Created for NaNoRenO 2016, Her Tears Were My Light is a short indie visual novel by NomNomNami. What did I think about it?
Length: Short (1-2 hours)
Lewdness: 1/3 (Hand Holding and Kissing Only; No Nudity)
In this VN, the player plays as Time, a girl who has the ability to go forwards or backwards in time in order to change outcomes. However, she only uses her ability to rewind events (unless the player makes ample use of the Fast Forward button).
Time’s love interest is Space, a lonely girl who has the ability to create stars by crying. There is one more love interest who also has an interesting relationship to both Time and Space, but I will keep it at that in order to not spoil the story.
The game truly is short. It took me less than an hour to finish the game in its entirety. This is including the mandatory Rewinds and Resets players must go through to experience everything the game has to offer (which not only makes good use of the Ren’Py engine but also meshes well with Time’s skillset). That’s fine by me since this was created for an online game jam where developers only have a single month to complete a game, so it would be unreasonable to expect an extensive game. Not only that, but Her Tears Were My Light is essentially free (Name Your Own Price), so there’s not much to complain about.
What did I mean by Time’s skillset? Well, she gets these abilties called Rewind and Reset. Rewinds allow Time, aka the player, to backtrack and choose a different choice most of the time. There are some instances where players can’t backtrack, which is mandated by plot. Furthermore, once Time has saved a Memory (think of it as unlocking an event in normal visual novel terms), rewinding past a certain point also becomes impossible.
Resets are used when the player wishes to abandon a timeline and try again. This usually happens after Time has saved a Memory which has disabled Rewind. The player will have to make use of Reset several times in order to secure every Memory.
The game does auto-save, which makes saving not needed. The game is so short that saves are not required, actually, which is good since there’s only six save slots. And every time the players Resets, the saves are wiped regardless.
I thought the art was very cute. It’s not amazing, but it’s still soothing and pleasing to the eye with its distinctive outlines. I just really love how Time has an hourglass hair decoration and that Space has stars in her eyes. It’s so good!
The music is quite basic as the music artist makes heavy use of synthesizers. However, this was intentional as he was going for a style that is reminiscent of older video games. And this is a light, cute visual novel so it works.
One last thing I have to say that impressed me is that the game has a wide amount of translations available. There’s English, Spanish, Russian, Korean, and Chinese to choose from. Talk about accessible!
If you’re in the mood for a light visual novel about love and alternative timelines, why not give Her Tears Were My Light a shot? It’s short, it’s cute, and it’s well-written (in my opinion).
You can download the game here.
NomNomNami’s blog can be found over here.
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