Crossroad is kalanhow and TsunamiGames's first visual novel in Steam. This is an otome novel that features fantasy and romance centered around a young village girl named Lumy.
Lumy is instructed by her mother to deliver supplies to her grandmother who lives alone in a magical forest. Depending on the choices made, Lumy may end up encountering various inhabitants of the forest, and even might develop a special relationship with one of them.
The game took me around 3 hours to reach all endings and obtain all achievements with help from a published Steam community guide. Crossroad has charming artwork, with a mix of cute, funny, sad, and happy moments with plenty of unexpected surprises in the endings and routes.
The scriptwriter is quite creative in thinking up of a variety of characters, along with a large amount of endings, 34 of them in total. Each ending comes with a cute and/or comical SD picture. Each of the characters will also have an icon specific for that person at the end of every line of dialogue, further adding to the charm and highlights in the story.
From the settings you can choose to play in either full screen or in windowed mode, but there are no options to specify the resolution. You have all the usual options in the settings such as adjusting the volume and text speed as well as skipping text that has already been seen, which is good as we have 34 endings to get through. As this was built using Renpy, there are 60 save slots total making it much easier to organize saves to work towards those multiple endings.
In terms of background music, there is a large variety of pleasant tracks by Hilmer, Kamil Saners, and Delirior to highlight the charm of the game. The soundtracks In a microwave and Game Over also help to bring out the comical parts of the game. My personal favorites are CrossRoad, Never Return and Derevnya.
Mostly, everything was done right in this visual novel. The only con that comes to mind is that there are many dialogue choices which look quite similar in each person's route. Without referring to a guide or online walkthrough, it might be difficult to reach the happy endings based off your own guesses due to this.
Overall, Crossroad is a cute and funny romance visual novel with nice artwork and pleasant background music. If you enjoy short otome adventure games set in fantasy realms, then this is a good choice, but maybe wait until there is a heavy discount so that the amount of gameplay time is more proportional to the price. With that said, there are plenty of surprises and interesting characters so if you can't wait for a sale I believe you will still find lots to enjoy from this title.
Gameplay videos with author narration and commentary by ShippersGuideToTheGalaxy
I really enjoy the outfit designs in this novel. Her red and black outfit is amazing!