We would like to thank the developer for providing us with a review copy of this visual novel.
Story
The story starts out with Kei, a college student who is meeting his friends and girlfriend in the morning before their class. Dan, one of Kei’s friends, tells him that a new teacher has joined the school who is young and has been somewhat of a hot topic for a few people. After meeting this new teacher, everything is going normally in the class and the new teacher seems very nice but that is just a facade.
Turns out, the teacher who goes by the name of Evelyn is a witch, and not the nice kind, she takes pleasure in killing students.
This normal-looking day for Kei and his friends suddenly turns into a nightmare that they must find a way to escape from.
Pros and Cons
Pros
Soundtrack is good to listen to
The art style is well done
Free to play
Cons
The story had a good start, but eventually falls flat
Character development suffers extremely in the latter half of the story
Choices don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things
Story/Characters
The story had a good start, the characters all felt nice and likable and had personality. However, that is all thrown away when chapter two of the story begins. This stems from what the characters end up doing and what they did prior to the events of the visual novel. The problem I found with this is the fact that it all felt forced. The characters whom I liked ended up either doing something bad with an attempt to justify their actions.
Heavy themes are explored throughout, but the story ultimately failed to fully explore the topics that were introduced. One of the most glaring issues with the visual novel is the fact that all the guys are either idiots or outright douchebags and the female characters have this issue as well to an extent. The main character also has these same problems, but all the female characters end up liking him because he is the main character.
The one character I did like was Jessica as she was the only character that stood out as interesting and different.
It’s like Berserk or Fight Club but the entire point of the story was completely misunderstood. I saw that other players were comparing it to the visual novel Umineko.
The next glaring issue centers around the impact of the choices you can make during the story. Midnight Witch has multiple endings and certain choices will lead you to them. There are at least two final endings depending on the choices you make.
However, there are other choices that you can make along the way that don't seem to affect the story at all. For example, there are specific times when you have a few choices, but the story outcome remains the same regardless of the decision you made with your choice. I found that this lack of impact from the choice selection causes the character development to suffer since you really can't shape the main character based off the actions you select him to take.
Graphics, Performance, and Soundtrack
Midnight Witch is an incredibly beautiful visual novel, there are only a few scenes, but they still shine in the presentation of it all. I tested the game on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, AMD Ryzen 5 1500X Quad-Core Processor 3.50, and 16 GB of RAM, I experienced no issues throughout my playthrough.
The soundtrack is also something I enjoyed and is available on the Midnight Witch fan pack which not only includes the soundtrack but 40+ high-resolution artworks and some concept art for the characters. I recommend picking this up.
Final Verdict
Midnight Witch is a visual novel that I had high expectations for based off the art, but unfortunately did not meet my expectations. I would have liked to see more ways to develop the main character via meaningful choices that allowed the player to be something outside of an idiot.
It is note-worthy to mention that this is a completely free game so gamers will not be out any money if they decide to give this one a shot, but there is plenty of room for improvement preventing me from recommending this as a must play game.
The soundtrack and art are well done and worth picking up the fan pack ($9.99usd) if you would like to support the developers to encourage them to continue improving and making more visual novels.
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