The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass

The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass
N/A
Metacritic
88
Steam
69.63
xDR
Our rating is calculated based on the reviews and popularity of the game.
Price
$29.99
Release date
6 May 2021
Developers
Publishers
Steam reviews score
Total
88 (170 votes)

An intricate mystery visual novel. Freely search text and jump around the story to unravel the tangled events inside the enigmatic Ashiya Tower.

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The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass system requirements

Minimum:

  • OS: Windows 7
  • Processor: 1.8GHz Dual-Core
  • Memory: 2 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Integrated graphics
  • Storage: 3 GB available space

Recommended:

Recommended requirements are not yet specified.
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Steam APP ID
1432500
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Windows PC
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turquoisechess3141
turquoisechess3141

I had a wonderful time playing this with my friends over the course of around 50 hours. I would describe this as a fantastic puzzle game disguised as a visual novel.

The premise is that the main cast finds themselves in an insane situation where a seemingly endless sequence of impossible mysteries unfolds in a rapid pace. Nothing seems to make sense at all, but in the end there truly is a logical explanation for everything. Naturally, your goal as the player is to figure out the hidden truths and explain whatever you can. There will be a lot of things that need resolving.

While technically a visual novel, you shouldn't go in expecting a well-written narrative in the same sense that people don't play The Witness for the plot. The game is fully centered around the mystery. Critics mostly harp on how this takes away from characterization/character development and natural-sounding dialogue or whatever, but I personally didn't care about any of that because I don't believe that this is a game that needs such qualities to shine.

As for the mystery itself, it's really well-done. The plot is wildly imaginative and unlike anything I've seen, or ever will see for that matter. I could not in my wildest dreams even begin to weave such an insane tale. Despite there being a LOT to take in, i was hooked on the countless deranged things that occur, and the solutions to many of these mysteries are truly beautiful.

This is easily my 2022 GOTY and it's criminally underrated. My only regret is making this the first game of the sort I've played because it's indisputably downhill from here.

...also the music kinda slaps.

obsidian.black.128
obsidian.black.128

This game is quite amazing. A well constructed mystery that the game encourages you to try to follow on your own. (and even if you can't, you can still experience the story just fine) The plot is well planned, and the characters are do not pick up the idiot ball unnecessarily.

Also has the absolute best UX i've ever seen from a visual novel - fully searchable backlog that isn't wiped when restarting the game, summary notes for each section (and more details once the game is completed)

DrowsyMoose
DrowsyMoose

An interesting mystery that takes inspiration from works like the Infinity series, but also pretty firmly establishes its own style. It's very much a mystery first and foremost, and seems to be written for people familiar with the genre and with similar VNs.

I have several issues with the story, especially with how things conclude in the final act, but ultimately I enjoyed my time with The Sekimeiya. I hope these devs the the chance to write another VN, because I feel like they were SO close to striking gold here. Just needed a little more.

Katabatix
Katabatix

I cannot stress how much I absolutely adore this visual novel!!! If you enjoy stories with very complex (but solvable) mysteries you'll probably love this game too. The story is enjoyable whether you want to put all the pieces together yourself or would rather just read and follow along as everything is revealed. I felt that all of the important mysteries were clearly and logically explained at the end as well.

As others have mentioned, this is definitely more plot focused than character focused, but I don't think this is a huge detriment. I felt that the characters still have well defined personalities and react in realistic ways to most of the strange events throughout the story, even though the focus remains mostly on the mystery.

Above all this is a brilliantly thought out mystery story and I honestly wish I could go back in time and play it for the first time all over again!

tjhance7
tjhance7

Very mixed feelings on this one, in that there are some super-negatives, but also super-positives.

Initially, it seemed like a huge slog. Very plot focused, I frequently had to stop and read sections very slowly to follow what was going on. Of the character cast, only one approaches a level of "entertaining". The co-protagonists grew on me over time, but I'd hesitate to say they're good at carrying the story.

Somehow, though, I eventually dredged up the willpower to actually engage with the mystery. To dig into what was going on, cross-reference events, look at the relevant data. In other words, I started to *really* play the game. And then the experience was entirely different.

Here's the thing: as a puzzle, this game is S-TIER. As a game about time travel, it is absolutely in a league of its own, and I've never seen anything like it. The sheer complexity of the scenario is staggering, and the rules that govern the supernatural effects are incredibly rich. This is the kind of game will stack 5 mistaken assumptions in a single scene, do this _repeatedly_, and then ask you to work it out. It's difficult, but it's very rewarding, and none of its reveals felt like an ass-pull.

To be clear, I recommend this game only if you LOVE puzzles. If you want to make spreadsheets while you play video games, this is probably for you. And if it's not, then it's not.

I wish the game had more emotional payoff. Even if it did though, I doubt my recommendation would change: this game is about the mystery, 100%.

ForcefieldDown
ForcefieldDown

An extremely convoluted mystery that will make you feel you just have to know what's going on.
The story is focused exclusively on the mystery, and lacks almost any form of character development, for better or worse. I felt this kinda helped it not to get bogged down by the VN-staple boring, tangential storytelling, so it depends on whether you'll enjoy it.

I really appreciate the effort the writers poured into designing the mystery, in any case. Recommend it to any hardcore mystery/suspense fans.

jams
jams

If you like Steins;Gate or Zero Escape, be sure to check this one out

There's some valid reviews about there being too much exposition and not enough characterization, but fear not- while the game's start is a bit stilted, it's not what it seems, and there is plenty of character and natural progression to go around. I really enjoyed the whole story, but it's best to go in knowing that this game is a mystery before anything else, and it expects you to follow along and try to solve it

BG88HE_FD_PA
BG88HE_FD_PA

I'm now done with this VN and this is my final edit to this review.

Overall, I can't recommend this VN. It's closer to mixed than negative, but there is no mixed option on Steam. Most mystery VNs require some level of patience. This VN will absolutely stretch your patience and interest to a breaking point. I personally have a lot of patience for this kind of slow mystery building, but even I feel worn down by it, as do most people who purchase the game since fewer than 50% ever complete the first chapter. Eventually I was running out of patience with these slow, contemplative, empty characters and just wanted the story to get on with it, and that's not really a good sign for a novel.

Let me go over several problems that plague this VN

1. STILTED WRITING
The characters have no personality, and they never really develop any. They all only have 3 emotions: confusion, anger, and blank empty robot statements. The novel clearly intends for them to have personalities(it says so during its reveal chapter where it points to characters acting differently as clues you should have noticed, but their personalities are so bland and cardboard that it's hard to notice any difference whatsoever)

2. MISSING MOTIVATION
The characters begin the novel with no motivation whatsoever for their obsessive interest in solving the mysterious circumstances of the VN and it makes little sense for them to do what they do. They simply all have a strong impulse to investigate the mystery for no reason rather than just staying put and surviving. This eventually makes sense for some characters, but for others, it never does.

3. SEARCHES AND SPECULATION: EMPTY BLOAT
Almost half of this VN is characters searching a building and finding nothing. Almost another half is a character going on long, pointless, speculative, paranoid rants. The searches NEVER turn up anything useful. The speculation NEVER actually helps you determine anything or move the mystery along. The searches are just there to create ultimately uninteresting mysteries that are explained later and the speculation is meant to help you eliminate false deduction paths by having the character think through it and find some obvious contradictions. The problem is the mysteries these searches set up aren't particularly interesting and there's too many of them. And the speculation these characters have are never really very helpful. The mystery in this game is open ended enough and has loose enough rules going forward that the speculation doesn't meaningfully tell you anything really

4. TOO MUCH N, NOT ENOUGH V
This VN is heavily reliant on text, which is a problem, because the mystery is extremely intricate and positioning dependent. It cares a great deal about where people and items are located at specific times, but almost all of this is just conveyed through text. It's a bit bizarre because during its reveal phase, it begins using a lot more visuals and diagrams to explain things, but doesn't do this during phases of giving the reader information. It almost feels like it's needlessly gatekeeping the mystery by just making it difficult to visualize it and forcing the player to do a bunch of unnecessary mapmaking and notetaking busywork if they want to be able to visualize it properly when there's no reason the novel itself shouldn't show these things. This is exacerbated by the game often going on long speculative internal monologues about previous events in the game and it can be quite difficult to parse and understand exactly what they're referring to.

On top of a lack of useful functional imagery in aiding the player's investigation and understanding, the game has pitifully little unique art of its significant events. The game's visuals are almost exclusively of background images of rooms and doors and character portraits. Even a shocking event like finding a person hurt just shows a background image with a red ring around the edge. Makes the game feel very thin. I understand the dev team is very small here with 3 people but it still feels underdone.

5. COMPLEXITY OVERDONE, SOLVABLE BY NONE
This is the real meat of the criticism I have for this game. You could really ignore the rest of it as forgivable flaws, but this section comes to the core of the reason I think this VN doesn't work. The Sekimeiya isn't solvable. Not in its entirety. Not only is it not solvable, but I think this is a mystery the writer actively does not want you to solve on your own and isn't really interested in providing you the tools to help you do so. The player simply isn't given enough information and the mystery isn't narrowed down enough to make any real sense of it.

That's not to say the game reveals nothing along the way. It does. But its ultimate solution is so specific and intricate that these reveals along the way really do nothing to help you narrow down exactly what happened. That's also not to say you couldn't figure many things out along the way and have several strong theories and ideas in place for the broader stuff(I had the general idea figured out but not all of the mechanics, and plenty of things I couldn't figure out), but as far as actually concretely understanding it before the reveal chapter? I don't think it's honestly even possible short of spending hundreds of hours making maps and detailed timetables. Maybe not even then. There is simply too much to keep track of and no easy way to actually track all of it. And that's truly the problem: The Sekimeiya is not difficult to solve because of some failing on the player to think critically enough or because the mystery is deep, but because it simply has too much minutiae to track, gives insufficient information to the player regarding its rules, and asks too much of the reader by burdening them with a lack of tools to actually track the information they want the player to track. This effectively results in a largely broken mystery that the reader can't meaningfully engage in, but merely be told the solution to. A good mystery should allow a critical thinking reader to meaningfully solve much of it, but I feel The Sekimeiya simply does a poor job in conveying the right amount of information.

It's unfortunate that the VN has so many shortcomings because it's possible that it could have been one of the greats. The reality is that it feels incomplete, like a game in beta that hasn't been polished yet. It needs a writer to flesh out the characters, it needs to find some extra spots to give the player more and better information, it needs an editor to cut out the fat, an artist to bring more life to it with custom CGs, and a programmer to add in better note taking and mapping functions. The framework for a great mystery is there, but the rest of the work isn't done yet. If it did do that extra work, it could really be brought to the next level and be worth playing for every VN fan rather than an extreme niche.

Ashai
Ashai

The QoL features in this game are downright impressive. I'd give this a positive review even if the story was bad.
Luckily the story isn't! The mystery is so well crafted.
I went into it with high expectations and was blown away.
Bravo.

Dark Fox
Dark Fox

*No Spoilers*

Only 1 interesting character, dry and uninteresting dialogue, bland characterization, paragraph after paragraph of exposition dumps that read like a textbook that gets worse as it goes on, very few character moments so their motivations have to be explained to you in the end, everything is convoluted for the sake of being convoluted, far too many contrived plot points, far too long to expect the reader to remember something that happened 20 hours ago even with the notes, the mystery is unsolvable by 90% of players according to the stats, and finally, the ending is disappointing.

The music and character design is nice, and the first 2 chapters are at least decent, but it falls off hard and doesn't come back. the notes system is a nice touch, I wish it was implemented in a better game.

*No Spoilers End*

*Spoilers*

A good mystery is like a good magic trick, Sekimeiya: spun glass is like watching a 40 hour magic show on TV trying to figure out how they did every trick on your own, at the end you're told the whole show was prerecorded and every trick was simply video editing, you're then given a 10 hour lecture about every single frame of video editing. Very few mysteries are solvable until you get towards the end judging by the test they make you do most people only get 40% right, the solution for nearly every mystery is that the magic rock can do everything.

The magic rock is literally every single time travel trope rolled into one, past and future time travel, timeline switching, regular time loops, hypothetical time loops, duplication, teleportation. It's like the story was written backwards, they make the most convoluted, obtuse series of events possible and then add more and more powers to the magic rock until they're able to explain it all. Since character motivations and backstory aren't hinted at much, you will have no "Why's" until the end when it's spoon fed to you. You will only have "How's", How did a suitcase appear here? Sekimeiya. How did Sai die? Sekimeiya. How did someone enter from the outside? Sekimeiya. Etc.

60 hours of this and I still don't have all the answers and I don't care to, no amount of attempting to unravel the writers bloated thesis paper on time travel will make this experience satisfying.

Parsnip
Parsnip

Without spoiler, if you hesitate to purchase the game:
- The Sekimeiya is one of the most complex puzzle story there is. It is however solvable, at least partly if you want to experience it casually, and at the end it will make logical sense. The mystery is introduced gradually as the characters discover it themselves.
- It is a mystery, not a horror story. It has no jumpscares, disturbing images etc.
- There is no gameplay, or barely any depending on your point of view.
- There is a LOT of text to read. Sometimes it seems like characters are obsessed with explaining details, or that some parts take too long. It all serves the narration in order to understand the puzzles. Some reviewers criticize the characters' personality. If, yes, they are very analytical, make barely any oversight, and do not lose track of what happened, I am glad that they do. Some could seem above average intelligent but that stays plausible and they do not become annoying as they would not need to be superhumans to act as they do, which saves the immersion. This is a story about a mystery, not about the characters. They are not the focus point of the game and exist to make sure that the puzzle makes sense and is solvable.
- The game has many tools and options to help the player keep track of what happened (great notes system, ease to jump back into some past text, search functions, filters, summaries of every chapter) and after finishing the game there are great tools to help you understand the last bits.
If that seems fun to you go ahead and buy the game. It is best to go as blind as possible and trust the developers.

I will think about the Sekimeiya for a long time. I still cannot believe how someone could write a story that intricate without any hole in it that I can think of, and I love it for that fact. It is very refreshing to experience, when on the other hand many fiction works can have inconsistencies/paradoxes simply swept under the rug.

nanami
nanami

I enjoy mystery complex stories and I was recommended to play (or more like, read) it by my friend.
But I have to mention she warned me beforehand that it starts rather plain and can be sort of boring, until it really starts to spin with all the mysteries. But it will be truly rewarding later. And it was.
And by slow beginning... I really mean it. First approx. 6 HOURS of the game was confusing by its lack of anything special. I just plowed through it because I knew it should get crazy later, trying to pain attention to details (and sometimes failing), guessing those details might be important later.
...and they were. This game is all about paying attention to details. After ending it and going through unlocked bonuses, I feel extremely satisfied with all the answers I got (aside from answer, or lack of answer on purpose, regarding Isla; this one was left unanswered as a tease). It's awe inspiring and mind breaking how detailed it is in the end, with supernatural phenomena being explained with mathematical precision you wouldn't expect. And it solves all mysteries, even those you would say were impossible to explain logically while reading them for back when they happened.
Also, keep in mind that this is visual novel - you get to choose some options between several or try taking a guess, but not many and it's mostly tons of reading. Hours of reading. Days of reading.
So I have to mention it isn't flawless. It relies heavily on details. But reading those details can be boring, to the point you want to quick-skip it (yes, I look at you, visiting-cafe arc.). And you can easily forget those details in the flow of the story (it's hard to remember it if you read it like week ago, because yeah the story is LONG). Add to it that your POV is limited to what certain character is experiencing and thinking, and that sometimes story is plain saying to you: do you have any ideas? No? Don't worry, you don't have enough perspective to solve this one. Yet. The pacing is all over the place too... The story seems linear, but is not, with occasional out of the blue little stories, which doesn't make sense until a lot later.
So, I love solving mysteries, but because of this, I stopped trying to make guesses at some point and just focused on going forward with the story. (Not completely, I had my own theories, of course, so it was still fun, but I stopped trying to make complex answers; also, being surprised why MC didn't guess it earlier...).
Somehow I focused on drawbacks, but obviously I had great time playing it. I enjoyed it a lot. I even liked the characters. The OST is absolutely masterpiece in controlling the atmosphere. Those off-tune pieces with changing pace were making me anxious while reading those parts (in a good way). I enjoyed the mystery a lot. And ending is satisfying, even though for the most of it you don't have a clue just where it is going.
Also let me say this: Sai is such a troll. (I enjoyed his character greatly).
So for me, the game is like 8/10. It could be masterpiece, it has all potential needed, but my brain is too confused after reading it to encompass it all. And I will absolutely read it again, now that I know so much, but at the same time I'm a little too overwhelmed when thinking about how massive it is.

Die for me
Die for me

In other reviews for Sekimeiya you can often meet with the opinion that characters, dialogues, pacing etc are bad, but complex mystery really good and worth it... well, I disagree with that.

So let's jump straight to the mystery part without spoilers.

What the main problem with mystery explanation in Sekimeiya? The way it is presented .

First of all, when you are making visual novel, you can use visuals to explain things. I'm not asking for some manga frames like in Danganronpa series, just some graphs and diagrams made in paint, at least(and Sekimeiya really needs it, and no, a couple of schemes in the 5th chapter and tips are not enough). Instead, you will almost always get walls of poorly written text, as if the main idea was to make part of the explanation as difficult as possible for the reader.

Another thing that bad is a systematization. There's not much to say without spoilers, just keep in mind that you will have problems forming a coherent picture of the events in this vn, their structure, and this could have been avoided. No, notes and search not gonna help much. Lots of events are in the same space, so it's easy to get lost in the plot; overwhelming theories; very bad pacing(especially in chapter 3 with huge slice of life part) and lack of good tools and visuals, all this makes your final exploration really troublesome.

And you know, in other works with much weaker mysteries, I always have at least some kind of emotional response, but here all I felt was: "so this is how it happens... k."

So if you think you just need to endure poorly written(in terms of how interesting it to read, idc about style and other things like this since I'm not native english speaker) vn just to get some blow-mind mystery in the end... maybe you are right. Maybe you will like it, like many other people in reviews, or maybe you will feel nothing, just like me, I don't know.

Sekimeiya feels more like some draft for visual novel rather than actual one. It could have been top-10 on vndb if it was written properly, but as for now it's just another bad vn, imo. And there were a lot of moments, when this vn really could have been great, but almost all of them was wasted. Writer\director simply had no idea how to handle tragic scenes, characters' motives, how to represent events to make you feel immersed, how create atmosphere, so instead of great thriller that could be made here, we got a puzzle that exists only for the puzzle.

And about the characters. I want to add that this is anime visual novel. One of the reason why I'm still in anime despite being 29 yo is because in anime characters matter the most. Some might say that characters in Uchikoshi's works are also weak, but Uchikoshi characters are on fine level in my opinion: they have personalities, past, they are different, dialogues aren't bad. The problem with Uchikoshi is that his characters just don't have some deepness like in Ryukishi's works. But in Sekimeiya characters are way worse(except Sai) than in Uchikoushi's works, so I don't get what is the point to make Sekimeiya in anime style, when you completely don't care about characters.

But still I can't say that Sekimeiya is some kind of trash. Like I said, it could have been top-10 vn on vndb, but instead we have some pretty niche vn for crazy Nakazawa and Uchikoshi fans. I would like to read new works from devs if they are gonna make something in the future, and remember Sekimeiya as their pilot project in "students gathered together and tried their best"-style.

5\10.
Or 6\10 if you like ost like I do. I recommend to check Sekimeiya playlist on youtube even if you are not gonna read it.

P.S. In case you are wondering why I have so many hours, well, mostly because I usually read vn's while I'm at work and sometimes don't turn off the game when I go to bed, but also because Sekimeiya was really hard for me to get through, I didn't even switch to other vn's while reading this one because I was affraid that I will never back to Sekimeiya if I left it once. Started April 24, and finished only today.

patitok
patitok

I've never left a steam review before but this game was so good and is so underrated i felt the need to write one. I went into this knowing nothing about it except that it was a mystery and i think that's the best way to experience this, so I won't spoil anything. All i'll say is that if you're the kind of reader who likes to think ahead while reading mysteries and tries to figure out everything in the story before the characters do, this VN will be perfect for you.

Krypton
Krypton

(no spoilers)

this is the toughest 'recommendation' I think I will ever make on Steam, and it really makes me wish Steam had a way to rate as 'mixed'.

Sekimeiya is a mystery visual novel but cranked up to the max. For the sake of spoilers I will not be comparing it to any other game or going into detail about the core mystery, but let me just say that the mystery is EXTREMELY convoluted. I will go into that later, but let me talk about some positives first.

To start, the music is great. While I don't think any of the tracks were created specifically for The Sekimeiya (I could be very wrong), they all fit surprisingly well. There's some extremely tense tracks, emotional tracks, hype tracks for when things really go down, all of the music is really good. The art is also great, and it's usually detailed enough to reflect exactly what's being described in the text even down to minor variations. My biggest nitpick is that it doesn't depict (minor? spoiler) character deaths. Instead of actually showing this, it just draws an effect around the screen and is extremely underwhelming.

The setting atmosphere throughout the game is also good, it holds this extremely uneasy feeling over you and the devs did a good job and making you feel creeped out. I love the layout and aesthetic of the tower that the majority of the game takes place in, and I love the setting of the village that it takes place in. It honestly makes me wish that the tower was recreated in VRChat or GMod, I'd love to roam around in a recreation of it.

I also really like the UI and the fact you can jump to any specific line in the game and take notes on specific section of each chapter, it really helps when you're attempting to figure out some of the stuff that happens within the game. These are genius ideas and I'm extremely glad the devs went as far to implement these.

Here's where I'm going to go into the things that mixed or just straight up negative.

The characters are a mixed bag for me, I like their designs but they don't have a lot of personality which seems to be a common complaint. A few of the characters feel like they get some development here and there but most of the characters just seem to exist for the sake of the story. Not a major issue for me, I didn't really mind it, but it's important to note.

The biggest thing to talk about is the mystery itself. Like I said early, it's extremely convoluted. In the last chapter of the game it gives you a quiz to test how much you really understood of the mystery and let me tell you that if you 'pass' this quiz (65% of the questions correct) you are in the minority of players already. That's how convoluted it is. This is my BIGGEST issue with the game, the mystery itself is actually extremely compelling and it makes you want to play through the entire ~45 hours, but when you get to the end it's just so overwhelming. A huge part of this issue is that in the last chapter of the game you're STILL learning crucial details about the core mystery. And not just minor details that wrap up some unsolved questions, it's actual fundamental knowledge about the situation you're in that is necessary for you to even begin to comprehend what's going on. I understand that the point of the game is to figure out the mystery by yourself, but up until the end you're working with pure theory and barely anything to actually confirm your suspicions. Along with the fact that there is SO MUCH going on (even though it may not seem like it at all) and so much to keep track of, it's genuinely hard to keep yourself as focused and motivated as you are at the start of the game. After all, the game is 45 hours long and chapter 1 alone takes up 15-20 of those hours. The end of the game expects you to answer questions about events from chapter 1, but that was literally 20+ hours of game time ago and they're asking you to keep track of minute details that you probably forgot even happened. As a positive however, they did a fantastic job at making a mystery this complex and still making it (from what I can see) free from plot holes. I cannot imagine how difficult it was to pull this off, and i respect the writer(s) greatly for what they've accomplished.

It doesn't help that the game does not do a great job at conveying information to you in a way that's easily digestible. When you're playing, your character likes to theorize. A LOT. However, a lot of the theorizing is done solely through text, which is VERY draining after a while. A lot of the things your character starts theorizing about is extremely complex, you're almost guaranteed to start mindlessly going along with what they're saying because it's just so overwhelming that you don't really want to think about it. More of the information needs to be conveyed by things like diagrams and actual flowcharts, which actually do end up being used but not nearly enough. Thankfully at the end of the game you unlock the ability to read in-game tips at specific spots and an interactive timeline, which I promise you is one of the best decisions they made. It is ABSOLUTELY necessary that these things were included and I was extremely worried that I'd finish the game and just be dumped back onto the menu screen with the game hoping I understood everything.

To sum things up, I really enjoyed the first 20-30 hours of the game. The biggest issue is that the mystery gets so overwhelming to the point that the vast majority of people are just going to give up and go into autopilot, ESPECIALLY at the end when the mystery actually starts being revealed. The other suggestion I have would be to create more visualizations for the player like diagrams and flowcharts, they feel extremely necessary yet only show up a handful of times. I want to see another game from these devs, there's a LOT of potential here, but some of the stuff here really needs to be ironed out. While the game is extremely compelling and it's extremely impressive how a mystery this complicated barely has any plot holes, it's just genuinely exhausting towards the end of the game. The music is great, the art is great, I love the setting, I want to love this game but it's really hard for me to do so because of the issues I mentioned above. If I had to rate this game, it'd get a 7/10. It was so enticing at the beginning but towards the end me and my friend just wanted it to end because it's just so overwhelming.

This is why I wish Steam had a 'mixed' rating: If you LOVE mysteries, can handle an extremely convoluted plot, and are willing to take note after note on everything going on and continuously theorize for 45 straight hours, you'll love this game. However, if these things worry you then this game will probably scare you off. I can't call this a must-play simply because of how overwhelming it is, but I do love everything about the setting, art, music, and world of this game. It's extremely conflicting, but I'll give it a recommendation because the game is overall really good and deserves a look. I can't wait to see what the team is going to release next, but I genuinely hope the things I talked about are remedied.

Salsa Stark
Salsa Stark

The game in 3 words: an utter slog.

This game made me realize why publishing houses have professional editors. An editor's job is to cut, cut, cut a writer's over-written manuscripts for the sake of sharpening the story (usually causing indignation and rage for said writer but at great relief to the reader). An editor understands what the primary ideas are and and attempts to shape what's written around that. It's clear the Sekimeiya's head writer had a primary idea of writing an intricate, elaborate mystery about a group of people trapped in a locked building chasing each other around and experiencing mindbending time travel craziness over the course of 12 hours. But sad to say, this gets drowned out by all of the extraneous word vomit that would never have passed an experienced editor's sniff test. This VN is in DIRE need of a delete key.

Flukiest
Flukiest

Great but i wish there was an epilogue where you could have seen the main 3 hang out after the end of the game and talk about stuff, maybe even get talk to the rest of the cast.

The ending was good but it could really have been made more satisfying

draigonic
draigonic

Absolutely stellar mystery. All the best things I could tell you to get you to play it are massive spoilers that would lessen the experience to learn about, so I won't. Instead, I'll say I spent 10 hours reading this, then was forced to go do something else. I then fell asleep, woke up, and spent the next 30 hours finishing. 30 hours reading, without a single thing distracting me, is an IMPRESSIVE feat, as my attention span isn't very good. I can't recommend it enough if you like complexity; you will not be disappointed. Its worth full price, and a STEAL if its on sale

Stache
Stache

I don't believe in ratings. I think of experiences an abstract soup of memories and emotions, and the moment you attach a number, letter or whatever else to quantify all of it, some of the magic is lost. The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass is now my prime example of why.

I believe this game is a masterpiece, but that is because of how good it manages to be in spite of its flaws. Should this balance out to an 8/10? Or does the overall experience overshadow these flaws such that it becomes a 9,9/10? In my opinion, neither of these make sense. In my head, Sekimeiya will forever be a beautiful, chaotic soup that made up one of the best experiences I have ever had reading fiction.

I would recommend just about anyone to give this a try, if only on the off chance you get to share some of the same feelings I experienced.

2dTones
2dTones

I think other reviewers have done a good job covering the experience of playing this crazy piece of work. Just wanted to touch on what it asks from you as a player (albeit gently).

At one extreme you could spend hundreds of hours taking detailed notes, carefully poring over them and theorising, and this VN is hard to beat if that's the kind of experience you're after.

At the more casual end, you can definitely enjoy cruising through the game up to a point, but there is a pretty demanding minimum level of effort and commitment required just to follow the story to its conclusion.

Hopefully you'll figure out what the right balance is for you - just know before diving in that it's a bit of a cognitive gauntlet whichever camp you fall into, but the ride is worth it. And the OST is a banger - one of the best collections of tunes I've heard in this genre.

Sidereus
Sidereus

The most intricate and satisfying puzzle plot mystery I've read. This game also has the best UI features of any VN I've played - the map that live-updates the positions of characters, the chapter summaries, and the notes page are all extremely helpful for keeping track of the details. Anyone who enjoys solving puzzle plot mysteries will have plenty to sink their teeth into with this game. Those looking for strong character writing may find some aspects disappointing since the focus is on the facts and details of the mysteries, though the protagonists are quite well-written in my opinion. The quality of the game is also very high for an indie VN in terms of CGs, backgrounds, music, and UI. I cannot recommend this game enough to any fans of mystery stories. It is criminally underrated and well worth a read. You can really feel the extraordinary amount of thought, creativity, and foresight that went into crafting the plot, and every detail has been carefully considered. Overall, a thoroughly impressive game that really deserves more recognition.

Kinu Nishimura
Kinu Nishimura

This review is negative not because I don't respect the intense and passionate craft the developers clearly put in, but because I can barely even compel myself to continue, much less someone with less stake in this sort of genre.

I really love mystery visual novels. Stuff like Ace Attorney, Zero Escape, Root Double, Umineko, all of those sorts of things are really up my wheelhouse, and The Sekimeiya, theoretically, is also one of those. However, having cleared through the first chapter of The Sekimeiya, I can't really recommend it to anyone who doesn't love mysteries even more than I do—and I'm a freak for them.

The thing is that The Sekimeiya is really, really, really clearly an intricate and well-thought-out mystery. The pacing on new mysteries is breakneck, and there's obviously a complicated but consistent set of rules behind them. The game contains a ton of great features in its backlog and notes and whatnot. The actual experience of playing The Sekimeiya is very accessible.

However, where the game really lacks is in the quality of its character writing. About four of the eight primary actors thus far have any notable or distinctive personality traits at all outside of totally utilitarian facts, and that's being generous. The emotional drama between the two main characters is well-developed and kind of interesting, but there's almost too much focus on it—with the aforementioned breakneck pacing, the only times the game actually slows down for a second is exclusively to focus on them. In other words, The Sekimeiya is a functional, utilitarian mystery where the intrinsic joy of theory-crafting and trying to puzzle out rules you don't understand is the ENTIRE gameplay.

There's nothing really wrong with that, mind you. But I exited all of my play sessions utterly exhausted, and it took me seven months to even finish the first chapter because of the bone-deep tiredness that the story's incredibly fast pace and lacking characters settled into me. The majority of the text is the protagonist or one of the other characters with an actual definable personality (again, slim pickings) going off on elaborate 'what if' tangents about the properties of the eponymous object, which are frequently immediately proven to be wrong. This is a valid tactic to disguise information, sure, but it's also really tiring.

Actors within the story are very utilitarian and seem to exist just to be put into conflict. I don't doubt that there are answers behind the strange behaviors some of them exhibit, but I also kind of don't care—there's very little to actually latch on to to actually compel a desire for answers.

It's a shame because I know this game is so clearly, CLEARLY a work of love and passion, but even trying my best to approach the mysteries as they come, I just can't keep up. I'm not entirely sure even what questions the story wants me to ask, and worse, I'm not sure why I should care. The Sekimeiya is a deeply cerebral work for a specific kind of person, for whom this sort of puzzle box where discerning the rules themselves is more interesting than finding interesting ways to apply those rules, and for whom the actors within a mystery aren't actually very important. I'm not that kind of person, and I think that sort of person is kind of rare, so I can't recommend it.

Maybe I'll get the energy to continue it at some point, but for the time being, I'm just so deeply tired.

Eko
Eko

Well, the Sekimeiya is a ontological mystery, most of the time you are not fighting to know what or how happened and more time thinking the rules behind the strange events that bend the game. I would give the game a neutral review if was possible, the game does some amazing stuff and dropping the ball hard in the simplest problems.
Pros:
-The mistery is intriguing, complex and interesting, at least for most of the time
-Good selection of music, even if it gets a bit repetitive after a while.
-Not a lot of plot holes, most of it is patched up even if sometimes the explanations are ridiculous
-The game is interactive and lets you kind of resolve the mystery, in comparison to other games where the answer is given and thats it.
-The UI is the best thing ive seen in a while, a lot of features and interesting concepts.
-It takes some interesting stuff from other games like the TIPS after the first playthrough.
CONS:
-The characters are something like super computers, thats it, and thats when they can talk, half of the time arent even present, 0 character development, instead of going full mystery and adding like 90 mini-problems, it would be better if they took some time to develop relationships or making the plot interesting, there was a lot of potential in world-building at least, instead of having to remember a small mystery from 40 hours ago.
-The game goes so hard on the mystery and lets you resolve it but its so overwhelming that at the end you just dont care, also a lot of the time the questions you get on chapter 5 dont even make sense or are kind of abstract. It would be better if you had less mini-mysteries and focused on the big ones, the game doesnt even let you resolve the big misteries tho, most of the time were just mini-problems in the plot.
-The plot and characters gets really boring in the last chapters, like you dont really care what happens to them, even their last objective its kind of dumb but I guess the objective could be spared, the main issue is that by the end of the history, you dont really care about nobody, there is not even an epilogue of what happened to the chars, the most you receive is an specific char epilogue but doesnt even talk about what happened at the end, just a recolection of memories. At the end you just keep reading it because you want to know how it was possible or just to finish the chore, like you already invested 30-40 hours, gotta finish it right?

At the end, the game had a lot of potential but the ball was dropped, I think the Studio had a lot of good ideas and implemented a lot of them like recollectiing stats etc, thats really interesting but couldnt deliver an engaging history, all they did is drop a really good/complex mystery sacrificing everything else.
If you love games like Umineko/Remember11/Ever17 etc, you would like the game probably but dont expect the lovable cast some of those games have. If the studio releases another game i would give it a chance, its their first game and they had some good ideas, I wish they will keep trying and bring us a gem for their next game.

Sir Connie
Sir Connie

If I were obsessed with this game, I think this would be perfect. It's ripe with mysteries big and small and seems exactly like the kind of thing you'd buy a cork-board and a bunch of red string for. A thriving fan community dissecting every little thing would be fascinating.

As a single play-through by myself though, it's kind of hard to follow. I wouldn't call it convoluted necessarily, but there's so much going on here that I really can't put everything together in my head in time for the pop quiz that is chapter 5 with a single read-through. But honestly, I think it's really great a story like that can exist. I kind of really appreciate it for doing that, even if some of the questions in chapter 5 are really bizarre and overly specific (was I supposed to know water can evaporate from a glass at room temperature in 3 weeks??? Is that common knowledge? And was I expected to notice Atsuki drank half a glass of water and left it in the kitchen like 40 hours of text ago???).

Basically, this is a great read if you want something complex, even if you can't fully unwrap everything in one read (I promise you, you won't). If you want something to read casually, look elsewhere.

Klepto Maniacal
Klepto Maniacal

This is the most complicated story I read so far in all the right ways.
After a slow read of 50 hours to get all the endings and trying to wrap my head around the mysteries I feel like I still understood maybe half of what happened which is insane.

The level of detail that went into this game is just out of this world hehe .
Every single piece of evidence presented by the writers challanges you to think with all your brain cells to understand what the hell they were thinking when making this story.
The Zero Escape, Danganronpa and Phoenix Wright series' all have great convoluted mysteries but still this game felt like it was in a different league. I hope more people give this a shot especially if you like figuring out sci fi time travel shenanigans.

I appreciate that you can always look through the entire game's dialogue with searching for keywords and you also get more story tips and a flow chart of EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER AND THEIR ACTIONS after you complete the game. Everything is solveable and solving it is kind of like a mini game in itself.

The dialogue itself focuses heavily on the mystery aspects of the game and mostly not on the characters but I found this to be fine as the mystery is just that good. Just be ready for some stiff text explaining the many mechanics behind the world of sekimeiya. Oh and all the songs are bangers.

Anyway I will probably spent another 50 hours trying to untangle this web and solve some of the mysteries that even the game purposefully did not give a clear answer to.

Bravo Vince Gilligan

loomweaver
loomweaver

Sekimeiya is a dense ontological mystery with immaculate attention to detail and all the necessary tools (and then some) required to solve it, extremely fair to the player yet still managing to confuse and misdirect at every step.
As any dense mystery reliant on its details, it is best enjoyed completely blind, but I want you to know that the Sekimeiya truly stands out in its respective niche of ontological mystery VNs (and ontological mysteries in general), and the novel ideas it presents are executed competently enough to provide a unique experience worth having.
If the paragraph above was enough to interest you in the slightest, you should stop reading this review and play it. Sekimeiya is the rare kind of game that is unique enough to be worth experiencing in full, even if you don't end up enjoying all of its parts.

Sekimeiya's denseness is both a blessing and a flaw, as every scene, no matter how mundane and seemingly pointless, has a clear purpose and pay-off when recalled in hindsight.
This, however, requires approaching it with an immense amount of trust - trust paid forward, as the game bombards you with dense descriptions and oddly structured speculations, hiding the key details in its labyrinthine prose you must sift through if you hope to have any chance to solve the core mysteries before the game (mercifully) spoonfeeds you the solution.

The mood of the Sekimeiya is steeped in tension, suspicion, but also almost melancholic quietness.
The characters of the Sekimeiya (with one notable exception) feel understated, yet real, as you learn just enough to understand their motivations, but never enough that they stop being strangers.
I don't know if this was an intentional choice on the author's behalf or merely a consequence of the characterization taking a backseat to the core mystery, but it feels oddly compelling and complements the quiet, yet tense tone the Sekimeiya establishes.

The quality-of-life features in the Sekimeiya are stellar and second to none.
The simple ability to Ctrl+F through the entirety of the previously read text and immediately jump to any specific point is a standout, and hopefully, more VNs will incorporate this in the future.
The notes feature is helpful for speculation and short summaries of events that occurred so far into the story, and the minimap feature grounds the VN in actual physical space.

The OST is strangely fitting, and full of 10/10 tracks that support the Sekimeiya's vibe, and even if most of them weren't specifically composed for the Sekimeiya, they still managed to make their way into my daily music playlists.
The graphics are occasionally beautiful, but mostly merely serviceable, with relatively generic character aesthetic and clearly painted-over photos and modeled 3D environments used for backgrounds.
The overall resulting aesthetic feels coherent and appropriate, however, and I never felt it was lacking or jarring. If anything, the cold, almost sterile feel of the Ashiya Tower fits the game's atmosphere perfectly.

It is honestly stunning that a single writer and two editors with no prior commercial releases have managed to create a game that (even if its overall execution is far from flawless, occasionally clunky and meandering at times) still manages to explore and deliver upon its core concepts far beyond what you'd expect from a AAA visual novel, much less a game with this kind of production value.

If you enjoy dissecting the narrative engineered with the precision of a luxury wristwatch, where every moving part has a purpose, you will adore Sekimeiya.
Even if you prefer your mysteries to have bombastic characters and quirky writing (neither of which you will find here), I still urge you to experience Sekimeiya in its entirety first-hand.
There is nothing quite like it among the genre of ontological mysteries and it is clear that there was a strong, coherent vision of the end product and an insane amount of heartfelt effort was poured into making that vision come true.
Personally, I look forward to insta-buying whatever the Trinitite Team decides to release next.

Malle
Malle

I don't want to leave a negative review, so just know that this is more of a 'meh' than a recommendation.

I enjoyed a few things about Sekimeiya - it does a decent job of setting up the premise, even if the first chapter is extremely long and somewhat of a slow burn. The art and music are quite nice (some of the tracks are strange at first listen but you kind of get addicted later, it's weird), what little character we get from the main cast was just enough to make me interested in them.

Unfortunately the reward isn't worth it. I hesitate to call this story intelligent when it's just excessively complicated, and the last chapter in particular is really jarring and unenjoyable (which isn't uncommon for mystery VNs, necessarily, but it's for a different reason than you'd expect.)

To put it simply, you will not understand what is happening for the first half of the game. That's fine, it's a mystery story. The whole point is to not understand and come up with your own theories on what is happening. What is not fine, however, is that the answers are ridiculous, and even if you pay attention, you will understand maybe a third of what's actually happening. (I'm not exaggerating. The overwhelming majority of people who play the game to the end only understood about 30%-40% of the story, based on the game's own in-game stats of the final chapter's quiz questions.)

I'll discuss more of my thoughts in spoilers. Be warned that I am going into detail about the final chapter and the overall 'answer'.

Chapter 5 is completely terrible. First of all, it gets very meta, where every now and then the author will pop in and ask you a question about the mystery to see if you got it right. They will do this 93 times before the end of the story. The questions are nonsense and mainly minor details that involve a lot of guess work, but you'll tune out quickly and stop caring very much.

Any immersion you have in the story is torn in favor of several hours of the protagonist experimenting with the McGuffins while you guess at the mechanics of the time travel featured in the story. This is incredibly uninteresting. You'd also better be sure you have a chalkboard nearby so you can keep up with which version of which character did what thing to which version of which character in which world at what time, if you're trying to actually understand the plot.

The plot could make perfect sense if you re-read the game several times. It didn't make much sense, however, casually reading through it, which is a big problem. My constructive criticism for this developer's next project would be to tone down the complexity. I know, have played, and relatively enjoyed, the games that clearly inspired this one. But this is too much over too little.

With all that said, maybe it's for you? The game itself is well made, has attractive sprites and decent music, and I enjoyed it for about half of my time playing through it. But after finishing it, I'm disappointed that it sacrificed enjoyment for convolution.

Still, I'd like to see more from the developer in the future. Best of luck.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Well, that was amazing. If you want something to make your brain collapse under its own weight, but still make sense at the end of the day, then buy this. That being said, the game doesn't hand you everything on a silver platter; if you truly want to understand the tangled web of events, then you're going to need to put in some elbow grease.

Pretty much exactly what I want when I play a mystery game. 10/10.

normalgrinn
normalgrinn

Maybe lacking in the the writing of the characters, but the mystery and the way it explores the mystery is more than enough to make a very compelling story.

SomeoneXXXIII
SomeoneXXXIII

This game is definitely worth playing. It lacks emotional weight and expects you to care more about solving its overwhelming number of mysteries than I think is reasonable. However, I still enjoyed it a lot, and it's clear the creators put a lot of thought into this game. With some minor tweaks, I think this could have been one of my favourite visual novels of all time.

𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪
𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪

An extremely flawed masterpiece.

scottsaw
scottsaw

Finished it offline. High quality game, loved it. If you like Umineko, Zero Escape etc this is a no brainer.

Bibo Boggins
Bibo Boggins

One of the strongest, most intricate and tightly-knit mysteries in any VN I have read. If you are a strong mystery fan, especially if you love to engage and participate in solving the mystery yourself (I strongly encourage using the note-taking system incorporated into the game), this is a borderline masterpiece.

Bralle
Bralle

overall a good experience, somewhat weak characters and awful pacing (typical VN pacing though) is carried by a great mystery, fantastic soundtrack and generally great QoL for a VN means it's overall a very enjoyable experience.

worth noting is that i left the game on and that it took me around 25-30h to completion, not 80 :-)

Xen
Xen

Flawed masterpiece reviews are hilarious.
"The dialogue is stiff, the characters were hard to follow, I got a hangnail, my dog died, but also this is the best game I've played in my entire life"
Mostly because people tend to...agree? And I think I'm one of them. This was a wild ride.
The game really wants to be a fair mystery and so it has to make sure everyone goes "detective mode" immediately, even when nothing has happened. It's weird. Explained later. Still weird. But understandably so. They didn't want to wave away some stuff with "I guess we didn't notice because it was early" so ultra-explicit it is.

Beyond that, there's nothing really to say because going in depth is a spoiler. Even some critiques. I recommend you find out what they are on their own.

The one thing I'd love the devs to see that isn't a spoiler:
At the end you're given a sequence of 95 questions in the final chapter. This is brilliant! It rewards people who wanted to pay attention. There is also no way in hell anybody could feasibly get all 95.

The last chapter was like surfing a colossal wave. And like surfing a colossal wave, if you fall off you're kinda done, at least for a while. There's a lot of story to go back and look at when you realize what's important and (more importantly) what's not. I think this game could have MASSIVELY benefited from more of these sequences. Not only were they great, but they serve as a way to keep the reader caught up with whereever you want them to be. Instead of one colossal wave, it'd be a series of massive ones and you won't be questioned about a random item found 16 hours of story ago. The reader gets to have more of these fun sections, the author gets to be more certain where the reader is, cognitively and it helps the reader be sharper for subsequent sections of the game.

100% autobuying the next release though.

SilentDD
SilentDD

A dense but highly enjoyable read. All the details necessary to fully understand what happens are presented by the end, but that doesn't mean you have to have all the answers by the point when questions start being asked. While I certainly didn't end up with everything fully figured out, every question I did get right felt rewarding, and the things I overlooked made a whole lot of sense when explained.

buzzo
buzzo

The best and most complex mystery VN I have ever played, this was incredible from start to finish.

l.tarabout21
l.tarabout21

One of the best, most hardcore mystery stories I've ever read. Seeing how well everything fit together in the end was incredibly satisfying and I'd heavily recommend this to you if you enjoy engaging with mysteries like this and trying to figure stuff out before it's explained to you.
I particularly loved how comically nonsensical the first few hours were, compared to the beauty of figuring out that nonsense in the final hours. The "notes" and "search" functions were also really useful when going over past information. Otherwise visuals were good, and music was great.

My only real complaint would be that the beginning of chapter 3 drags on too long compared to the fast pace in every other chapter and that some twists should have been given at least a few more hints before being revealed (I'm thinking of the Miiya twist in chapter 2 and the January twist in chapter 3). Sometimes it feels like the story purposefully hides information behind unreasonably vague descriptions, only for it to be a twist later, which feels disingenuous as the characters themselves had access to the information the whole time, and only the reader didn't.

All in all, still a great story with lots to think about.

Anime Revvie
Anime Revvie

Just a really incredible mystery.

I don't think the characters are as bad as people claim them to be - The main characters really grew on me during the story - While I admit that the expanded cast doesn't get great development and are a little more grounded it's certainly not distracting.

I'd 100% reccommend to any Mystery VN fans. If you enjoyed games like Umineko, Zero Escape series, or the like then I think you will be really impressed.

Noctua Spell
Noctua Spell

Good thing to know: it's not a visual novel where you have lots of choices and combinations of choices (or reaching certain ends) brings you to different endings. What it is: a mystery novel with a quite lineair progression through it, with dead branches that immediately tell you you've gone wrong but do contain information to what's going on.

Why do I recommend it?
Because it's fun to figure out wth is going on with that complete clusterf*ck those characters make of it and quite a lot of thought has gone into figuring out how to piece this plot together. length is about ~25 hours. It has a helpful search function, more save slots than you could ever wish for and option to take notes on things that are happening per parts of a chapter. If you like mystery and solving them yourself as you read on, then this is for you.

If not, then most definitely do not buy this :P

QuestLion
QuestLion

The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass is good and smart visual novel, so good and smart - you better stay far away from it. This is very specific type of entertainment which will go only for crazy Nakazawa fans, so if you are not one - skip it.

Basically, this game is expensive fanfiction based on two Nakazawa works, you could guess which ones. Also it borrows not only from them, but also uses Uchikoshi original ideas heavily and poorly tries to implement Ryukishi07 style of narrative.

Let's start from good points. Music is great. This is basically best VN feature and reason big Kickstarter campaign was held. You can listen to music in gallery after game and it's only reason I see you could have more than 40 hours of playthrough. Problem is, music is still copyrighted, so if you are letsplayer you are warned of consequences in menu. Being taken from different authors there is no some theme or leitmotif behind music, so it works natural only in 20% scenes of story or so. Otherwise, it's just random good music you are listening to. Sound design is not that great, but it seems authors cared.

Graphics are something. You are welcomed to great and powerful backgrounds and characters sprites. Then you understand that most characters have one or two poses with emotions, sometimes slightly different to their normal faces. Not much of body language here. Backgrounds are 50% empty - these are just floor, walls, copy-pasted things. Only one third of these are looking lively. But that's 75% of BGs. What about other 25%? These are straight out photos in way similar to Nasuverse or Ryukishi07 works. They were using it then they were indie developers without much money and they rarely used them nearside painted backgrounds, because it would look weird. So go figure, why graphics are so expensive.

Technical part is great. UI is probably most good thing after music. Made in Ren'py, you don't feel like it even if you go into settings menu and see typical preferences options. Sometimes pauses between scenes and music were present, but I don't know if these were some lags of downloading or weird design decision. Main feature of game is text search, which is truly unique thing, but I think this transforms this game into pedia more than else. It's made for specific reason, which is story.

So, story. Concept is good and it got no specific plot holes as many people notice. There are other problems about it.

First, storytelling. Pacing is terrible and narrative is broken. From start you get 10 minutes or so to know your main characters and like them. Then things happen and you are atttacked by walls of text. These walls go in three tastes: 1) Narrative drily describes things happening, 2) Main characters questions themselves and events in long monologue (like you are reading pedia or questionary, and its not like pseudo-scientific Nakazawa/Uchikoshi infodumps), 3) Other people go into two- or three- sided conversation suddenly playing great detectives and accusing each other with few clues. So, you, reader, are not welcomed here aside from that your PoV is required. Very few jokes and references and ones present are lame. Some scenes are added just to make text longer. Story kinda becomes better soon with random flashbacks and few spoiler things, but then comes middle of story and you are given slice of life which is weirdly out of place even for mystery VN concept. Afterwards narration becomes sort of meta, making you forgetting you came here reading integral story with characters and not being questioned by writer about what did you understand what in the world they meant by that.

Second problem are characters. As said before, you have 10 minutes to meet main duo, then 20 minutes to meet others. They have no interesting personality and are basically "shadows" of characters from other stories. MC is Takeshi or Junpei who is stupid and unheroic until endgame, but from start becomes very cold-minded and sightful of situation even without any detective expierence. He got two mysterious waifu as friends (nothing suspicious here), but one is dead (nothing suspicious here either). Sai is Marty Sue and self-insert which can tell and do anything to make him cooler and story longer. Erina and Isla are reformed from Umineko, you probably know from who exactly. Akaro and Katei are two adults whose role is to be kicked by younger protags. Naomi... who's Naomi? Also, few characters from backstories make appearance, but only two of them get some presentation and then there is random guy who gets image, so I feel like its kickstarter reward. They all are made for sake of creating mystery, like furniture in empty room, but you need leap of faith to start liking most of them.

Third and final nail into coffin is ending. Story kinda... ends? If you read Remember11, you could know what I mean, but it is way worse. Instead of some resolution and direct answers, characters make one heavy decision and then suddenly author, in form of narrator, asks you if you liked story, questions you about some weird logic which is not fair-play whodunit (Call Knoxx to the rescue) and then unlocks some promised features you forgot about and suggests you to reread story to understand ending better. Features are helpful, I got some idea about how story ends and don't know if rereading unlocks some true ending route, but I don't want to sink in 25 hours of poorly written text for some virtue's last reward. This VN is totally not casual, author even states you probably would not understand his grand scheme, so let's take them on word and get it as one more reason to not try to.

In the end, The Sekimeiya is thing I feared most then I first saw it's page. It's mystery for sake of mystery, nearly sterile and empty just like corridors of museum on screenshots. You can hardly allude to these smart-head characters (which are smarter than you a lot, that's the point of writing), you don't have love story and friendship themes are omitted, there are no horror elements to keep you entertained, detective work is primitive one, so all it got are senses of paranoia and confusion which it makes by hiding some facts and features during first readthrough from player, but being linear VN you feel like you are reading textbook on stuff you hear for first time than engaging and satisfactory story. I also could compare it to Zero Time Dilemma, being total opposite in contents but same type of quality. It similary confusing, silent about some things (waiting for you to notice weirdness) and grants some answers akin Deus Ex Machina (like aliens technology with little to none explanation). However, ZTD is third game in series (you could know characters), got puzzle gameplay, unique non-linear system of storytelling and adds horror and humour as in, you know, game and story. So you could spend same 25 hours playing cool game or reading one and meaningful Ryukishi07's episode, not read this fanfic.

P.S. Wait, is it me or Shiroya lived at home for nearly fifteen freaking days without checking any calendar, date on newspapers or such, absolutely oblivious about crowds of people on Happy New Year? That's not plothole of course, it's plot abyss.

P.P.S. At this time, if you see this review and read comments, you could find interesting how different people write similar things in their reviews and then ganging up on single negative review for current moment. Yes, I should say, I probably don't get some parts of "maze" writer made, but it's because my job was to skirmish game for honest review about this as fan of visual novels and not mysteries per se, and to make sure these positive reviews from developers and bakers weren't as biased as mine.

And as you can see, my negative review doesn't condradicts most of positive claims - I say it's wall of text, they say it's long mystery. I say plot is dry, they say you don't need emotions for reading through this. So that's only fair. Skip it.

AceAttVeg
AceAttVeg

The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass is for anyone who enjoys complex Visual Novel mysteries.

Unless you have a degree in temporal mechanics, some of the finer details of the plot can be hard to decipher, especially your first time reading. Seriously, even if you’ve played things like Steins Gate and Zero Escape, it won’t prepare you for the complexity that’s coming. Fortunately, even if there are some specifics that remain out of reach for a casual reader, the larger plot isn’t too hard to follow. And it feels good to understand more and more as time goes on.

Usually in a story like this, there are tons of plot holes, but here it feels like the writers had an explanation in mind for every small detail. After clearing the story, you are presented with some additional tools to learn even more about what happened, highly incentivizing a re-read either immediately or later down the road.

The characters are very interesting, and the usual tropes are kept to a minimum. There are dozens of hours of material to keep you busy. I wasn’t a huge fan of the music personally, but you have options to play with sound effects only if you prefer. The novel is not voiced, so I preferred to treat it like a regular book or use my own playlists if I felt the need.

This game is extremely niche even among Visual Novels but for some of us, it’s just what we’ve been looking for.

Tyson
Tyson

Sekimeiya is one of the best games/visual novels I've ever played. I've been interested in this game since the kickstarter and as a massive mystery game fan I had high expectations. It exceeded them in every single way.

The game is about a group of individuals entering a tower for an event, who all get trapped and have strange experiences happen to them. They are taken on a ride for the next 12 hours.

And boy, what a ride it was. This might be the single most complex/intricate narrative I've ever played in a game. There are so many twists and turns that the story takes and all of them are consistent with the rules of the world. The rules are hard to figure out, and the game does provide a small amount of help in understanding this. However, it is pretty much up to you to apply the rules in order to understand the events that took place. The game is for the most part linear (apart from small side routes here and there which are a couple of minutes long at most), but asks you questions along the way to test your understanding of the narrative. There is no consequence of getting them right or wrong, it is just purely to rate your understand of the world (you can even compare the score you got with what the other players chose, which is super cool). I love this implementation and figuring out all the events that took place was so much fun. There are still parts of the game I don't fully understand and I intend to play through the game again to get some answers to unanswered questions. The story is around 20-30 hours long if you are a fast reader and want to understand the story fully, and 40-50 hours if you are not.

The mystery is at the forefront of the game, and unlike most other VNs, there are little-to-no slice of life sections or moments of respite. I loved this aspect as I absolutely hated them in other similar VNs such as Steins;Gate and Root Double. The entire point of the game is solving the mystery and applying all that you know to figure out the events in the game. If you are more into character-driven stories, you may not like the story so much in this. However, I still loved most of the characters in the game apart from 1/2. The main characters are so smart and are competent unlike characters in other VNs, which I loved. In particular, Atsuki, Shiroya and Sai are my favourite characters. The game spends a lot of time in the minds of the characters you play as and reading their thought process and comparing it with your own was always entertaining. I also liked that the game uses little to no tropes like other VNs do. It is just so refreshing to not be constantly annoyed by some shitty pervert character or some generic heroine #368 or whatever. The writing is excellent throughout.

The story is also paced incredibly well for the most part. It starts off somewhat slow, but as the different events kick in, the pace slowly starts to build up and you start to have no idea of whats happening. I'd say it's similar to the pacing of route A from Root Double where you are directly dropped into the action without really delving into some backstory of the characters. There are certain sections of the game which drag a bit, particularly in the middle, however it quickly picks it back up and the story starts firing on all cylinders until its conclusion. One thing I didn't necessarily like was that there wasn't really an epilogue to see what happened after the events of the game, but its more of a minor gripe as the game wraps up everything that is needed to finish the story. Another great thing is that there really are zero plot holes, I can really tell that the Trinitite team really put a ton of effort into telling a logically sound and consistent story.

There are two mechanics that I absolutely loved in the visual novel. They are the search and the notes functions. These are so well implemented are are really crucial to understanding the story. I constantly took down notes as the story progressed and this in turn helped me keep track of all the stuff that was going down. Notes are needed as there are minor details that you can miss out on that could help you better understand certain events. The game does keep a couple of main notes for you that tell you the high level story, but you will need to keep track of some minor details that the game will question you about later. The search function was also so seamless, whenever I needed to quickly look up a series of events or the dialogue from certain characters, it was really easy to do so. These are top notch features that I feel are absolutely necessary in this genre and Sekimeiya has really set a standard for the industry. I've used certain IDEs and text editors in the past that aren't this good. The UI was also excellent.

The art of the game is great. While some of the backgrounds in the tower itself are a little generic, they do their job well. What really does stand out are the CGs and they are GORGEOUS. The characters look great and the scenery of Yushibana is a sight to behold.

The music is also pretty good. I felt that some tracks felt inappropriately used as i felt that quite a few scenes in the game really ought to have had calmer music. While it wasn't a big deal, it can really stress you out as you constantly have these intense tracks playing and you also have to try and wrap your mind around the story. The tracks themselves are all great however.

I did have a few gripes with the game. The notes and search interface would bug out ever so slightly by keeping the text cursor either a few characters behind or a few characters after your previous notes. This was annoying as I always kept maintaining and updating my notes throughout the game, and if I wanted to change certain sections of the text I always made mistakes as the cursor doesn't properly indicate where it is actually pointing to. Another thing is that it isn't really easy keeping track of the "flow" of certain events since there is a LOT of complexity to the narrative. I don't think there is really an easy fix for this however. There is something added after the end of the game that helps you with doing this. There is also no voice acting in this game, so if its a deal breaker for you this game may not be for you. I felt it never needed it though.

All in all, the cons never really detract from the experience. I had an incredible time with the game and if you ask me this is one of the best stories ever told in video games. If you are a fan of really complex mysteries and you love solving them on your own, this visual novel is for you. You can still also enjoy this without applying your mind too much, but it really is designed so that you piece together the story on your own. This is one of the best games I've ever played, and is one of the greatest visual novels ever, it is as good as if not better than greats like Remember11, Ever17 and Steins;Gate. I can't sing enough praises of this game and can't recommend it enough. Thank you to Trinitite team for this wonderful experience. You can really tell the love and passion the team has for the genre, and it is evident in every aspect of the game. The fact that they've created such an incredible VN as their first game speaks loads about their passion, skill and love for the genre. I really look forward to see what's next for the team, as they surely have a lifelong supporter in me. I really wish I could wipe my memory and play this incredible game again for the first time. Great job to everyone who worked on this game!

CaptainZentra
CaptainZentra

Wow. What a spectacular game. This is easily the most complex and well thought-out mystery I've experienced, and I can't fathom how long it must've taken to make. The entire game is a gigantic puzzle made for the player to solve, and I don't think it will appeal to everyone. At first, I wasn't sure if trying to solve the questions was worth it since it felt like the game was doing it for me—the characters theorize a lot and are usually pretty smart—but the game provides you with a notes and search functions to help you narrow down the events, so I figured there was a point to theorizing myself. I have to say, I'm glad I took my time to think things through and write information down, because it helped me solve things and it was extremely rewarding at the end.

I've played 'similar' visual novels like Zero Escape, Root Double, Steins;Gate, and the Infinity series, but don't be deceived by the similar premise. This game is a lot denser than those, and I doubt you'll enjoy it if you play it casually and with your brain off. If you NEED an emotional attachment to enjoy a story, I'd reconsider diving into this game since the appeal, from the beginning, is to crack open an insanely layered set of events. And I don't mean to say there's no emotion, but it's not the focal point.

The art is pretty (albeit a bit generic), the music is fantastic (some of it is pretty gritty, which might put off some people, but it fits really well during dark and confusing scenes), and the QoL features might be the best that I've seen out of any Visual Novel. If what I've described sounds attractive to you, get this game immediately. It's hands-down the best English-only Visual Novel I've played and in my top 3 VNs, but while I admire that it strictly tries to appeal to its target audience and offers a beautifully crafted mystery, if you're looking for a story to read on and off and not commit hard to, you should probably hold off from playing this.

9.5/10, blown away

astand
astand

A mind-bogglingly complex visual novel in vein of Infinity series/Root Double/Zero Escape.

Should be must-play for any mystery VN fan.

(and I recommend going as blind as possible into it, obviously)

twins10
twins10

while the mystery might nice the game suffers from terrible character writing and dialogues,

characters react and talk like robots or maybe bored actors playing a role,

parts of the cast seem to start investigating for no discernible motivation or reason at a point they have no reason to do anything more then wait a few hours with far more focus and intrest then makes sense.

so far twice reasoning was partially based on basically
"as a utility maximizing automaton if this character did X then Y must be true as a perfectly efficient and rational actor would not X without Y"

the mystery might still be intresting as long as you accept that it is the entire purpose of the with no attampt at writing characters to play it out let alone recognizably human ones.

Charlie
Charlie

An ambitious mystery visual novel that'll work your gray matter.

The story and pursuit of the whole truth is what you should be here for. While something like this doesn't have broad appeal, any fans of mystery, complexity, and suspense will be right at home. The reader is given effective tools to decipher the truth as the characters themselves work through the mystery. It is possible to understand the full picture at the end, and it's incredibly satisfying.(My four hours spent in the Notes section is a testament to the effort involved).

This title has basically occupied the majority of my free time for the past week, even to the detriment of sleep. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

sambuske
sambuske

as a vn, it is everything i wanted steins gate to be

JohanPip
JohanPip

No Visual novel has ever made me spend so much time *NOT* reading the Visual novel, but instead made me think, take notes, craft theories and construct timelines.

According to the in-game playtime recorder, I’ve spent 17 hours in the notes section and 8 hours reading the log. But that doesn’t take into account the time where I’ve just been theory crafting while staring at the screen or when I’ve audibly gasped “No fucking way dude” and I have left my computer with my hands in the air because of what just occurred.

I highly recommend this Visual novel for the right type of person. You need to be able to enjoy reading lengthy internal monologues and characters going over every major and minor detail. And while I don't consider myself especially intelligent and English isn't my first language, the story really is complex and I don't think many people will be able to appreciate the puzzle that is this Visual novel, if they just read it at the pace they read a slice of life VN. So, while I’m sure that spending 25+ hours in the notes and search section is definitely overkill, you should properly be prepared to reread a few sections and make sure you actually understand what’s being said before you go to the next line.

From here I'll just be rambling a bit, putting my thoughts into words.

I was surprised by the fact I actually think that most characters were well written. I went into it believing that the characters would just be vessels to facilitate the mystery, and to some extent they totally are. But their individual motivations were totally fine, and they had plenty of personality, which made sure that I did connect with them. So not only did I want to solve the mystery, I also wanted to see what would happen to the characters themselves.

The music is actually great! Almost every song is a bit of a bop. I’ll have to wait and let the recency bias fade a bit before I can say for sure, but this soundtrack is properly among my all time favourite VN soundtracks.

I Love the QOL features, and I felt bad when I rated them from best to worst in the stats scrteen, as I liked and appreciated every one of them. The stats themselves where a very nice surprise I didn’t expect! (I did however get a fair few bugs when using the notes, if I wrote too much for a single scene)

I really do like the idea behind chapter 5, as it felt really good being able to prove that I had understood what had occurred in the tower. But sometimes when I answered incorrectly it did feel kinda unfair. Half the time when answering wrong I would go “yeah okay that actually makes a lot of sense”, and in those cases I was happy to take the L. But the other half of the time, I felt that how I could’ve realised the answer was unreasonable, or that more than one answer made sense. I did end up with 70% correctly answered by the end though so I guess I passed with a C- lol

Anietnu
Anietnu

Basically, this is a pretty solid mystery visual novel made with a mindblowing level of detail. If you would like to think and smash your head against the keyboard tryng to put all the pieces together to solve a massive riddle, i recommend this to you.

Music is nice, visuals are nice, the pacing was perfect for me and it has a lot of quality of life features that make an overall better experience.

The weakest point to me are the characters for sure.

Danmaku
Danmaku

Game makes my brain hurt
Solid and tight mystery with few plotholes(at least compared to the Zero Escape Series and Ever17)
Many points to think about and speculate on
Notes system and search system is ingenious
If you can get past the characters having more reserved and inquisitive personalities with semi-off motivations and jarring music choices
This is a solid purchase for seasoned mystery VN fans who want something challenging

astralchild
astralchild

A brilliantly-crafted visual novel with one of the most complex plots I've ever come across. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, though - I loved the characters, but the focus isn't really on them (or rather, it's mostly on Atsuki and Shiroya). They get moments of development and they're far from bad; it's just that this VN is simply more about the complex plot, and figuring out the puzzle of what on earth is happening.

It pays off really well in the end, and I thought everything tied together incredibly neatly - it's obvious the writers of this VN have spent an ungodly amount of time thinking about every single action that happens during the story. However, the story quality itself does lag a little around chapter 3, in my opinion? But it picks right back up at the end, and it's never bad enough to make this game not worth every cent; it simply took me a little longer to get through than the first couple of chapters.

All in all this is a wonderful game. Nothing will replicate the feeling of playing through the first chapter completely blind ever again. There's so much tension, uncertainty, and questioning, and it culminates in a plot that I found ultimately rewarding to follow and pretty touching. The game itself has incredible UI - easily the best UI I have ever encountered in a VN. All of the game's music is accessible in-game after you complete it, there's a great chart at the end to help you figure out the more complex paths, there's stats that you can compare globally, there's a search function and a notes function in the game... it's all very well made.

Also, Sai is really, really hot. Just putting that out there. I would buy an entire game about Sai. He's also one of the best characters, behind Atsuki (my personal favourite) and Shiroya. Sai-focused VN when pls

Morbid Views
Morbid Views

The visual novel was good. Fell asleep while the game was running twice, but i actually finished it in about 26 hours. Wish their was a epilogue. I loved the song Twice As Dead.

Atlas
Atlas

For me, this game is beyond amazing. Especially considering it's minimal budget, I can say with confidence that the story it tells is among one of the best I've ever experienced. To be as spoiler free as possible, my thoughts in detail about some key elements are as follows:

The Story : This game focuses on one major mystery (and many smaller mysteries which stem from it). Regarding the writing, it seems that the main effort was put into that. Thoughts of the player character and discussions with other characters are executed very well. The game is told in multiple chapters, and every chapter differs a little bit in it's writing style. Some chapters focus more on character interactions, some focus on explaining different circumstances and such. This inevitably leads to major jumps in pacing, sometimes it seems to progress very slow, sometimes so much happens that it is hard to keep track of everything. And believe me when I tell you: The story, if you want to understand 100% of what is happening, is among the most complex and complicated stories I have ever seen. Many situations are so confusing and ambiguous that it's basically impossible to keep up. The game gives you many hints about what is happening, some more evident, some entirely obscure. Everything that happens in the game is explained in detail at the end of it, and for me, some parts are so confusing that I still don't get them 100%, for some parts I had to read the explanation for like 20 minutes to make sense of it, and yes, it does make sense. Also at the end, the game presents you questions to check if you have come to the right conclusions, the answers don't change the outcome of the story and serve to just see if you could figure out parts of the mystery yourself, a feature I really love. Overall, it baffles me how someone could even come of with a story of this complexity and magnitude. The story itself is the strongest part of the game (yeah duh, in a visual novel...), so if you are not into mystery stories where you have to think (and I mean REALLY think) about what is happening and such then this game probably is not for you. Also, you really can't play this game with your brain on auto-pilot. I basically needed to be completely sober and not tired to be able to keep up with everything I read, the script really is dense.

The Characters: As mentioned earlier, each chapter differs in it's writing style, sadly the chapter which focuses most on character interactions is chapter 1 (which, for me, is the best/most interesting chapter overall, though I like all of them). There are two "main" characters and basically after chapter 2 every other character is reduced to a side actor. I think it is kinda sad because I thought some other characters to be very interesting, however the screen time just gets cut too much for them, so in the end they fall kind of flat. Other than that, I like most characters as many of them have different motivations and game plans for the situation, and it's interesting to see how certain situations play out. Also a note about the characters themselves: What I like most about many of them is that they are like REALLY intelligent, like almost too intelligent in certain aspects. If anyone has seen the series (minor spoilers for both works I guess) Dark : There are many connections and shared themes between those two stories. My main issue with Dark was that its characters were the dumbest people imaginable. The characters in this game are like the polar opposite. They always try to figure out what is happening, testing theories, considering alternatives to their thoughts and conclusions... I really love that. To be honest it almost goes to far, as the characters are almost TOO intelligent to be believable at some points.

The Music: I really liked the music, many pieces worked perfectly in the situations they were played, capturing feelings of terror, anxiety, mystery, or calmness. I definitely added some songs to my personal play list. The number of different tracks is also really high, so I didn't feel that the music got repetitive at any point.

The Backgrounds/CGs/Sprites/Presentation: This is where it becomes a little bit evident that the development budget of the game was pretty low. Don't get me wrong: I think the character sprites and CGs are BEAUTIFUL! I love the art style of the artist(s) who created them, and I added some CGs to my Desktop background rotation. It's just that there are very few of them. Basically very few scenes got CGs, which is really sad because the existing ones really set the mood for the scenes they get shown in. The backgrounds for the character sprites are good and serve their purpose, nothing more, nothing less.

The UI: Now, I can clearly say that The Sekimeiya has got the best UI in a visual novel I have EVER seen, period. It gives you so many quality of life functions, the biggest one being a "Note" system which acts like a collection of short summaries after every scene, where you can write down personal notes. You can view the whole text history for every sentence you read, you can search for words or sentences in the history, and you can jump to previous sections of the story at will. You also have a map which helps visualize what's happening. After you clear the game, there are more features added which tremendously help you understand what exactly is/was happening at certain times, also adding whole explanations or remarks about certain events. Hands down, the best UI I've ever seen in a Visual Novel.

Overall, on one hand I'd like to recommend this game to every person I know, because it definitely is the most complex, and one of the most interesting stories I've ever read. On the other hand I understand that this game is not for everyone, in fact I think most people probably wouldn't like it, as it really is in many ways, as the game puts it itself, like a mountain climb. Really difficult to get into, but at the peak you are rewarded with a great sense of awe.

76561199183721800
76561199183721800

One of the most engrossing mysteries I've read. I was on the edge of my seat for basically the entire duration of this game and could only stare in awe at some of the crazy events, twists, and revelations that kept coming one after another. Excellent presentation, soundtrack, and an absurdly complex and refined story that I can't even fathom exists.

Despite how much I loved this game, take it with a gran of salt. The writing is very dense, and if you want to keep up and understand what's going on, you'll have to pay very close attention to every minute detail. All the answers are there, but there's so much going on that even after finish the game, I'd have to replay it to thoroughly understand everything. As an actual complaint, the first two hours are much less interesting than the rest of the game. The characters and the writing are pretty robotic for that little while, but that stops being a problem pretty quickly, and when the game gets going, it reaches a peak of insanity that I haven't seen anywhere else.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Amazing game! If you are a fan of mystery visual novels like Ever17 and Remember11 (yeah, especially Remember11), you should try this! I will definitely support the future projects from this group of developers, given how good this first game of them is!

NilchEi
NilchEi

Excellent paranormal mystery visual novel in vein of Infinity series and Zero Escape series; In fact, I can confidently claim that The Sekimeiya is the first English visual novel I've played that are competitive with aforementioned works.

The story is packed with labyrinth of mysteries that - albeit seemingly insurmountable at first - leaves behind sufficient breadcrumbs for player to guesswork, culminating in sensible solution for the readers to appreciate. Even after major paranormal gimmick driving the chaos are revealed, it takes serious reflection of previous events for player to illuminate the truth behind some of the incidents.

I must also point out that the game offers ton of beneficial functionality. At any time, player can: jump to desired scene without need for saving, access chapter summaries and write notes on them, enable minimap that continually tracks the protagonist's position, and search specific words to discover all the cases where it had been mentioned. It also offers fun post-game stats page that show how popular your choices has been.

Regardless The Sekimeiya does have some controversial elements that may hamper player's enjoyment. Although Sekimeiya thoroughly solve most essential plot points, it pulls Umineko and Remember11 by deliberately leaving behind some mystery unexplained. Threfore be warned that no official answer will be given for some of tangential - but not necessarily minor - mysteries even after 100%'ing the game.

I should also note that writing from Sekimeiya almost exclusively focuses on the mystery. All characters are assumed to be rational actors and most of the scripts involve characters monologuing or discussing why X is wrong, how X can be explained, how X can't be explained etc. Therefore those who seek unforgettable characters, downtime devoted to character interactions, or mystery serving as support for character development could find the prose exhausting. This is no Higurashi, Root Double, Dei Gratia no Rashinban.

Don't misunderstand me as saying the characters are bad though. They are perfectly functional and protagonist eventually do get some development. I'm just saying that characters are clearly lower priority than mystery like how they'd be in classic detective fiction. Personally it was great for me (and probably Zero Infinity fans) who actively tried to figure out what's happening and wanted a lot of perplexing incidents to tackle.

Well, if my attempt at fairness haven't discouraged you too much, then definitely try this out! Sekimeiya overall offers great fun for those who want to find themselves lost among complex mystery, and I definitely look forward to what Trinitite Team's next work will be.

meromeronya
meromeronya

I'm not afraid to call this game a masterpiece. I've never seen a mystery story pay off so well while remaining engaging and intricate the entire time. If you're itching to dive into a complex, layered, and jaw-dropping story that will demand your utmost attention to piece together a gigantic puzzle, play this game. The experience this title provides is unparalleled, and I'm sure there won't be anything like it ever again. To top it off, the soundtrack is incredible.

alexbattledust
alexbattledust

I'm not too good at writing reviews but this game just absolutely scratched a mystery solving itch I had. Very much enjoyed it.

^2Juhasz^3Abel
^2Juhasz^3Abel

This is one of the few mystery games where I don't fully understand the answers I am given after finishing it, yet I'm still not disappointed.

First of all, I highly doubt anyone is going to figure everything out before the game reveals it. It's equivalent to solving a 5 dimentional sudoku puzzle, the human mind is just not designed for it, and once it's solved it's still difficult to grasp the whole picture at once.

Second of all, that doesn't matter. The game is so well written that not understanding what's going on is really just part of the experience, even after the ending.

Also, the music's fantastic.

There are really only a couple problems with the writing. 2 of the characters in specific just aren't nearly as well fleshed out as everyone else, and a lot of times characters react to events in an unrealistically muted fashion. This is a minor problem, mind you, it doesn't take me out of the game at all, and I definitely prefer less responsive characters to melodramatic ones, but I feel like this game went a bit too far with that sometimes.

ClosedVolumeIntegral ∰
ClosedVolumeIn…

Game is good. Story is interesting, albeit a bit confusing. It clearly follows rules it establishes, but rules can be hard to find out on your own.

A spoiler about game ending part and my gripe with it below

In the end you are told that well, there are three worlds and characters can move between those. It made me suddenly care way less about all characters since there are 3 of each of them ( with 2 exceptions) and they are quite different between themselves

Development Book is quite good as well

Shiguma
Shiguma

A game made for a very specific type of reader, The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass is an intricate mystery that will truly tease your brain. It is hard to recommend to the general audience, because this VN is truly a thinking man's VN. The story is excellent (after the first few hours), and everything will be wrapped up by the end, but don't expect much to be spoonfed to you at all.

The mystery VN genre is already rare, but if you read the few entries and felt an unscratched itch of "but they didn't try to get me to solve the mystery", this VN is definitely for you.

RiotVolt
RiotVolt

Excellent presentation, soundtrack, and a complex and refined story. One of the best Sci-Fi Mystery visual novels. If you're a fan of the Zero Escape, Infinity series, or a mystery fan in general, you should check this out.

SilverFayte
SilverFayte

Do you like extremely complex mystery novels that give you the chance to solve things for yourself before it reveals all the answers? Then this VN is for you.

It's a little dry on the character and emotional aspect, but holy shit it is OVERLOADED with mysteries to solve.

If you're a fan of Ever17, you'll find a lot to like there. Maybe even too much. As someone who thought he understood these sort of stories I was pretty humbled to find my deductive abilities pretty sorely lacking.

Either way, damn this was one hell of an experience.

KhajiitWerewolf
KhajiitWerewolf

I was hooked. If you like mystery driven games, this one may be for you. An extensive gallery of background images really made the whole atmosphere come to life. The ability to search the whole VN's text, keep notes, plus the post game explanations was pretty awesome. Most of the pressing mysteries were resolved with a few deliberately left to solve on your own. Music was great too. My one complaint, and it is a big one, is a lot of the characters felt two dimensional. Some had so few lines you could forget they existed for a while. The mystery and plot obviously had a lot of loving care put into it, to the point that the characters suffered. This isn't a VN where you're likely to emerge with a favorite character. But it is one that'll challenge you to think and repeatedly ask 'would that idea work'? I had fun for sure.

Arky
Arky

So, this was a ride.

The Sekimeiya is a love letter to the likes of Umineko, Higurashi, Steins;Gate, and other similar mystery VNs... except this one took a lot of crack cocaine before making its story, and then had it revised by theoretical physicists. The plot is like a house of cards; if you take away even one piece, the entire thing falls apart. I'm simultaneously in awe of how much thought was put into the plot and wondering if it was a little too much. The scope of how much you're dealing with only begins to get apparent at the end of Chapter 3, and it only starts to hit you in the face at the start of Chapter 5, but by that point, I hung up my notes; I decided I couldn't reach the summit. You need to wrap your head around a significant portion of the plot to understand even the smaller details, and that can be hard when the game starts bringing out mathematical formulas and graphs to explain a LOT of things to you. I'm not a math person, so I gave up at the first algebra equation, but I still enjoyed seeing everything come together.

Nevertheless, please understand everything aforementioned only really applies to the final chapter when the game challenges you to solve some of the more obscure mysteries scattered throughout the tower. Earlier on, there are clearer mysteries the game presents; for example, who had what key, how did this person enter this room, how did we not see this person, and for the most part, you can solve these as they're presented using the information you have at the time. Some smaller details have more complicated explanations, but these are usually relegated to 'tips', a feature unlocked after you beat the game that is meant to explain said smaller details you might've been wondering about. I've read all of the tips, and found most of them answering questions I didn't really wonder about... and a few of them not answering questions that I did wonder about. Still, its a good feature; this game is riddled with really good QOL features, and I think the search function deserves a special commendation. All VNs should come with this feature, especially mystery VNs. I spent several hours alone using the search function to refresh my memory and reread scenes that I saw in a new light.

I might be sounding a bit harsh, but that's because the amount of effort put into this behemoth makes me feel like I should put a similar amount of effort into this review. Despite everything I'm saying, I really, REALLY enjoyed this game; I would venture to say it is my favorite VN. The tense atmosphere is top-notch, the art feels straight-up professional, and at least a handful of my playtime has been spent listening to the OST (Double Vision is my favorite). The cast of characters, though not particularly compelling, felt occasionally charming: shoutouts go to Sai and Atsuki. However, there is one specific character featured in Chapter 2 that had a lot of unrealized potential, and I think it's a shame some of the worse aspects of her personality never really became relevant. This game definitely has a problem with leaving plot hooks open and either explaining them in tips postgame or not explaining them at all and leaving it up to the audience to solve them. While this would normally be fine for smaller mysteries, this is also the case for some of the more major ones, and I felt kind of baited once or twice.

Still, issues aside, The Sekimeiya is well worth your money (even at $30). It's a hell of a climb, and I enjoyed it a lot, even near the end when my brain turned off. Just don't expect things to be all wrapped up in a neat bow at the end, or else the dangling threads might drive you to join the Discord server and madly search for explanations.

KyoShine
KyoShine

The experience of reaching the "answer arcs" where this mystery so dense that every two lines is another massive mind melting twist finally starts to click is unmatched. I have never experienced a game that has so thoroughly destroyed me and yet I was still eventually able to put it together. Even a game like Umineko, which I was absolutely not prepared to solve, didn't melt my mind in the same way this game did every minute. The game is heavily focused on the mystery but I think it still does a fantastic job of getting me invested in the characters and the world. The art is gorgeous and although the music is licensed I never would've known because it all fits amazingly. Fantastic game.

Aeluuin
Aeluuin

If you like complicated stories, solving mysteries before the answers unfold, this game is for you. The game has introduced some cool concepts to me, I would never think of.

rory
rory

I can recommend this, but with a caveat... unless you really want to spend a lot of time taking notes and hand-drawing a timeline for the game, you are not going to be ready for the ending sequence of the game in a satisfying way. I wasn't, and I don't think I could've been either without knowing what to look for beforehand, which... ehh.

The actual story and mystery is very well-constructed, albeit the mystery -is- the story, there's not much depth to the characters or much of an emotional draw to this one, it's very cold and logical the whole way through which is clearly the focus... it basically tries to dump an umineko's worth of mystery on you without any of the more calm, anecdotal moments between that give you time to let the facts sink in, it's just nonstop "unexplainable thing happened" start to finish, which makes it.... kind of exhausting to read, especially since chapter 1 just goes on and on and on - thankfully, later chapters are better paced, but, ehh... it's fun to ruminate over and there's some element of suspense too, albeit it's downplayed.

My main issue is the ending sequence, which... well. Personally, my focus was more towards the greater scope mysteries, some of which I was able to solve - probably the biggest of them all, even - but... towards the end of the game, you basically get an hours-long pop quiz asking you to very meticulously recreate a timeline of events, track every characters movements, who did what, etc. and a lot of it feels very... menial. It feels like doing homework more than it does solving a mystery. I don't care than Johnson Smith was in a hallway at a specific time. I don't care that Tom McThomas picked up some duct tape on his way out of his apartment. I dunno, by the end of this segment I was completely exhausted and just wanted the story to end, making the rest of the ending just... completely fall flat for me, too.

I definitely can't say it was one of my favorite mystery VNs, or favorite VNs in general - while the writing and the mystery are solid, and it's compelling enough to keep you reading, I could never quite get into the game's vibe and didn't really find myself attached to the characters, some of which have basically no personality development or notable backstory even 30 hours later, and topping things off with an extended final exam where about 15-20 of the nearly 100 questions for clarification, my stats said I got 50 out of 94 right, though by the last 20ish I'm pretty sure I just started clicking random answers to get it over with) actually felt important or insightful kinda soured it for me. It's certainly still good, especially if you're more willing to dedicate time and energy pouring over every single action that occurs throughout the story's runtime, but I don't think it's gonna linger in my mind the way the best VNs do.

Stale
Stale

It is kind of hard to say much about this game without spoiling its contents, but if you are looking for a great mystery visual novel to read, this is it. The mystery in this game is quite hard to wrap your head around but once they are revealed you will hit yourself in the head thinking "How did I not see that?" This is that kind of game, though the difficulty of the mystery that needs to be solved in this game is hard.

STORY

The story started off with a premise that we're quite familiar with, a bunch of people trapped somewhere which never ended up good in any media whatsoever. Sekimeiya takes this plot point and adds an interesting "mechanism" to the fray (you will know if you play the game), one which causes chaos to ensue. This "mechanism" is the most interesting part about Sekimeiya as it remains consistent throughout the story, it is up to us the players to decode this mechanism and to find out the truth of the events that is happening. Trust only your judgement and look out for every minor detail that the characters missed.

GAMEPLAY

"It's a Visual Novel is usually the extent of my review on the gameplay but Sekimeiya has nifty features to help you solve the plot Blues Clues style, here are some of the interesting tools at your disposal.

1. Search
In this game you can access the complete text log of everything you have read so far, and not only that you can also search through your text log with any key word. You can also sort them by characters who said them. This is very helpful especially when you remembered something that was mentioned and you wanted to go back and check whether it is true or not. You can even read through the text logs of previous chapters so that you can experience your own "Eureka!" moment

2. Notes
In this game, there is an integrated notepad which is I know, Mindblowing. No longer do you have to open a notepad on a different window to take notes when playing this game, you can just do it in-game. But besides that the Notes also provides a brief summary of events that has happened so far, if you get lost within the story you can consult the Notes to see what has happened so far so that you can regain your bearings. As someone who blanks out when reading this feature is very helpful.

3. Map
Have you read through a mystery story but have no clue what the hell happened because you didn't have an accurate geometry of the place so the names and location of places eludes you? Sekimeiya got you covered with its Map feature, this very nifty map will appear on your screen when you press the middle mouse button to show you the whole floor plan of the building and where the main character currently is. You can also change the in-game settings to make the map appear at all times on your screen, CS:GO style.

4. Stats
When you finish the game, you can marvel at your own detective skills by comparing your answers to all the people who has finished the game and see how much you had it figured out.

OST

I have to talk about the OST, to put it in simple terms: It is quite banging. There is a range of songs used in the game, you have ambient tracks that really sets the mystery mood, industrial tracks to jam to, Lo-Fi tracks to decompress after a brain work-out, and a lot of other tunes to grind your brain with. It's all good fun.

CHARACTERS

This video game does have characters in it, they are all quite interesting with their own motives and goals. Though in hindsight they do fall a little flat, but of course this is a plot-centered narrative so I am fine with that.

Overall, the game is damn good and enjoyable. I fully recommend this title and I hope that the game can reach an even wider audience that it is currently now. The amount of effort and quality put into this VN is simply astounding. Buy it to support the devs, cheers!

Nota
Nota

This is a VN you should read if you've read other mystery stories and thought "I want something significantly more complex to solve." It has an intricate, well through out scenario to really sink your thoughts into, and it gives you the tools you need to work out it's mysteries. The visual presentation is also well done, as is the soundtrack. The one setback here is the prose being very dry and logical, without much room for levity, so you may at times get fatigued from the density of information and arguments being delivered through the dialogue. Despite this one flaw, the characters themselves are interesting enough and feel genuine, without any overbearing tropes to carry them, and do find some small room for development as the story proceeds.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game, and strongly recommend it to anyone who considers themselves to be a fan of mysteries, and especially ones who want a real challenge to solve.

yuirick
yuirick

This game is special. It's rough around the edges, the opening is dry, the author at times decides to hide things from you that the perspective character knows, there's an unnecessary quiz at the end which really just should've been a narrative revelation, but man, you have to admire what went into this. While I do think there's probably a few plot holes around and about that I'd find if I went searching, the plot is so strangely tight, so intensely inter-connected and plotted to the minute, so relatively filled with reasonable mysteries (and some unreasonable ones) that every moment was just a sort of 'mystery rush'. I don't know how to explain it better than that.

If you don't mind a story being almost entirely constructed out of mystery and plot, you should give this VN a chance. Because even if it is rough around the edges, I don't think anyone can deny that it's unique and does something special. I hope the author keeps writing VN's, because if they do and aren't consumed by impostor syndrome, perfectionism, the fear of making something bad or the like, there's some really good VN's waiting out there in the future.

CatointheMiddle
CatointheMiddle

This game is absurd. The sheer amount of thought that went into the mystery is staggering. I find it hard to believe that there is any other mystery novel/game out there that is as dense and as tight as this. If you love mystery novels and figuring stuff out on your own, this may have been made for you.

And as an added bonus, there is a highly useful and user friendly search function and notes page, where you can write down your thoughts and theories. The options the game provides in this regard are extremely well thought out, and go a long way towards giving you the tools needed to follow along with the overall story and solve the myriad mysteries therein.

Highly recommended

Fenrir Deimos
Fenrir Deimos

The short version:

In as few words as possible: this game is amazing! Go play it. And don’t forget to tell all your friends about it.

The longer version:

I was skeptical when I read the other reviews, stating this game is on par with the Infinity series.
But my skepticism proved to be very wrong. From what I understand, this game was made by fans of the Infinity series, and it shows. They really managed to create a game that feels deserving of a place in the series.

But let’s start with the bad first.

The Sekimeiya is not devoid of problems. Especially in the very beginning, which can be pretty slow. Not knowing what exactly to expect, I found the first couple of hours focusing on the characters trying to figure out the heist plan to be a bit boring. After all, why should I care about somebody trying to steal some dumb rock? But as soon as the first corpse dropped, the game picked up fast and didn’t let go. I haven’t had this much fun playing a visual novel for a long while.

Another problem I have is the characters. Again, mostly in the very beginning. They just don’t feel alive enough at first. They talk in infodumps and feel oddly motivated to solve the mystery they shouldn’t want to have to do anything with. This was something another reviewer here pointed out and I agree. But as the story progresses and the pace gains more speed, it kind of stops mattering. I’m not sure what the reason is: maybe I just got used to the writing. Maybe the characters just got better and more fleshed-out with time.

Lastly, I am not a fan of the made-up Japanese-y setting. I would be ok with the game being set in Japan per se, but the inconsistent naming and the lack of “grounding” really screws up my immersion at times. I think the game might have been far better off with an entirely original background, set in an undefined country, undefined city and whatnot.

That's about it. These are my only real nitpicks with The Sekimeiya. Everything else is just great.
The mystery is interesting and tight. I can’t help but admire the writer(s) for plotting everything out. It surely took a lot of effort. I’d also like to highlight how good the job done was with concealing the most important answers that hold the fundamental keys to solving everything until very late into the story. They turn out to be quite simple, which is even better and the implications of them provide enough room for twisting everything into a very intriguing and enjoyable mess.

Until now, my favorite game in the “complicated time-travel mystery” genre was Remember11. This game, in my opinion, approaches the same level of greatness. To the point I can’t be sure if the Sekimeiya didn’t manage to topple Remember11 because Remember11 is just that good or it’s because Remember11 was a darling for too long a time and thus is not easily replaceable. It would be much harder to pick favorites if I played both these games back to back.

I can’t stress enough how much I urge you to buy and play the Sekimeiya. It breaks my heart to see the number of reviews here on Steam. I sure hope the team behind the game made enough money from kickstarter and/or console sales (not sure if the game is out on consoles yet, though) to eventually fund making more of this stuff. I really miss the Infinity Series and the Sekimiya successfully filled the void. At least, it certainly does a much better job at it than Zero Escape.

For me this is, without the slightest doubt, the best original English language visual novel I know of.

ProphetofShawo
ProphetofShawo

This is the greatest story I've ever experienced. Genuinely.

I also don't know if you should play it. I got absolutely immersed in the atmosphere, the story. The first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning, it was the last thing I thought about before I went to bed. After I finished the game, I thought about it for weeks. Sometimes I still think about it.

Wow.

Granted, the characters didn't leave much of an impression. But I still remember the story. If you want a story that leaves you emotional? Maybe not for you. You're here for the mystery. And wow, what a climb it was.

If you're willing to take notes while you play a game, buy it now.

mad_scientist92
mad_scientist92

I want to really like this visual novel, but somehow held back by several things. First, I'm not first time VN reader, but the amount of text in a single window is so intimidating to read. Maybe I'm too used to read on ADV mode where mostly only 1 or 2 sentences per textbox, but even with NVL mode like Higurashi or F/SN I usually don't find any problems because the sentences is written so reader can easily read with a single catch. Here, I have to spent most times to re-read the sentences because it's too long. (or maybe I'm not native speaker of English, so it took me a long time to understand, probably. Anyway first time VN reader should not read this)

The second is the progression of the event is so slow until the point I skip most of MC's inner narrative (sometimes feels endless) because I prefer the events unfold faster. I can deal with MC's thought in one or two sentences but nah, this VN spent at least 2 windows to explain one event along with his endless speculations. This is something that I not enjoy. I prefer to guess what's happening by myself, not to read someone else's assumption.

I am by no means dropping it in near time because things have picked it up since the MC time traveled & teleport with Sekimeiya but if the later chapter turned out to be boring again I might have to drop it.

Sprites is so-so, background is kinda meh, the BGM sometimes feels jarring and all over the place, somehow doesn't quite reflect high production value. The only thing I like is the slick UI and the cover image. But I believe the price is something worth the story, and I want to support the developer by any means, because it's not easy to develop rare VN like this. I might give it another chance if they make something that is easier to read.

YMK316
YMK316

Solid mystery, good music and tension building. It's difficult to phrase this, but this isn't "anime". Quite a lot of VNs follow a similar style of writing that is used frequently in anime. This game doesn't do that despite it looks. This may feel a bit wordy as a result if you're not aware of this heading in. For me this is by no means a negative, I actually prefer it this way. But be aware heading in, this is very much in the style of a novel.

satory
satory

Very pog, recommanded to pure mystery vn lovers.

Dont recommand if you're looking for slice of life/romance included mystery.

no maidens?
no maidens?

One of those games where you wish you could give a "maybe" review instead of a "no"
Story is convoluted even though by the end everything is explained (but will go over your head anyway) but there is a definite fun element in trying to piece out the mystery.
Music is great
I will most likely buy this studio's next game if they can make the plot and mechanics of the mystery easier to follow as the mystery is unfolding, instead of dumping it all on you in the last minute, Umineko style

Caucasian Yandere
Caucasian Yandere

As someone who plays every excessively convoluted visual novel they can get their hands on, the plotline of this one is absolutely unrivaled (as far as I know). If this story is a 2000-piece jigsaw puzzle then something like Zero Escape is a 9-piece.

Although it sounds intimidating, the story is very well-written, easy to read and engaging. Plus it comes with a page for taking organized notes to help you remember things, and a cool search function that lets you re-examine parts of the story, dig up specific quotes, look up interesting keywords, etc. They did a great job of making the story as digestible as a story like this could possibly be.

The reviews warning that the characters get little focus aren't entirely wrong; the plot is definitely the central masterpiece here. But the two main characters were extremely enjoyable and well-written, better than the vast majority of characters in other stories in my opinion, and I'm really going to miss them now that it's over. The rest of the cast felt a bit more like mere plot devices sometimes, but they were at least fun and interesting and given extremely consistent, well thought-out motives and character developments.

The sheer complexity of the story means you won't be able to wrap your head around every detail, but it won't hamper your experience much. Everything is abundantly foreshadowed, and the major twists and mysteries (and many of the more obscure ones) aren't too hard to predict if you're paying attention and taking some time to think. If you really want to understand it all, there's great replay value; the knowledge you get later in the story makes the earlier parts of the story infinitely easier to understand, and the game gives re-players many secret hints/explanations and extremely useful timelines to search through.

If you like elaborate sci-fi/supernatural mysteries, you absolutely can't miss this one. I've never found anything even close to being on this level and I won't be surprised if I never do. The creators were insanely ambitious and they somehow had both the will and the brains to actually pull it off without a single plot hole.

Fazdullah
Fazdullah

Absolutely one of the most insane, well-written and heartfelt works of fiction I have ever read and the unraveling that the game will walk you through will absolutely blow your mind. Great music and characters. Hard recommend. Definitely don't miss this one.

Mike-Luv Alternative
Mike-Luv Alternative

Being able to ctrl-f the entire script, instantly jump to the scene of any line of text, and being able to write your own notes next to an in-game summary of every scene, is the most powerful quality of life feature set i've seen in a large-scale mystery VN.

The general tone is comparable to VNs like Ever 17 and Zero Escape, if you loved those, you'll love this.

The writing does this thing that may be tough for some to read, but for me i thought i worked well: the characters blurt out dozens of their own (usually outlandish but sometimes reasonable) theories on what's going on to a point where it's overwhelming and almost feels like filler. However i think it works well to act as a guide for the reader to figure out the kind of direction things are going.

Finally, The CG/art direction in general feels really well done. Shiroya's design is beautiful! I love her so much.

Just starting chapter 3 at about 13 hours in; I'm really looking forward to seeing where this ends up.

Roughly 20 hours in and I just finished and wow. That was a wild ride. Can't recommend this enough to those who love mysteries and figuring out where the story goes.

Sciembe
Sciembe

Its a mixed bag that, on average, comes out on the better end of the scale.

The core mystery and mechanics behind The Sekimeiya are both excellent and the main draw of the entire experience. Unfortunately, the actual way in which the mystery is told and presented is a bit more lacking. Long, dense blocks of text seem to be the main way that the reader is actually caught up to speed which can often make it a bit of a headache to get through everything. While a generous search feature and notes can ease the problem a bit, there is still a lot of information here that will be difficult to keep in your head all at once.

If you have the attention span, memory, and willingness to really sink your teeth into it, I think Sekimeiya definitely offers enough to make that effort worth it. But it really doesn't like making things easy on you.

The Spanish Inquisition
The Spanish In…

This was honestly the most intelligently written visual novels I have ever read. The fact that only 47 people have reviewed this is shocking considering how amazing this story is. I know the phrase "hidden gem" gets thrown around a lot but this story is really a hidden gem.

Do yourself a favor and buy this game if you are a fan of complex mystery games like the Zero Escape series, since in my opinion this game is even better than all of those games. (Especially ZTD lol). Even though the price may seem a bit high for a visual novel I can assure you that you will get your money's worth.

InfiniteZeke
InfiniteZeke

What an incredibly difficult game to rate. From a mystery design perspective, this game is unparalleled in its complexity and depth. The creative team should be lauded on their ability to somehow craft a perfect labyrinth of interweaving narratives. There's no bullshit here; these guys have really thought of everything, and it shows. There will be times playing this game where you'll be so deeply confused that you'll 100% certain that there's no way they'll be able to explain it all. But they do, albeit in ways that I still struggle to fully comprehend. If you're looking at this game at all, it's almost guaranteed that you've played Zero Escape. To put it into perspective, this game is literally 100x more complex than 999 and VLR (both of which I greatly love). I wish I was exaggerating but I'm really not, and I have to reiterate that it's incredible that they were able to put this all together.

Unfortunately, from other perspectives, the game struggles. The characters are some of the least interesting I've seen in games like these; it's disappointing because some of them show promise, but it's rarely capitalized on. Simply put, these people don't feel like people, with character dialogue often lacking personality, which has the downside of making it difficult to connect with the emotional core of the story that it tries to build. The main duo is serviceable, and I actually came to like them decently by the end, but it took way too long to get there. Beyond them, only Sai stood out for me, mostly because he acted so much differently from the others that there was at least something to latch onto.

To the same point, the prose is often extremely dense and difficult to parse. Characters spend a long time discussing theories, almost to an obsessive degree, especially at the beginning of the game. This is weirdly refreshing in some ways - it's nice that characters act smart - but I simply don't buy that anyone would be quite this smart in such a situation.

Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of the game to judge is the structure of its final chapter. Essentially, the game systematically walks through the previous events, asking you to solve many of its core mysteries. In total, it asks almost 100 questions over the course of about 5-7 hours of play. Being correct is not necessary, and the game definitely doesn't expect you to be all the time, so don't worry about it too much. Conceptually, this is extremely awesome, and I genuinely think this is very bold and innovative. But it's simply too much. Not only are many of these questions extremely specific and difficult to parse out, even if you're trying to solve them, but because this part takes so long, you're bound to take a break in the middle, which almost certainly will make you lose much of your mental image on very specific events that are very hard to keep track of. To the game's credit, it provides a robust search functionality and notes tool, but even that's not enough. The game provides a timeline once it's done to make sure you can really put it all together; I can't help but think that this (or at least parts of this) would have been really nice to have during this section, simply for actually understanding it all. Given the statistics the game shows you about how many answers other users got correct once you're complete, I feel confident in saying that narrative is presented in such a way that makes it too difficult to easily grasp in full.

The result of all of these downsides (the characters, prose, and finale structure) is that the game often feels like it lacks oopmh. There are a lot of twists in this game, but honestly they rarely hit hard in ways that other games like 999 or VLR do. Reveals rarely were treated with gravity, and spending 30 minutes trying to parse through text to answer a specific question left me too tired to feel impact when I finally answered them (often incorrectly). Several times something would be revealed and then the story would just move on to answering the next question, leaving little time for me to both understand what was just revealed and resonate with it emotionally. On the flip side, there are even two specific cases where a mystery is left to the reader to solve; these happen to be two of the most interesting moments in the whole story, and it's very frustrating to end this game without answers to those.

I can't help but imagine a game that took all of the best parts of this mystery, trimmed it down to comprehensible levels (maybe about 30% of what's here), and wrapped it with an emotional core with interesting and varied characters. That said, what's here is still incredible, just in ways that are more awe-inspiring than anything else. If anything about this game still sounds interesting, I would definitely encourage you to play it. But don't be surprised when you feel similarly to how I do.

max_cheung2002
max_cheung2002

A proper mystery is something I’d describe as a work that has a core of a logic puzzle with a shell of a story wrapped around it. The appeal lies in the speculating and discovery of the true series of events but there’s a situation and characters that ground the puzzle and make you care about the whole thing.

In that sense, The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass is a boulder of a puzzle wrapped in a cling film of a story, to its benefit and detriment. It has a singular goal; to create the most challenging and complex puzzle of a narrative (and it achieve that to a superlative degree) but the characters and broader story aren’t developed more than necessary. Still there’s something admirable in going all in like that rather than compromising and it has definitely resulted in a work that’s definitely something special.

It is fundamentally a story about the eponymous Sekimeiya, a gemstone which has the ability to enable time travel (honestly I’m not sure that should be a spoiler considering it forms the very essence of the VN but for some reason it isn’t mentioned in the store pages, which have an honestly generic and vague plot description). The plot as a whole is honestly one of the most complicated that I’ve experienced in any piece of media. Like the various sci-fi mystery VNs it’s presumably taking inspiration from (most obviously the Infinity series and Root Double), it takes place in a tower in which 8 people are trapped in and then things start getting weird and complicated

The resulting story is one that is genuinely challenging to follow and unravel. One that’s confusing and bamboozling but even so there’s a joy in trying to connect the pieces together.

While the visuals aren’t anything special, the soundtrack consists of some pretty neat electronic tracks that work well with the tense mood the VN goes for and it’s also worth listening to on its own. Probably helps that it’s licensed music. It also stands out to me since most VN music generally isn’t the type to have a heavy drum beat.

It is a very lopsided work and it really isn’t for everyone but there was definitely an admirably amount of work put into the mystery and it’s pulled off magnificently. If it doesn’t sound like your sort of thing, you probably won’t care for it, but if it does it’s definitely something worth trying.

Kungun
Kungun

I'm really surprised to see that this game is not more popular.
The core mystery of Sekimeiya is a mechanical perfection!

If I can rank all mystery VN based on the quality of the mystery alone, Sekimeiya would be at the *PEAK* for sure.

I would highly recommend to all player who like the mystery VN genre.

middenss
middenss

A very good time

Awesome music, awesome art, awesome UI

hyveplexel
hyveplexel

‬‬‬‬ignore my playtime. ive beaten the game (but not the extras) and read the development book

minor spoiler, but this game is about time travel. i read a bit of the other reviews and i dont think they say it. theres not much story, the building was locked down just to catch someone that tried to steal something and the building is nothing special. i thought there were too many mysteries for no reason and near the end i didnt really bother to understand anymore. the characters spend a long time thinking instead of just getting to the answer which i found a bit boring

music is ok, but out of 60+ tracks i felt like i only heard 15-30 of them in game. i also dont think the type of music is suitable for VN. it also has some of the best features ive seen in a VN but i didnt use them much

i think the game is fine for anyone that likes mystery VN, but i didnt really like it myself. i wouldnt recommend it at full price. i think its quite average unless you really like time travel or solving mysteries yourself. dont buy if characters matter a lot to you, they are just for the mystery here

[SeHa] j0bs
[SeHa] j0bs

Most definitely a hidden gem :)
Easy recommendation if you enjoy solving convoluted mysteries.

thomasgao
thomasgao

Complete lack of urgency during the beginning part of the game. Sorry I just don't have the patience to solve some mystery that I don't think worth solving to begin with. Please, protagonist, tell me why I should care.

Saika
Saika

I'm not far into this game yet, having only played for about the length of a movie. And I do really want to get into it after having gone all in, buying it immediately after seeing it compared to other visual novels in the genre, but it's hard to want to continue. I'd consider myself to be within the narrow target audience for this kind of game, so I know what I was getting into.

The writing style is difficult to parse and too wordy. It's not a matter of it being boring writing, but it becomes boring in the process having to read paragraphs and paragraphs of words that could be trimmed down into more natural sounding dialogue.
In addition to this, I think it would have been more visually stimulating if the dialogue was displayed at the bottom of the screen when each character spoke, rather than the book style that overlays the entire screen.

The dialogue between characters is so similar that it's hard to tell who's talking even with color-coded text. I do appreciate the options to change the text, the clean UI, and the note-taking aspect that automatically updates with the basic plot developments.

I don't mind that it doesn't have any voice acting. Perhaps it would have been more obvious how unnatural and flat the script sounds if voice actors had to read it out loud. Alternatively, some kind of sound effect to indicate voice pitch could have helped separate dialogue from internal monologue as well (examples: 999 and Ace Attorney).

I'm struggling to maintain any suspension of disbelief, which is my biggest problem so far. Reading other reviews, I know this is supposed to be an intricate mystery, but I'm talking about the setting.
What's with the pseudo-Japanese sounding names? Where are they supposed to be? It reminds me of when I was a kid and just learned about anime. I wanted to make original characters that weren't exactly in Japan because I didn't know enough about the culture. It's super cheesy and weird, unless your setting has a parallel to Japan or some other world building to allow for such names. The characters may be drawn in an anime style, but that doesn't mean they have to be Japanese. Or just make them Japanese! It's totally fine!

I constantly find myself asking "why" for the wrong reasons. Not for the obvious reasons, like new events happening, but the for the details given as an aide. Why would so many people even be interested in going to a gemstone exhibit when most of the residents are wary of Ashiya? Why would the characters care about the history of Ashiya, or any faceless organization for that matter?
"Oh, and by the way, this is x because of y" is my least favorite way of learning a new fact about something. Various explanations about the setting or situation are given to you with no intrigue. The town feels empty and fake, just the name of a place to put your building in.

I know there's some element of the story to explain the reactions of the protagonist but why is the first reaction of these characters to investigate with no reaction to the supposed direness of the situation they're in? Even if they're being lied to at any point or made to feel a certain way, shouldn't they react in the moment?
The characters themselves feel very flat and uninteresting, which I know is the main critique from other reviews, but man... Give the reader something to enjoy about the characters other than their looks. Interests, quirks, tendencies, a recognizable silhouette, personal feelings about the escape situation... Not just an occupation, motive, and role to play in the story. They don't have to be crazy or super unrealistic to be interesting.

The cover art is pretty and I can tell this whole game was a labor of love, but Katei and Akaro's sprites... they hurt to look at. The player has to look at these sprites for 30+ hours, with the rare CG with higher quality art. Older men don't have to look ugly in an anime style. Most of the women look fine or even good. It's subjective to taste, and I can enjoy a lot of different art styles, but the cover art is misleading about the quality of the visuals. This game came out last year, but it feels (unintentionally) straight from the early 2000s. If that was the intention, then it succeeded.
The backgrounds are pretty standard and work perfectly for this setting, though. I also really enjoy the soundtrack choice, which is honestly the most immersive aspect.

I'll update this review when I have more information about the plot to form an opinion around.

ExplosionOnC4
ExplosionOnC4

A true hidden gem that can only be described as the forbidden child of '9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors' and 'Now You See Me'.

The good:

    • A deeply complex mystery story with many moving parts that will force you to invest in a Pepe Silvia corkboard. A typical playthrough goes "Why are we trapped?" to "The Sekimeiya does what now?!" then "What even is a drinking glass?!?" and finally "Oh, so that's why duct tape exists!". It truly feels like everyone in the cast is always trying to show their best Houdini impression and the events get so mind boggling that for most of my playthrough I thought the most logical explanation was that the Sekimeiya is actually a microwave. Fortunately, the end ties up the game's mysteries and the thoughtful writing allows the twists to breathe anew even after knowing the trick. The only way I can describe it is that I never knew a book could have mechanics.
    • Towards the end of the game, you are given the chance to attempt to solve the mystery yourself by answering a series of questions (see prior, "Why does duct tape exist?") which are interlaced with the story. Personally, I haven't seen any other mystery game structure itself quite like this. And, if you prefer to have the game answer the questions itself, the questions are completely optional and do not impact progression.
    • Helping with answering questions, the UI has more toothpicks than a Swiss army knife, allowing the player to search for any text previously encountered, writing and formatting notes for any subchapter to track theories and events, a myriad of options to change the appearance of text, keys, etc, and a flowchart that was probably stolen from NASA headquarters (although it is only unlocked after finishing the game).
    • The vibe. The music, while not the most orthodox beeps and boops for this type of game, makes a great 'EDM beats to conspiracy theorise to' playlist. The role it plays in setting the mood and giving the game a unique identity is vital. Further, the writing does a wonderful job at making you feel trapped in a tower, where one of your fellow inmates could potentially be a dastardly criminal. The tension in the atmosphere brought back some good 999 at 1 am memories. Finally, I have to say that the game looks very good, with fitting CGs, some of which are quite beautiful.

The shortcomings:

    • The character writing is lacking. On one hand, the characters all have 1000iq, being able to remember all the minute details of what has happened thus far and are gold medalists in mental trampoline jumping, while on the other they rarely interact with each other, nor do they have many distinct moments that elaborate on their motivations and actions. It is a real shame because the few slice of life moments that are present work really well. Honestly just add more rants about the crystallisation of glycerin.
    • The pacing is unfortunately a bit all over the place. The biggest hurdle is the beginning, which although sets up many interesting mysteries and has many interesting throwaway dialogue bits that may catch your attention, doesn't have much of substance to get the reader completely invested, nor does it give much reason for characters to act the way they do. Please, try to persevere, because the first major reveal, which happens a few hours in, majorly solves these problems, and afterwards the story rivals the speed of Venezuelian inflation.
    • The final small nitpick is that the writing can be particularly dense. I swear most mathematics research papers have less developed logical arguments than this game, causing me to have to reread several paragraphs multiple times to understand what the game was talking about. Sometimes you will be more confused than an American at a salad bar, and that's ok.

Overall, a big recommend to people who love stories including complex mystery, solving what can only be described as magic tricks, and trapped building/escape room settings. I am extremely impressed that such a well though-out story was written by just a few people, who are clearly big fans of these types of work. By getting inspiration from past works, they have created a distinct and unique visual novel that is worth experiencing even with its occasional shortcomings.

Kasumi
Kasumi

If you like immensely long, complicated mystery stories then this is for you. I can tell it was heavily inspired by other mystery VNs like Root Double and Steins;Gate. If you liked either of those, this is perfect. Honestly, after almost 40 hours, my only complaint is that there isn't more to read.

CapsHellDoor
CapsHellDoor

I don't think any review can make this absolute madness of a VN justice. All I can note is that all negative reviews are from people who dropped an hour in, and everyone else praises it as the best of its genre. It picks up faster than you might expect, don't miss out. Still looking for my jaw, but losing it was worth it.

Kevin
Kevin

    • Very well explained and detailed plot, no plotholes or inconsistencies.
    • Decent writing, good descriptions.
    • Characters are believable and mostly even relatable, though kinda archetypal.
    • Exceptionally entertaining puzzle to solve, surely deserves much more attention.

Still kinda dislike Miiya for some reason

quintivious hornswoggle
quintivious ho…

10/10, best VN I've ever played.

I would go into depth, but I think the only thing I'll say is that the other reviews stating that the story doesn't develop characters well enough are misguided at best and plain wrong at worst. I hold firmly that Sekimeya gives the characters as much depth as the plot calls for; and while it can be stated that Sekimeya generally deviates from the lengthy exposition other VNS give their background characters, in many ways I found the development of said characters authentic and grounded.

Authentic and grounded; probably the two words, among many, I'd use to describe Sekimeya. It is a journey best experienced yourself. But heed my warning, among many given by others; this VN is not like others, and you will have to arrive at your own conclusions. If you have a problem reading, do not play this VN. If you like stories told to you through explicit wording, it's not the VN for you. If you don't like solving mysteries or arriving to your own conclusions on things, it's not the VN for you.

Sekimeya was an excellent and intriguing mystery that had enveloped me completely. Before I knew it, I was down the rabbit hole, and I think you'll have a similar experience. Despite the lack of direct storytelling, it is not laziness. Every detail is meticulous, every plot point devoutly and beautifully arranged in a way that gives you all the pieces you need. I've never seen anything like it.

Play it for yourself. Good luck.

Coil
Coil

While I rated this up, it's not for everybody. The sheer number of mysteries in this game is unlike anything else I have ever witnessed, to the point where you start to lose engagement with them, forgetting details and mixing them up too. It's very interesting and the first chapter is worth the price tag, but the actual conclusion will likely leave you unsatisfied. If you're a supercomputer, this could be the game that gives you a challenge.

永遠と勇気の翼
永遠と勇気の翼

This is an incredible VN.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and was desperately craving more. If you are a fan of mysteries - get this without a second thought. The setting is fantastic; the characters are great (though some aren't as well developed as others), and the intrigue is compelling. I haven't felt this enthralled by a mystery since Higurashi/Umineko.

It is incredibly complex and sophisticated but also consistent, with no Deus Ex Machinae or other hallmarks of poor writing; you CAN solve it all yourself, but you'd have to be diligent about your note-taking (the game gives you this facility!) and perceptive.

The music is also great, and I can hear it in my head...

Singularity
Singularity

If you like figuring stuff out, this is the VN for you. It gives you everything you need to put it all together, and it's wonderfully internally consistent.

Flam
Flam

A very fun time if you like engaging with the mysteries along the way and aren't put off by the lack of character focus (the two main characters are still great though). Huge respect to the writer(s) for keeping it all cohesive. Remember to pick up the development book too if you end up enjoying it. sequel pls

Strix6969
Strix6969

Game has a really good mistery and very tought out.

Characters are good but i feel some are a bit underutilized but honestly its really good

9/10 probably will read again

y tu, bidi?
y tu, bidi?

The music hits so hard that sometimes it's distracting.

Nak
Nak

You Uchikoshi fans out there always thirsting for that sweet ontological mystery fix? This one's worth the money - it is MEATY as hell, and I'd say it even surpasses Uchikoshi's writing in making sure every last mystery is tied up satisfactorily. That does it make it text-dense as hell and a little weak on the character writing front, but the pacing is excellent and the sheer intricacy of the mysteries is really unparalleled in fiction.

JuicyLucy
JuicyLucy

Stein's Gate X Umineko. Real good stuff.

ant
ant

Don't bother talking about the interesting things like a dead body or anything, just keep talking about whether or not an elevator went to x number of floors for four hours.

Characters regularly contradict one another and spend HOURS discussing things that couldn't possibly have occurred only to then admit "nah that couldn't have happened. Oh well."

Just play Remember11, which this game wants to be SO badly.

mini_zuzu
mini_zuzu

This game was so convoluted that I didn't enjoy trying to follow it, and I sort of stopped caring what happened by the time I was halfway through. But I would recommend this to anyone looking for a very complicated sci-fi time travel and universe-switching plot. It just was not for me as a mystery fan.

thark
thark

Prose: Mediocre.
Dialoge: Stiff.
Pacing: Poor.

But this is one of the most thoroughly intricately crafted and detailed mysteries I've seen in a work of fiction. Unfortunately it achieves this through meticulous attention to minutiae which means the solution also ends up a drawn out series of answers to small question rather than an elegant cutting of the gordian knot.

You're not going to be pulled through by compelling writing, but for my money it's still worth it for the sheer sense of bafflement as the complex series of mysteries continues to build. YMMV.

Deusovi
Deusovi

The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass is a mystery visual novel that i picked up on release - may 9, 2021. i finished my playthrough on march 30, 2022. after finishing the game, i decided that it is unequivocally *the best game i have ever played* — not just the best visual novel, the best *game*.

you can read Sekimeiya casually, and it's pretty good that way! probably a bit confusing, and some things may not make sense, but you'll probably have a good time with it. but, as i mentioned, it's a mystery story, and it's written with a heavy emphasis on 'fair play'. if you read carefully enough, you can figure out unseen events, and crack some of the big mysteries before their solutions are revealed.

so, the way to get the *most* out of the game is to analyse it heavily, and solve all the mysteries inside. as with Obra Dinn (another great game), you can watch the same scenes over and over... and each time you do, you'll pick up more small details. and there are *so many* things to pick up on. i had many, many amazing "oh my god there's only one way this makes sense" aha moments over the course of my playthrough. (you can even go further, as i did, and try to solve the whole game just before the reveal - you'll know when things start dropping.)

if you're looking for deep characterization or themes, this might not be the game for you. the characters aren't *completely* flat, but character development isn't really a priority. but if you're looking for a good mystery to solve... it delivers on that better than any other game i've ever played, by far.

Jeitie
Jeitie

Initially I dropped the game after an hour or two of Chapter 1.
Picked it up again after a while, and completed the entire thing. Got very hooked on the mystery, even if half the time I was wildly guessing at every turn.
Hard to recommend to more casual players, but I enjoyed it.

Working
Working

Truly a hidden gem. The amount of thought that went into making this massive labyrinth of a plot fit together is incredible. The mechanics behind the events in the story are explored in extreme detail and depth. (To the point it may put some people off - there are many lengthy monologues of the characters theorizing to themselves).

There is a really handy Notes feature that automatically updates with details of the events that have happened so far, with space for writing your own notes. There's even an "exam" at the end which tests your understanding of the events (which I did horribly on I'll admit). It doesn't affect anything besides your self esteem fortunately.

As for the characters, I did not find myself caring about any of them and it felt like they were just there for the construction of the mystery. I had no problems with this, as the events themselves were interesting enough on their own.

Personally, I absolutely loved this VN. The story had me hooked from the very beginning. I still find myself thoroughly confused even after reading the solution, but I'm actually looking forward to giving it another readthrough to pick up on what I missed the first time.

Reading the dev book, it seems this VN came very close to not being made at all. I am really, really thankful that it did.