is a kinetic visual novel by Night-time Sheep and DLsite falling into the genre of romantic comedy with yuri content. The story focuses on the relationship between two schoolgirls set in a modern Japanese era. Seri Aeba is always absent from class, and her teacher entrusted her classmate Fusa Konno to bring the lesson notes she had missed in class to Seri's residence.
As the title suggests, this visual novel explores the yuri relationship between two schoolgirls, and has a number of beautiful and attractive artwork featuring Fusa and Seri in each other's arms that serve as the main highlight of this visual novel. The game also has pleasant background music to match the sweet romance themes throughout the story.
However, this game is beset with several cons. First, there are some reviews that have complained of the English translation. Agreeably, the translation is rough although most parts of the story are still understandable.
Second, the story progression in this game is far too short never developing any meaningful relationship between Fusa and Seri properly. An example of the rushed pacing is when Fusa went to Seri's house to deliver the notes at the beginning of the story, she fell asleep and already ended up being held and kissed by Seri when she woke up. Most of the other scenes later on write about Fusa spending her time with Seri, and by the time Fusa is ready to move forward with her new relationship with Seri, the story is over, all in about an hour. @_@
Third, the ability to take screenshots through Steam does not work for this game, so you can expect the Steam community hub to be barren in comparison to other novels that does support this standard feature.
Overall, I find that the price of this game to be a bit high even after discount at $5 because the story is too short, lacks voice acting or theme song, and doesn't develop the character relationships properly. I understand this is a doujin (indie) production, but I would still like to see this romantic comedy have a wider variety of events such as being able to see how their relationship goes once they have officially started dating, or even showing Seri making an exception to attend class with Fusa, and so on. Furthermore, this game doesn't have Steam achievements or trading cards to highlight the artwork as it is the main feature of this game, which further reduces its appeal preventing me from recommending to purchase for yourself.
In spite of everything, I still hope this game will qualify for Steam trading cards and have Steam achievements in future, and the developer as well as the publisher will continue to localize and bring more 13+ and 18+ (I can only hope!) yuri visual novels to an English audience. Lonely Yuri is nevertheless a sweet romantic comedy with lovely yuri themes and artwork. If this game could expand further with an appropriately priced DLC or free update, improve on the English translation, and have a more attractive price, I might be more comfortable with recommending the game in future.
Initial gameplay video with author narration and commentary on YouTube by Gotan4140