Oh sweet summer child, you can have better spaced fonts.
I had high hopes for Chaos;Child – the latter of two entries in the recently dropped science adventure visual novel series – the earlier of the two (Chaos;Head Noah) exactly met my expectations. After being unable to respond. It seemed likely because the features are similar and the main character is less annoying on paper than the MC of the head. Unfortunately, Chaos;Child maintains some of the same gameplay quirks as its predecessor, but trades in slightly prickly characters for major text issues.
Chaos;Child occurs 6 years after the event of Chaos;Head. The event required the Shibuya section of Tokyo to be rebuilt from scratch and restored to its former glory. The main character, Ryusuke Miyashiro, is a member of the school’s newspaper club investigating a series of murders on the anniversary of the “New Generation Madness” murders depicted in the previous work. The murder is particularly gruesome, with the second victim being a female singer who was stabbed and bleeding after her Bluetooth speaker was found sewn into her abdomen. In the third, someone is suffocated to death by a rope attached to the support of a revolving bed in a love hotel. . The game does a good job of explaining what happened so far, and the main characters actually have social relationships that aren’t at gunpoint, which is great to see.
Basically, Chaos;Child is a visual novel with a long common root. The story needs to be fully explored before it splits into character-specific endings and “true endings”. The “delusional” system of choice at any given point is retained from Head, though not where it was sexually charged like the original. His M rating for this game focuses primarily on violence. Murder porn is off the charts here, mainly because it’s in the main his story. A very specific path required to unlock the true ending basically requires a guide. While there aren’t many character endings to unlock (four in total, Head had seven of his, and Steins;Gate had six), they last longer than either of his two Switch predecessors. I’m here.
The internal editor Pen was working overtime on Chaos;Child. Hopefully it will be patched soon as the default text size often causes the last letter or two of a phrase to be on the next line of text.
Also, I don’t know if this is a stylistic choice or another issue, but sometimes the last letter of a word or a punctuation mark is removed. (The “wai-” or “wait” cutoffs show up as “wai” with extra spaces.) These kinds of problems drove me crazy during the playthrough process. Chaos;Child has a lot of standard urban environments as backgrounds, but most places he only appears once or twice, with the exception of the school.
If there is a patch to fix the text bug (the game was still 1.0.0 at the time of review), I might try to go back to Chaos;Child. But for now, there are still plenty of other things to read that I’m not worried about bouncing out of the game early.
